(9/1/2022)
I remember being in the third grade, working on a project where we were asked to think about our futures. We were asked questions like what job we wanted (mangaka, unfortunately) or how many kids we wanted (two adopted daughters. No husband for me, although we won't start unpacking that for at least another ten years). We were also asked what period of our lives we were most looking foward to. Many of my classmates were excited to be in their twenties, going to college, moving out on their own, being young and having fun. Me, precocious bastard that I was, answered I was looking forward to being in my forties; in my forties, I would be settled, I thought, having an established career and family (which, let's remember, is me, unmarried, living in Japan drawing comics with my two children), but still young with a lot of life ahead of me.
I'm twenty-eight now, staring down the barrel of thirty. Some days forty seems unbearably close. Other days, the thought of having to be awake and alive every day for another decade, only to have to keep doing it every day for the rest of my life, is such an exhausting thought. (Dramatic, I know.) I wonder if third-grade me, when imagining her adult life, actually put any thought into what the road to get there would look like, or if she just wanted to skip ahead to a happy ending. I've never been very good at putting the work in. Call it laziness, call it executive dysfunction, call it needing help that no one offered and not knowing how to ask for it... whatever it is, I've never been good at the "road to get there".
I wonder now if it would behoove me to revisit that old project. What job do you want? A stumbling block already. I don't know. I know I like my current job well enough, but I also know it doesn't pay well enough for me to live on the rest of my life. It certainly isn't my calling, if that is a thing that really exists. I wonder if the idea of a "calling" is part of what makes it so hard. Like realizing you don't really believe in soul mates, you learn too that there is no perfect job sitting out there waiting for you, no special thing that will make you happy the rest of your life. There is just rent and the need to make it.
It'd be nice to have a calling though. It's be nice to have a soul mate. It'd be nice to know there is a version of my life out there in the ether somewhere where a version of me is doing things she likes with people she loves.