Empire State of Mind

I wouldn't say that I'm "rebellious" per se.  I don't have tattoos.  I don't have piercings anywhere but my earlobes.  And, really, let's be honest, I am a straight-laced, J.Crew-shopping, Top-40-listening, corporate-America-working, unapologetically mainstream 20-something.  I know that.  My rebellion takes place completely in my head.  My own inner struggle between being content with the straws I've drawn in life and this rebellious streak that nags at me, telling me that no, you must resist!  You cannot simply "settle" for the status quo!  There's always the thought in the back of my head that something can always be better.  It's that quest for perfection that keeps me continually on the lookout for the perfect apartment, the perfect job, the perfect boyfriend.

And that continual pursuit of "something better" appears to be symptomatic of my generation.  To us, nothing is permanent, and everything is fluid.  Anything can be changed, undone, fixed.  Don't like the college you picked?  Transfer.  Don't like the boy you married?  Get divorced.  Don't like your job?  Quit.  Isn't that part of the beauty of so many things in life?  You are allowed change your mind.  We are a generation of flip-floppers.  When I accepted my job offer over 2 years ago, my dad commented that he had never known anyone who was already planning when they were going to quit before they had even started their job.  I was very vocal about wanting to quit within 2 to 3 years of starting.  Now that the 2-year mark is nearly upon me, that nagging feeling that I should really be looking for "something better" is becoming more and more urgent.   It's pretty easy to hate this job, but I wonder how much of that hate is a sign of true discontent or whether it's simply a result of my own rebellion against myself.  I wonder how much my own state of mind is actually preventing me from embracing and enjoying my current lot in life.

Take, for example, when I first moved to New York.  I absolutely hated the idea of being that wide-eyed girl from southern, suburban America moving to The Big City.  As a result, I really tried to resist the City's charms.   When I went home and people asked me how New York was, I found myself hedging.  I was snobby about it.  I'd say something like, "Oh it's okay.  I mean, you know I never really wanted to live in New York.  It's just the only place in the States I can see myself living right now."  I could hear myself downplaying it, like it was just sort of the default choice.  No big deal, who the fuck cares, it's just New York.  And eventually, even I tired of being such a Debbie Downer about the whole thing.  I decided I needed an attitude adjustment and resolved to be less negative.  Basically, I gave in.  I stopped resisting.  I allowed New York to seduce me.  I embraced it.  And it still kills me a little to say it, but yeah, okay, I do love living here.

So what would happen if I stopped trying so hard to hate my job?  What if accepted it for what it is - a job that pays the rent and enables me to enjoy New York?  What if I actually tried to embrace it?

Similarities

I am feeling pretty indifferent towards my job right now.  Sure, there are some good things to be said for it, but it's kind of a dead-end.  I know it's not where I want to be in five years - hell it's not even where I want to be in five months.  And, it's not as though it's leading me to other opportunities.  There's no light at the end of this tunnel that I'm trying to reach, no real reason to stick it out for a set period of time.  So it feels like I am just sitting here without any real purpose, floating along, passing time.  Yet I'm not being particularly active in seeking out alternatives.  The problem is, my current situation is pretty comfortable.  It's easy.  I have no urgent reason to quit now; in fact, it's quite the opposite.  There are probably more reasons why I should just stay until something better comes along.  It can be a giant pain-in-the-ass sometimes, but for the most part, it's really not so bad.  But I also think that the longer I stay and the more comfortable I get, the harder it will be to leave for something unfamiliar that holds more potential for a future.  

Now, replace "my job" with "'F'" and read that paragraph again.

Priorities

My mom has been wanting grandchildren...probably since I was born.  Eight years ago, we were at Harrod's in London buying a gift for my cousin's first baby.  I picked out this cute little stuffed bear.  And then my mom decides to buy two of them - one for my cousin's kid and one...to save for her first grandchild.  I was 18.  Eighteen!  That bear has probably been shoved so far back into a corner of my mother's closet that by the time the day comes when my mother becomes a grandmother, it'll probably be easier to fly back to London and buy a new bear than to try and find the old one.  Actually, I bet by then my mom will have completely forgotten that she ever bought that bear in the first place.

So, a little while ago, I was thinking about expectations, and my mom's in particular, and decided it would be in her best interest if I told my mother NOW that I didn't think I wanted kids.  Truthfully, I'm pretty indifferent to the kid issue, and I imagine I will probably end up wanting them at some point, BUT the truth wasn't the goal of this exercise.  The goal was to start tempering my mother's expectations; I just wanted her to be prepared for the possibility that she may never have grandkids to spoil.  I confess that I also thought it might be kind of fun to see her reaction.  I'm a bad daughter, I know.  I wasn't sure if her jaw would drop to the ground or if she would cry or if she'd try to convince me what a joy it is to be a parent (until the day your kids become sick and twisted and tell you that you may never be a grandmother just to see your reaction).  So one day, I decided to just drop the bomb completely out of the blue.  The conversation went something like this.

Mom:  Do you want to come with me to the grocery store?
Me, casually:  I don't think I want to have kids.
Mom, without missing a beat:  Well that's okay.  Some women are more into their careers.
Me: ................

Well that back-fired.  Instead of shocking her, she completely shocked me.  She shocked me into complete and utter silence.  I couldn't believe she was so okay with the idea of me not having kids!  Her!  My mom!  The woman who bought a stuffed animal for her first grandchild when her daughter was 18!  And then I went, wait.  What?  Does she really think I don't want kids because I want to focus on my career?

But...but...I don't even like my present job.  I certainly have no plans to make it my lifelong career.  When I think about how I've conducted my life over the course of the last 10 years though, it does seem like every decision I've made has been in furtherance of some fuzzy dream of professional success.  It is also true that when my high school classmates got married at 22, followed their husbands to wherever they (the husbands) found jobs and then started popping out babies, I absolutely judged them.  These were smart girls, and I couldn't help but wonder what happened to all of their youthful ambitions of becoming somebody, apart from just somebody's wife.  I distinctly remember one girl whose goal was to be the first female President of the United States.  She was one of the ones who got married at 22 and has never lived further than 10 miles from where we grew up.  Now, I know that when she tied the knot, it didn't mean she couldn't still become the first female President of the U.S.  But in my mind, it did.  Marriage meant failure, while getting far away from the town where we grew up meant success. 

The thing is, I'm relatively happy with the straws I've drawn in life, but still, sometimes, in some ways, I envy their lives.  I envy the fact that they have a family of their own that they can call their number one priority.  When someone asks them what the most important thing in their life is, they can definitively say, "My baby and my husband."

And then I look at myself.  I've never made having a family, or being in a relationship for that matter, a priority.  Actually, I actively avoided it.  I've always kind of thought, well, what's the point in getting emotionally invested in someone when we're just going to have to break up at the end of the high school/college/graduate school/summer?  I feared that I would fall in love with someone and then have to rearrange my life around him and give up a dream job for a lesser one just so that we could be together.  I didn't want love to hold me back from achieving whatever it was I thought I needed to achieve.

So if I haven't chosen to make love and a family my number one priority, does that make my career my number one priority by default?   Are those the only options?  I tried to think about what might appear at the top of other twenty-somethings' priority lists if not their family/relationship or career.  Faith?  Charitable works?  Drinking?  Blogging?  Traveling?  Coffee breaks?  City league sports?  Mere survival?

I guess the most important thing in my life right now is figuring out what the most important thing in my life is right now.