A Person's Bend (Part 2)

I stopped working for the Air Force at the end of April of 2006 because it bored me to tears some days while always managing to cause an exorbitant amount of stress and crazy hours that often meant I didn’t get in the workout which would have helped alleviate the stress and stimulate my mind. I say stopped working because I was still being paid by the Air Force and using up all of my unused vacation days until the beginning of June. I took a job as a production manager and a writer at a small production company in Denver. Little did I know at the time how prophetic this job would seem to me a few short months later. I began work almost immediately after I stopped working for the Air Force. The job required that I organize and track any number of projects, to include where they were (sometimes literally) on the edit suite floor and when the client wanted them finished. The other part of my job was to work with the director of creative services to develop, write and present treatments and other ideas to clients or prospective clients. I was good at both jobs. I needed both jobs – one to indulge my compulsively organized side and one to liberate my compulsively caged creative side.

I had this job for nearly four months. Then the director of creative services chose to “pursue other opportunities” and a week later I was given notice of the termination of my employment. Luckily for me, as I hate having nothing to do and really had no idea what I would end up doing after losing my job, I had an Air Force Reserve commitment that I was required to fulfill, so I packed my little car with everything I needed and headed to Omaha for two weeks to “be in the Air Force again” as I describe it to people who have no idea what I’m talking about when I try to explain how the Reserves work. While I was there, I managed to line up another 25 days of work with the Air Force Reserves back in the city where was then living. And that job is what got me to the moment when I started thinking about the feature story in the major consumer magazine about why Generation Y people move back in with their parents after college and when the movers were coming in six days to gather my belongings and take them all to my parents’ house in Ohio.

I digress.

The trouble is that I have always been good at everything if I applied myself just a little bit. This fact is also true of most of the people I know in my generation who are dissatisfied with what they are doing professionally. In school I was good at science and math, but also English and history. In high school, I was named the biology student of the year my senior year. That was the same year I was honored as the outstanding French student in the school. I tried to like one area better than another, but to no avail. I was stuck in the middle. I loved using both sides of my brain and I didn’t know which side to follow. After high school I went to “college” at the Air Force Academy. (For anyone who doesn’t know, although the Air Force Academy has the reputation of being the softest of the military service academies, let it be known that “college” and “service academy” are not synonymous. Similar in some ways, but not in so many ways that matter.) When it came time to declare my major, I essentially flipped a coin between chemistry and political science. In the end I chose political science because I didn’t think I could do the labs required of me for chemistry and continue to play intercollegiate soccer.

When it came time to pursue a graduate degree, I couldn’t decide between French and a masters degree in public administration. In the end I chose public administration because it seemed more practical, but was forced to give the pursuit of the degree up after military requirements made it nearly impossible to finish the program.

Now, free of the Air Force, free of commitments of any kind, I have NO IDEA what I want to do or where I want to live or what I want to study if I go back to school. I know that if I put forth even the slightest bit of effort I could have a freelance writing career. I know that if I finish my MPA, I could have a successful career in public service. I know that if I do any number of other things, I could do them, and do them well. The trouble is figuring out which one makes me happy, provides me with the sense of accomplishment or fulfillment that I need or want from my professional life -- a concern that doesn’t seem to be that important to my parents’ generation, where the mindset of “I have a job because it pays for what I really want to do in my free time” prevails.

Sometimes I like to talk about such matters with people whose guidance I find wise and whose advice rarely leads me astray. In the city where I was living at the time, that person, more often than not, was my pastor. I told him what I was thinking one day, about how I could basically do anything I wanted to do but I had no idea how to figure out what that was. He was leaning back in his chair, sipping his coffee, feet propped up on his desk (which he only did in the presence of certain, chosen people), and he says to me – after he told me how arrogant that sounded, “I don’t think so, Carrie. I think there is only one thing that you can do.”

Interesting proposition I thought, and so we dug in a little deeper.

A Person's Bend (Part 1)

I remember reading a few years ago in a major news magazine the cover story, which was a discussion of why so many people in Generation Y wind up back at home after college, living with their parents, skipping from job to job. I remember thinking that I didn’t know why either…even though I think I’m technically part of Generation Y. I flew my parent’s nest at the age of 18, moving nearly 1,200 miles away from home, visiting some summers for three weeks at a time, but rarely making it home more often than that. Well, other than Christmas, I guess. After four years that far away, I graduated from college and moved even farther from home, where I spent three great years making great money in a fabulously underrated location. I felt invincible. I was young, single, determined and completely incapable of thinking of a day when I would want or need to move back in with my parents.

Then, my older brother moved back in with my parents after college. Not long after, my twin sister moved back in with my parents…after college. My brother moved back in because he decided he wanted to go to graduate school. My parents suggested that he live with them while he commuted to school to save money. My brother didn’t want to move back in with my parents, but he did after the reality of how much it would cost to pay rent and tuition really sank in. After he graduated, he decided to go to graduate school again, but this time farther away. He finally flew the nest for good when he moved to Indiana for school, fell in love with a girl and married her. I think it’s a pretty sure thing now that he won’t be moving back in with my parents; and I don’t think that my parents would let him now even if he wanted to. I think it’s kind of like an unspoken line in the sand.

My sister’s story is much more typical of the Generation Y college graduate. She graduated from college the same year as me. Although she had looked for work while she was finishing her studies, she couldn’t find any. Something about it being the spring following the 9-11 attacks and the slowing of the economy probably didn’t help her much. So after graduation, my parents went down to her college to pick her stuff up and moved her back home. She lived with my parents for nearly three years. She prepared to move out once, but as she prepared to move out, her boss prepared to terminate her employment by fax as the company went under so she stayed in my parent’s house. Eventually – it took awhile – she found a new job. But she lived with my parents still because her job did not really pay her enough to pay rent, make a car payment and cover other costs associated with living – like buying food. One day she moved out. After a few months, she moved back in. Her roommate situation didn’t have the appeal she’d hoped it would. My parents even moved to a different house, and my sister moved with them. Finally, after nearly four and a half years living with my parents after college, at the age of 26, one month away from the age of 27, my sister moved out of my parents’ house and into her very own.

And after nearly four and a half years living on my own after college, at the age of 26, one month away from the age of 27, I moved back into my parents’ house. To occupy the room that my sister moved out of. The move was the last one I thought I would ever choose to make. But choose it I did. Because I didn’t (and still don’t) know what I want to do with my life. Or maybe I do know what I want to do with my life but I don’t know exactly how to get there, or maybe I’m afraid to pursue it.

If I remember correctly, the story from the major magazine said that people my age were choosing to live with their parents because the economy was bad and they couldn’t find jobs, or because they’d been babied so much growing up that they were unprepared to make the adult decisions they needed to make concerning which college to attend or which job to take, or even where to live. I don’t remember if the story mentioned that people my age were choosing to live with their parents because all of their dreams diverged in the woods, and they didn’t know what path to take. Because it seems to me that my trouble is not a bad economy or being unprepared for the decisions that I’d have to face as an adult. It seems to me that my trouble is that I have too many options.

The thing is, I don’t think my generation is too babied or too troubled to find steady, well-meaning employment. I think that more than ever, we’ve been encouraged to be whatever we want to be but we haven’t entirely escaped the pressure to just get a “nice job and settle down” and the conflict between the two can lead us astray. Instead of having one option, we have many, and by and large, we’re more than adequately prepared to pursue and succeed at any of them. At least that’s how I see it: I have too many options because I’m entirely too capable of doing whatever it is that I want to do – all I’d really have to do is apply myself a little bit. It’s not that I can’t find a job. Because I can. I’ve applied to many of them. But none of them really interests me that much, so I don’t do the requisite follow-up phone call to see if they’d received and reviewed my application. Which in turn makes it appear as though I don’t really want the job, that I’m not really that interested. And so my not calling kind of sabotages the entire situation and then they don’t call me and I don’t get an interview and we all know that without an interview, there is no job offer and rarely have I seen anyone get a job without first being extended an offer of one. It’s just kind of how it works.

Truth be told, I might really be interested in the job. And I might be really good at it. But I cannot tell you what all the job entails when I apply for it. I cannot tell you if I will get bored doing it, if I will stress out doing it, if doing it will almost require me to give up my workout time. And so I don’t call.