Boots and Fists to Pound on the Pavement

I often have this weird feeling like adrenaline is coursing through my body.  I can’t keep my feet still or my eyes.  I remember feeling this way as a kid, but then I hit middle school and I got serious about studying and became a reader instead of a girl who spent every moment playing outside.  And then I got to high school and became a mostly apathetic girl who somehow got labeled an overachiever.  Then I went to college and got smarter and found things I really cared about.  Then I started grad school and went crazy.

When I first started college, I reacted against my apathetic high school self by becoming rigid in my goal-making (and in my religion).  I was going to be perfect and nothing was going to stop me.  Living that way was miserable and late in my junior year I gave it all up and was happier for it (not-so-coincidentally, this was when I started studying theology and began to question what I knew before).  I didn’t grow any less ambitious.  I just learned to be kinder to myself and more open minded.  I had the feeling sometimes that I wasn’t doing as much as I could, but when I thought back to how miserable I’d been, I knew that I couldn’t go back to that.

I started grad school and my future closed in on me a bit.  I was walking down this really narrow and expensive path, not sure if it was where I wanted to be.  I questioned myself constantly.  I even took an extra year to decide.  Finally I made my decision to go for the PhD.  I wanted it, but I was fearful and struggled to see beyond my immediate future.  Everything felt out of my control; it seemed up to chance whether it would all work out.

It did work out and so much of that uncertainty that was haunting me dissipated.  Something else changed too.  I took control of my finances, which for as well as I think I know myself, I did not realize was weighing me down to the ground and limiting even my dreams.  No wonder everything felt uncertain when I wasn’t sure how I could pay for any of it, when I knew one bump in the road would put paying my rent the next month into question, when I could imagine no end to my struggle with money.  With the possible exception of starting a blog, no one thing has changed my life so significantly in the last five years.

All of this history has brought me to this weird point in my life where I have this crazy energy to reach for all the possibilities I see open to me and I know I can do it in a way that won’t make me miserable.  My goal used to be perfection.  It was a feeling of I need to change in order to be acceptable to other people. Now my motivation is to pursue the things that interest me.  I couldn’t stop myself from pursuing these things even if I wanted to; I am propelled by some force already.

It’s a strange aspect of the INFJ personality that we have the minds of dreamers, but we manifest that in the external world by being very systematic.  We write things down and put them in lists.  It’s how we calm our minds.  I gave up most of my lists when I came to associate them with failure.  I’ve come back to them now with a different feeling all together.  I am thrilled by the idea of taking my dreams seriously.  I look at my lists with big eyes and too much excitement to keep inside.

Over the break I took from blogging, I developed a list of goals and then I put them all into a 5 year plan.  My first ever.  I never could imagine 5 years into the future and now I can.  I look at it like an outline for a paper.  It’s a direction to head, something to look at when I get lost along the way, but something I certainly will veer from.  Where I end up in five years may look nothing like what I imagined, but these goals are so central to my interests that I cannot imagine them not a part of any life I lead.

Still, I laughed at myself the first time I looked at the completed 5 year plan.  The first thing that came to my mind is that I am so like my parents.  If no one else understands that things like this are fun to me (I know a lot of people who couldn’t think of anything less fun than a 5 year plan), then I’ll at least have two people who understand.  The second thing I thought is that it only takes one step back for perspective to realize I must be crazy.  Here are some things I plan to do in the next five years: get out of debt, earn a PhD, publish a novel, save $20,000, and move to New York City.  I am well down the road to all of them already, so maybe I’m not crazy.  Or maybe crazy isn’t so bad.

People often tell me to stop and smell the roses.  There are a lot of things I need to be reminded of, but this is not one of them.  I have never struggled with making time for myself.  I’m an introvert, so it’s only natural for me.  But, I’m not the stop-and-smell-the-roses type.  I’m more the type to be running along with my head in the clouds when a pleasant smell strikes me and I look down and think, “Oh, roses.  I forgot about roses.”  I’m all for changing the things about myself that make me unhappy, but I’m happy being surprised by roses.