APATHY AND GETTING STUCK BY SARAH EMIG

I envy people who know what they want to do with their life. When I was a kid, I had dreams and aspirations coming out my ass–I wanted to be a veterinarian, a writer, an actress, a spy, a traveler, and about twenty other things. But somehow, as I get older, I wasn’t able to decide on any one of those things, and that indecisiveness has followed my all the way to my Junior year of college.

What’s wrong with me?

I’m a very driven person when the time comes for me to accomplish something, even passionate, but without a clear something to be passionate about, I get stuck. I get stuck in bed, in the TV shows I watch, in my friends, in work and in school. I spend an alarming amount of my time waiting for things to happen in my life or waiting for the hope that I find some “inspiration” which will change everything.

Last summer, I felt the effects of all this waiting particularly hard. I wasn’t passionate about anything because I didn’t believe in anything enough to be passionate about it. It was a self-fulfilling circle of apathy which made my usual self much more withdrawn and combative, and it was affecting my family and friends. It took a while for me to realize it, but I now know I was the problem, not my situation in life.

This year has been better, but the path to clarity has become no more clear. I still don’t know what I want to do, and there’s nothing I want more than to find what that is. So instead of letting myself be dragged into a boring and predictable life, this year I’ve made that my challenge–my passion for now IS finding my passion.

So I still envy people who know what they want to do with their life. They have clear goals and have the ability to make plans to get there, no matter how difficult that may be. But I’ve come to realize that I can make the same plans to get to my goal, which is finding that thing I want to do.