The ever-dreaded threshold of thirty is just around the corner (one year, nine months, twelve days), and all of those Things I Should Have Done By Now are creeping into my very overwhelmed head. Graduate school, they whisper; serious boyfriend, they say; publications, they whine. Oh, if only I could quiet them and appreciate the here and now! Though I’m a huge fan of to-do lists, long-term planning actually gives me a terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach. Nervous and unsure, I feel hemmed-in—as though I’m stuck in a tiny hatch-back on a cross-country road trip and no one will let me drive. (FYI: I always drive on road trips. This does not make me a control freak; it makes me a better driver.)
Commitments are something my friends and I discuss constantly. At Nicole’s (very fun) birthday dinner, for example, it was relationships. The clueless men we’re dating and the ones we’d like to date. The ones that marry us, the ones that text their friends, but not us, that they can’t wait to see us, and the ones that appear after years of silence to tell us we still matter. I tend to specialize in the last species, and find it an emotionally exhausting and insecurity-fueled experience (and am therefore not looking forward to Venus in retrograde in April and May). Why can’t we get it right the first time, or in one case the third or fourth times? Really, why must everything be left so open-ended? On the other hand, I have been receiving a bit more attention than usual from a friend whom I’ve always been interested in. And we’ve never dated before—so look at that! Progress! Only I should probably warn him that I’m not much for the rituals of dating (really, who has the time?), so a surprise kiss and declaration of love will do the trick just fine. Oh, and if he even mutters the word “casual” I will walk. Walk, I say!
Mostly, though, I worry about my career. Today’s economic environment is ripe for career-anxiety, but I’m very lucky to have a position that I love with curators that appear to value me as more than an elaborately (and expensively, might I add) trained chimp who can press buttons on machines they don’t understand. Still, it’s not at all surprising that I’m beginning to freak out over my application to graduate school, which I turned in Sunday. What if I don’t get in? Worse, what if I do get in and don’t finish? (Again.) What if I suffer from writer’s block? (Again.) What if my professors hate me? (Or so I imagine, again.) What if I’m tired after work and can never get the readings done? Or what if I’m just no good at school any more? That would be devastating. The scariest part of it all is that an M.A. puts me on a path that firmly cements past decisions I’ve made and forces me to contemplate how I will move forward in the curatorial field. It’s really about taking the next step forward and trusting that everything will turn out how I want it. The only difficult part is defining exactly what I want. That’s what that one year, nine months, twelve days is for, I guess, but I'll try to be flexible about the time schedule.
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