Paths In and Out of Mediocrity
Up until my 17th birthday or so, I was the consummate overachiever. There was nothing I couldn’t accomplish if you’d just asked. You want me to be the fastest runner? Done. Win a couple spelling bees? Sure. Get elected to class president, get straight As, chalk up a few art awards, captain the basketball team, claim student of the year, AND… Do it while actively skipping at least a third of my science classes to hang out with some of my buddies in the cafeteria? Hmm. Tougher… But not a problem. I really wish someone would have told me that being good at everything as a kid would ultimately turn me into a damaged adult, floundering in oblivion and constantly wondering if I have chosen the right paths. No one tells you that you don’t get to be the best at everything forever, and that if you don’t choose to be great at just ONE thing, you’ll be lost in a proverbial purgatory of unfulfillment for years. Up until my first major failure, I’d never had to choose between math and basketball or choir and writing or biology and art. I was good at all of it and truly found joy in just about everything except for golf – Which I sucked at from the get-go.
Mediocrity would have served me well. It would have prepared me for life by giving me one or two directions to look into, instead of letting me watch the figs wither and fall off the tree. In a fit of panic during my Sophomore year of college, I decided to go into journalism because it seemed to fit all the right pieces… Creative, yet serious, prestigious, yet still a woman of the people. I pictured myself flashing a press pass, embedding in a war zone with the troops, going undercover for investigations, accepting my Pulitzer….
In reality, I chose a profession that is a.) Nearly obsolete, b.) Pays literally 7 percent more than minimum wage, and c.) Any human over the age of 8 should technically be able to do [Hence, perhaps, points a and b]. During my first job as a military reporter, I lived in a one-room shack in a ghetto in the middle of nowhere, and I made somewhere around $1,000 a month covering one of the Army training bases in the desert. I will say this: I did end up embedding with the troops. In the biblical sense.
When I really sit down and do the math, I am mortified at how much time and money I spent learning how to be a writer who doesn’t write. Actually, I do write. I spend about 8 hours a day writing. Unfortunately of the work I’ve done for the past two months, I would bet that only about 2 to 2 1/2 percent of my writing has been read by an actual human. I’ve flippantly tossed thousands of unread words into the internet void in search of great SEO gods, hoping they will meld my sentences into a creature straddling both art and search engine glory.
But the truth is that I just don’t care anymore. I’ve reached my saturation point with writing.
Earlier this year during my bout with unemployment [Sounds like a bad flu, doesn't it?], I decided to put together some goals. This blog, or more accurately, my more frequent posting pattern, is a byproduct of those goals taped to the back of my door. It started out lofty: Run a half marathon, lose 35 pounds, join the Kiwanis Club, take a class… And just a few weeks in, one by one, things started to fall into place for each of my 20-some goals. I started training for the half marathon and was up to about 4 miles by the end of January. Free Dreamweaver and Photoshop classes came up at City College. I lost 10 pounds in the first two months. With the exception of my dry spell noted in the last entry, things just started to come together.
One of the things I wrote down, almost as a joke, was, “Choose a Dream.” Like it would just come to me…
But it did. The disaster at the television station interview last week combined with my blatant disdain for writing search engine optimization and the fact that newspaper journalism has a salary rate of “destitute” all came together to form a perfect plan:
I’m going to grad school. And I’m going to get an MFA in film and television. No more floundering in self-pity. No more shame spiral. Maybe a few more days of SEO. But an exit strategy is in hand.
