Still
By Katherine—Age 28—New York, NY
Like most Americans, I wanted to get rich quick. This was around age eight or nine; I bursted with schemes, like starting a henhouse in our suburban backyard and selling eggs. My mother smiled noncommittally and I went back to the drawing board, dreaming of self-sufficiency and doing things my way. Several years later, hepped up on Babysitter’s Club books, I found a couple local mothers looking for cheap childcare. The responsibility caused panic attacks, worse than the time mom gave me twenty dollars to keep and I lost it under the gumball machine at Food Star. Ashamed of myself, I stayed out of the workforce till age 15, when I got a gig doing data entry after school at a family-owned health food store. Mind-numbing. Working at the coffee shop was better: customers, co-workers, interaction, the rich smell of beans in my clothes, good clean post-work exhaustion. College, my parents told me, was job number one, and I listened; the summer jobs (a museum, a restaurant, some desperate stabs at temping almost as panic-inducing as babysitting) hardly counted. One winter I worked for my father putting up oak siding outdoors. And I fretted about the future. I’d never wanted a job, not the kind where you apply and there’s a boss and you go and, my god, the panic again. Paid work felt like an ocean wave, something that was going to swallow me whole. I interned for a newspaper, a magazine. They were all right but I was still waiting to feel at home, the way I had in art studios and theaters, which always felt both fertile and safe. I was hoping to flail into something I cared about, a calling, a tribe. After according every job under the sun its fifteen minutes inside my head, I went to the best graduate program in English I could get into. The monastic commitment seemingly required of academics frightened me; furthermore, grad school didn’t feel like college. I’m out now, masters degreed, with a knowledge-worker job that pays the bills and oscillates between oppressive and interesting. I left with a feeling I was looking for something, looking to make good on something, a long-time dream. Be a creative person who lives in the city. Balance panic and desire, independence and worthwhileness. Know interesting people, do interesting things, and make ends meet. Is it too much to ask?
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