The Pursuit of Happiness
How is it already June? If you put me in a cave back on New Year's Day and let me out just now, I would guess that it is now March, maybe April. If Lindsay Lohan's judge ends up sentencing her to 180 days in jail for violating the terms of her probation, I would assure her that six months passes really quickly (and also tell her to stop doing coke).
Part of the reason I feel suspended in time may be that I dove into work sometime in February and haven't had much of a breather since. I've always been obsessed with occupation, ever since deciding in the seventh grade that I was going to become a psychologist, the kind quoted in Reader's Digest articles about why women prefer the paper to come over the top of the toilet paper roll. I've always struggled to resist evaluating my worth based on career (and not just achievement within it, but the choice of field itself). And as my age rises more quickly than my job advancement does, this anxiety increases.
I don't have much of a problem finding the small pleasures in life. I'm thrilled by the view from my terrace, and every time I step outside of my apartment building, I feel thankful for my neighborhood, and for my city. Buying food from a truck is anodyne. But when I think about the big picture (well, not the huge picture, eternally speaking, but just the one limited to our physical lifespans), I feel a little deflated.
I spent my sixth straight Memorial Day in the offices of Sports Illustrated. Having to work on Monday national holidays is a cheap grumble, and that's not what bums me out. Rather, holidays provide milestones for evaluating progress, and every time I spend one doing the same types of tasks that I did when I was a 23-year-old rookie reporter, the despair grows.
I try very hard not to have an ungrateful attitude, or to be known more for dispensing complaints than praises. I've had a couple of universally enviable experiences that were owed entirely to my employment at SI: going to the Summer Olympics (not only the best Games that will ever be held in my lifetime, but one that took place in my ancestral homeland) and editing an NCAA commemorative dedicated solely to my alma mater.
But I have a tendency to misuse those highs as temporary palliatives, failing to capitalize on the momentum of those triumphs to generate more opportunities. As a result, as those events recede in the past, what should be fond memories nurtured into something greater instead spoil in sad isolation and neglect. Three years ago, in the midst of a quarter-life crisis over turning 25, I rewrote my six-word bio:
No more drifting.
Now, she paddled.
(Some people are born with 40-horsepower motors. I have something more akin to two dinky plastic oars.) And even so, I drop them and often find myself just treading water until the next big wave comes along under me. That's a perfectly pleasant and acceptable approach to life for some, but if there is a certain destination you are trying to reach, you had better not rely on the shifting moods of the sea to get you there.
After returning from Beijing (almost two years ago), I started to feel somewhat restless at SI. In 2010, that restlessness has slowly grown into something approaching discontent. Put another way: One of our very brilliant senior writers once told me-in China, actually-that you should stay at a job for as long as the job is working more for you. I have reaped so much from SI over the past six years, but the scales are starting to tip in the other direction.
Having said that, I'm not necessarily quitting my job anytime soon (even though months like this one make me want to). If epiphanies were snowballs, mine is rolling down a slope of .01% grade. New species arise and go extinct in the time it takes for me to make a life change. Also, I don't want to make just a lateral move, and find myself in the same situation six years from now. But the kind of work I want to do (to WRITE for a living, not factcheck) doesn't come with a checklist to realization and also doesn't offer much by way of stability, and for all the frivolity and impracticality of my dreams, my actions remain nail-gunned in reality. I need Plan B in place before I let go of Plan A, and since I pretty much stumbled into Plan A in the first place, I sure as heck have no idea how to go about formulating a Plan B. I was an overachiever when I was younger because life growing up takes place on a conveyor belt, moving you along a predetermined route at a steady and predetermined pace. I would make a terrible Abraham because traveling anywhere without turn-by-turn directions petrifies me.
SI is a wonderful place to work, and most of the people there flourish, finding the sweet spot between ability and passion. But I think I've gone just about as far as I can go. For me, SI is like a pair of shoes (for relevance's sake, let's say a sweet pair of Air Jordan kicks) that don't fit quite right. A size too big, maybe too wide. Perfect for someone else, but on me my gait becomes halting, shuffly, but I keep wearing them. And over time, I get used to not running anywhere. I forget how to leap, what it feels like to dance.
Part of the reason I feel suspended in time may be that I dove into work sometime in February and haven't had much of a breather since. I've always been obsessed with occupation, ever since deciding in the seventh grade that I was going to become a psychologist, the kind quoted in Reader's Digest articles about why women prefer the paper to come over the top of the toilet paper roll. I've always struggled to resist evaluating my worth based on career (and not just achievement within it, but the choice of field itself). And as my age rises more quickly than my job advancement does, this anxiety increases.
I don't have much of a problem finding the small pleasures in life. I'm thrilled by the view from my terrace, and every time I step outside of my apartment building, I feel thankful for my neighborhood, and for my city. Buying food from a truck is anodyne. But when I think about the big picture (well, not the huge picture, eternally speaking, but just the one limited to our physical lifespans), I feel a little deflated.
I spent my sixth straight Memorial Day in the offices of Sports Illustrated. Having to work on Monday national holidays is a cheap grumble, and that's not what bums me out. Rather, holidays provide milestones for evaluating progress, and every time I spend one doing the same types of tasks that I did when I was a 23-year-old rookie reporter, the despair grows.
I try very hard not to have an ungrateful attitude, or to be known more for dispensing complaints than praises. I've had a couple of universally enviable experiences that were owed entirely to my employment at SI: going to the Summer Olympics (not only the best Games that will ever be held in my lifetime, but one that took place in my ancestral homeland) and editing an NCAA commemorative dedicated solely to my alma mater.
But I have a tendency to misuse those highs as temporary palliatives, failing to capitalize on the momentum of those triumphs to generate more opportunities. As a result, as those events recede in the past, what should be fond memories nurtured into something greater instead spoil in sad isolation and neglect. Three years ago, in the midst of a quarter-life crisis over turning 25, I rewrote my six-word bio:
No more drifting.
Now, she paddled.
(Some people are born with 40-horsepower motors. I have something more akin to two dinky plastic oars.) And even so, I drop them and often find myself just treading water until the next big wave comes along under me. That's a perfectly pleasant and acceptable approach to life for some, but if there is a certain destination you are trying to reach, you had better not rely on the shifting moods of the sea to get you there.
After returning from Beijing (almost two years ago), I started to feel somewhat restless at SI. In 2010, that restlessness has slowly grown into something approaching discontent. Put another way: One of our very brilliant senior writers once told me-in China, actually-that you should stay at a job for as long as the job is working more for you. I have reaped so much from SI over the past six years, but the scales are starting to tip in the other direction.
Having said that, I'm not necessarily quitting my job anytime soon (even though months like this one make me want to). If epiphanies were snowballs, mine is rolling down a slope of .01% grade. New species arise and go extinct in the time it takes for me to make a life change. Also, I don't want to make just a lateral move, and find myself in the same situation six years from now. But the kind of work I want to do (to WRITE for a living, not factcheck) doesn't come with a checklist to realization and also doesn't offer much by way of stability, and for all the frivolity and impracticality of my dreams, my actions remain nail-gunned in reality. I need Plan B in place before I let go of Plan A, and since I pretty much stumbled into Plan A in the first place, I sure as heck have no idea how to go about formulating a Plan B. I was an overachiever when I was younger because life growing up takes place on a conveyor belt, moving you along a predetermined route at a steady and predetermined pace. I would make a terrible Abraham because traveling anywhere without turn-by-turn directions petrifies me.
SI is a wonderful place to work, and most of the people there flourish, finding the sweet spot between ability and passion. But I think I've gone just about as far as I can go. For me, SI is like a pair of shoes (for relevance's sake, let's say a sweet pair of Air Jordan kicks) that don't fit quite right. A size too big, maybe too wide. Perfect for someone else, but on me my gait becomes halting, shuffly, but I keep wearing them. And over time, I get used to not running anywhere. I forget how to leap, what it feels like to dance.