The Low Point

I feel like I'm back in Junior High, in the sense that I have no idea where I belong, what my role is, or how to carve out my niche. I am constantly harried by awkwardness and self-doubt. All the other boys and girls seem to have the system figured out and I am the one fumbling ... in this metaphor, I suppose, with my life.

High school is 7 years behind me and while many of my friends, in that space of time, have bought homes, established careers, cohabitated, gotten married, and even started on the baby track, I have none of those things, passing that time instead in post-secondary only to realize that I had effectively rendered myself un/under-employable and spending the pennies I managed to scrape together on travel. So. In the Calgary context, against my real grown up peers, I feel like a complete failure. I feel like there are two things that I can say for myself: that I am good at teaching kids how to swim (a highly sought-after and lucrative skill, obs) and that I have seen a lot of stuff (like the pyramids, for eg). But these things don't feel like they count for much.

Yesterday, at my meantime part-time job, one of the patrons approached me and asked, "Are you a student?" I replied that I was not, that I had finished school. He pursued, "So why don't you have a real job?" As if I already didn't feel badly enough about myself for my dirth of normative accomplishment in my personal and professional life, now I have to suffer strangers' criticism. Thanks guy.

So. Needless to say, I'm at a bit of a low point. My cap-and-gown-wearing, future-looking, 18-year-old self is kind of disappointed in and embarrassed of me. I often find myself in the company of friends who are where I thought I would be by now. And I have too much free time to stew about it.

I need a distracting project.