This is something that I've been working on, mentally, for a while, and I'm just now ready to share it. I can't guarantee that it makes sense.
I feel like an octopus. Well, I'm the octopus body, anyway. And I've got all these responsibilities and things that are pulling me in different directions, like the arms (legs?) of the octopus go in all different directions. But the animal as a whole can only move in one direction and can't get pulled in competing directions or it'll fly apart and (apparently) die. (Octopuses - is it octopi? - can't just re-grow parts of their bodies like worms can, can they? Otherwise this whole analogy gets shot to hell.) So, for the sake of argument, here are my arms:
1. "Regular" life. The typical, day-to-day stuff of home relationships and laundry and reading the newspaper before it's not news anymore. Picking up prescriptions and remembering to send birthday cards. Brushing the cats. Taken individually, these things are not a life sentence. As a whole, though, they sometimes feel almost terminal.
2. Work. This is totally up in the air. I work 32 hours a week (and even that is not quite the way it's supposed to be) at a library. I head a department of 2 (yes, 2), one of whom put in her notice a week and a half ago. I work for a stereotypical power-hungry idiot, the kind of person who makes decisions on a whim and can't understand why no one takes her seriously. Just thinking about it makes me want to scream. But I'm over-educated (B.A., J.D., M.A. cand. 2004 - see #3, below) and in this area, that makes me almost unemployable. If it were only the work, I'd love my job. But She Who Runs the Place and several of the people with whom I work are either so irritating or so irredeemably foolish that it really sucks the life out of me to be there. Naturally, though, I can't leave. Responsibilities.
3. School. Need to finish writing my thesis by March 15 - meaning it's due in final form, with all the @!#$ing signatures, to the grad school at the University, by that date. That's only 2.25 months away! Granted, there are "only 3 things" that need to be done before I can get those signatures, but they are a complete re-write of the third chapter (of which I was particularly fond, naturally), a complete removal of one theme from all 6 chapters, and revision of the conclusion to bring it in line with the historical theory of the members of my thesis committee.
4. Money. #2, above, does not provide enough of this to satisfy my desires, and certainly not enough to take care of...
5. Extended family. One issue wrapped up in this is the huge loans that my family made toward the down-payment on the house I'm living in. They made the loans in the form of legal gifts, meaning that they signed gift letters saying that the "gifts" never need to be repaid, but there was an understanding that they would be repaid. And my parents are thinking seriously of retiring soon, so it would be nice if they had at least some of the money that they're owed. It's only fair.
There's also the continuing saga of my sister. She stormed out last Christmas after an argument, left in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve, drove home from Minnesota alone through a major storm, and hasn't really been in contact with anyone in the family except my dad since then. She called on Christmas Eve this year to say she's getting married. Not sure what to do with that.
6. Friends. For some reason, even though I consider myself a grumpy, unsocial person (perhaps I should say "introverted"), I've been lucky to have developed a web of friendships over the last few years. At least one of them is really life-changing, the kind that keeps me up nights thinking about the importance of not doing anything to screw it up because it means so much to me. Others are really casual, the kind that are totally by email and can be left for a month or two at a time but when resumed, feel as welcoming as they were before. Some are time-consuming and draining but worthwhile in some indefinable way. I know that some of this new "aura" of friendship has come in response to what happened last Christmas with [my sister]. For the first several months of last year, I was really shaken by what I thought was a significant flaw in my personality that caused the fight. It made me think about the way that I treated people and regarded my relationships. (Or maybe it just made me shut up for a few minutes, which would have been equally valuable.)
So now I have a lot of friends, and it's great. It's never been this way before. I actually feel like my attention is valuable and that people are competing for it. (Ah, ego!) The down-side? I'm tired! I have a dozen email messages in my inbox to reply to. There's a clear preference for the couple of people with or upon whom I spend my time (and by "upon" I mean by writing email or sending letters and stuff, not actually "upon", and anyone who's thinking that should wash out their brain with soap!). So I struggle to make the others, about whom I also have feelings but not the same degree of urgency, not realize either that they're "at the top of my list" or that there is a list at all. Maybe that's ego, too. Maybe they don't care, and I occupy the same mid-level friendship for them that they do for me. And maybe it's because I'm not an experienced friendship juggler that I'm not emotionally equipped to handle it. I guess I'd rather not be so secure that I never thought about it, though.
7. Fantasy world. Quitting my job, watching TV, eating potato chips and drinking Coke all day. Traveling with one of my friends. Regressing. Looking up old friends. Reading. Writing the novel and dedicating it to He Without Whom. Maybe, for once, feeling like I've done exactly what I want to do, without troubling myself to worry about how it's going to affect everybody else. (Yeah, and there's a reason it's called "fantasy".)
8. Inclination. What I want to do, all the time, is write and read. For a long time when I was much younger, I wanted to be a photographer. I convinced myself that news photography (actually, sports) was my career choice, because that was the most secure option for a "real" photographer (i.e. not a graduation photo shill or a Sears Photo Studio fixture). It was still my plan when I went to college and declared Photojournalism as my major. Less than a quarter later (yes, my undergrad institution was on a quarter system until about 3 years ago, so every 10 weeks we started 4 or 5 new classes. I took more than twenty classes in my major.) I'd ditched that plan - I couldn't make a deadline to save my life and my pictures were snapshots, not "images". The only thing I've always done is read a lot and write a lot. I don't know if I'll ever get #8 aligned with #1, 2 and 4. If I could, though, it would take care of this octopus business in a big way.
So no matter how much attention or energy I give to anything or anyone, I don't really move or progress in any direction.
Is this how everybody feels?
