I must confess: I’m a quitter. Seriously, I’m certified. I’ve always been a quitter, and I’m not sure how to make it stop. I’ve tried; I’ve made so many good faith attempts to change my behavior, my thinking. Unfortunately this was fairly difficult, so I gave up.
I’ve been this way since I can remember. Growing up I settled on a new hobby or interest every few months. This occurred when I’d grown bored with the previous hobby, when it was no longer fresh and exciting, or when I recognized some obstacle I believed I could not overcome. Sometimes the interest was brand new; other times I recycled one of the previous choices. The earlier ones included painting, astronomy, fish, the guitar, the organ, and collecting action figures. Then came photography, the French horn, cars, reading, and creative writing. Still, what I lacked in constancy, I made up for with zeal. If I was “into it” then one had best look out because it was likely that the residual energy radiating off of me was contagious.
This continued into high school, though at that point it was less about hobbies and more about my eventual vocation. I expended an extraordinary amount of energy trying to answer the question of what I was going to do with the rest of my life; to not know troubled me greatly. My senior year, I could often be found sitting at an Apple computer in my guidance counselor’s office searching a database of job descriptions. Once home, I read over my dot-matrix printouts, describing the nature of work of psychologist, high school teachers, podiatrists, airline pilots, automotive engineers, ophthalmologists, optometrists, novelists, pediatricians, and entrepreneurs. It wasn’t enough to simply know about the profession; I wanted to be saturated in it, consider all the pros and cons, ponder the amount of education required, envision what daily life would be like, think about the lifestyle I could afford. There were many discussions with teachers as I garnered information.
Similarly, the college years brought about many major changes and exploration. When I first began, I chose music because among the undulations of interests, music came up pretty often. The discipline necessary greatly surpassed my own, so I gave up. High school English teacher followed and stayed around a while until a clinical experience at a middle school classroom full of unruly, hormonal teenagers. Psychology was next, and with my college years coming to an end, I committed myself to it, unsure of my post-grad plans.
Although these transitions may sound as if they were made easily, each one was quite distressing, but more distressing was that I couldn’t seem to find something that held my interest. I couldn’t hold on to that initial zeal. Where it once held excitement, approaching my parents with yet another career direction became an onerous experience. None of my other friends appeared to have this problem. Sure they might have changed their minds a time or two, but by comparison, I seemed all over the map. I envied those who knew ever so lucidly their inherent talents and abilities and was baffled by stories of those who had carried those interests from childhood forward with diligence. I did many things reasonably well yet mastered none.
The first three years of adulthood levied me with an adult-version of the same song, with the adult version carrying somewhat more weight than completing a change of major form. Those years were spent either trying to “fit” myself into jobs I’d obtained or earnestly seeking an alternative that would make me happy.
∞
A distressed face looks back at me from the other side of my desk. It’s a look with which I’m familiar. I inquire about his major, and he goes blank, looks down, shakes his head, and with some embarrassment, replies something like, “I have no idea.” He appears skeptical about discussing it, as though to do so would be a waste of time, but I engage him in conversation anyway, asking my line of questions, pushing past the initial superficial responses. It’s obvious he’s not accustom to talking about himself this way or thinking about some of these questions, but we begin making some progress. We talk for a little over thirty minutes. I give him some recommendations and direct him to relevant research sources. Shaking my hand, he thanks me, “Wow, you’re really good at this!” I smile back, “I’ve had a little practice.”
This post is part of a synchronized blogging project called The Creative Collective – a group of artists, bloggers, and writers who post on a particular topic every two weeks. This week’s topic was “Giving Up for the Long Haul.” Read more posts on this topic at http://synchrobloggers.wordpress.com/2011/09/06/giving-up-for-the-long-haul/
