Current mood:

cranky

Grumbling about unrealized potential
There are two things I feel like grumbling about right now. I guess I'll start with unrealized potential.

The biggest thing I have learned over the past three years or so of being out of school and in the workforce is that there is nothing I can't learn. Even stuff that previously seemed out of my league and simply not my style is totally attainable if I want to go after it. So far, I've proved this to myself in matters relating to auto insurance, cars, and medical evidence. I might not truly have the potential to make it to the top in the arenas of math and science, but a lot of stuff I just never even considered within my range of understanding is actually completely in my reach. Whaddya know.

Some things came easily to me in school, like reading and writing. I was always encouraged in those areas, and I liked them. That's why I ended up majoring in English and then getting an MFA in creative writing. I liked that stuff, and it seemed attainable. It held my attention. I had about nil career ambition until I was already working, so making choices for college and grad school wasn't about taking a direction or building a foundation. It was about doing what interested me. "Following my heart," if you will.

And there was a deliberate resistance to just going to school to do something that would make money.

I wish I had realized that there are plenty of profitable career choices that would have been interesting to me, and that I could have pursued a number of paths successfully. I wish I had understood the value of money, too. One summer, I almost decided to take out tens of thousands of dollars in loans to go to some Catholic school somewhere and meet my future uber-Catholic husband. Wouldn't that have been a riot? All that debt, just to get married and have fifty NFP babies and no way to pay it all back.

I could have gone to law school, for example, like a high school friend who at my age is a bona fide lawyer and has a husband and child almost exactly Penelope's age. I would have found that very interesting, and I could have made myself much better equipped for going to work and still been free to make the same choices for my personal life that I did, like getting married and starting a family. That part I always knew I wanted to do. It was having a job and a career I never saw in my future.

I got an MFA, and what am I doing with it? Nothing. Having a master's probably has given me an edge getting the last couple of jobs I've had, but I have been a very poor steward of this degree. I haven't written any fiction since I finished my thesis. There are all kinds of reasons, sure, but now I don't even feel compelled to write fiction. I have zero fiction inspiration. Which doesn't usually bother me, because I am who I am, but at the same time, it seems like a shame. Sometimes people from the MFA program will say, "What are you writing?" or "I enjoyed your stuff!" I have to say I'm not writing.

And writing fiction isn't exactly like riding a bicycle. You work at it to get better at it, and it's use it or lose it. I have been out of the MFA program now for longer than I was in it. And I have not used it. I was really proud of the level I achieved with my writing at the end of that, but I didn't maintain it.

So what I've done, now, is get a degree I'm not using and which does not give me any particularly marketable or profitable abilities. And I did this when there was a variety of degrees I could have pursued that would have helped me launch a career. I did this because it never occurred to me that I would even be able to do something like law or medicine or what-have-you, and so I never gave anything like that a second glance. What difference would it make if it interested me? I could never have done it!

And at this point, it's kind of too late. I have student debt and consumer debt, plus grown-up-sized bills like a mortgage, plus a child. The time for education has come and gone, at least for the foreseeable future. I need to concentrate on advancing the career I'm in.

I also need to figure out how to impart this wisdom to my children.

I want to make the disclaimer that I'm not saying I regret going to the MFA program. I loved the MFA program. I told someone recently that I count that time, and particularly my final year, as one of the high points of my entire life. I just feel like I was being short-sighted. Why did I want that degree? I knew I didn't want to teach and that I didn't want to be a Capital-W-Writer. You can be a writer or artist without getting a degree. Of course, study only helps... bah. You can't change the past, and I wouldn't change it. I'm just understanding the consequences of my actions, and it's a bit of a pisser.
The other thing I wanted to grumble about is religion, but that'll have to wait for another day.