Adulthood (2)

I grew up in a comfortable home. I went to private school, I did well in many subjects, I was considered promising. I went to a prestigious college, took time off, returned to school, dabbled in a wide array of disciplines, took more time off, returned a second time. I graduated, I took a full-time job, I worked for two years, I gave notice. I went abroad for a year, returned, took a new full-time job, worked a year, switched to a part-time position, began private tutoring. Another year passed, I left the part-time position, I started a blog, produced a play in my living-room, survived on freelance tutoring. I began working on a protest movement, abandoned my blog, stopped taking tutoring clients, gave away money, departed the protest movement disillusioned.

At this point, it occurred to me (not for the first time, but more forcefully than ever before) that I was too old to consider these my youthful wanderings. Looking over my life, I saw that the trajectory was not towards a settled career but away from it. This was, of course, very scary. I decided to buckle down, to make myself settle on something. I couldn't do it. I applied to jobs, to graduate school, but my applications were all delayed by indecision, begun too late, finished last minute. I received only rejections. I had gotten off of the train and could not find my way back on. At my parents’ synagogue on high-holidays, I would see kids I’d grown up with, now transformed into lawyers, doctors, professors.

I had the intellectual capacity to do a variety of things, but I lacked some temperamental ingredient. I’m not lazy: give me any job, and I work hard at it. I’m not apathetic or dull. On the contrary, I’m passionate and curious and enjoy solving problems. I have no difficulty getting along with other people. No, it’s something else. What is it?

Then a strange thing happened: I accepted my mysterious inability—not as something good or pleasant but as something I could not run from. Maybe it was a curse, but it was not a moral failing. It was not merely the accidental result of a series of careless decisions or listless dissipation. It was something essential either to my nature or to my relationship to the world.

In the meantime, I had begun to notice that a lot of the people I was close to showed similar symptoms. And by all reports, statistically speaking, my friends and I were no anomaly.

In fact, I had been long aware of these statistical trends amongst young people, but previously I had seen my participation in them only as a source of further humiliation. Now it seemed to hint at something more generally frightening but less personally demeaning. Maybe failure was in fact a reasonable response to the world. It was not the only reasonable response, perhaps, but it was no less reasonable, and, I began to think, in its peculiar way, no less honorable, than the alternatives.

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