Any Help You Can Give In This Matter Would Be Invaluable.

I had a bad day today. I am trying to figure out why.

My day didn’t begin badly. By all accounts, it was actually a really good day until about two in the afternoon, when I went in to have a talk with my boss about data entry for our volunteers. And somewhere in the middle of that meeting, my day exploded, and I have no idea why.

We’d finished talking about everything we had to talk about. We’re both new, we’ve inherited a system we don’t like, and we’re trying to fix it. We’d both like it fixed now, but it’s becoming apparent that an immediate solution is not happening. I think he’s getting more frustrated than I am by this, but he’s paid more to be frustrated. I feel that I am paid to do grunt work and figure out solutions to these problems before they become problems, so I always feel responsible when a solution I come up with doesn’t fix things. This is  the way my mind works.

After we have finished discussing this, he abruptly asks me what I do at my other job. I am taken aback. I always feel as though I am giving the wrong impression when I talk about my other job while I am one place or the other. I explain that I give tours and do a small amount of research. Then he asks me what I want to be doing in five years.

And I proceed to burst into tears.

The last time I remember bursting into tears in a completely unnecessary situation was in 8^th grade. I’d been called on the carpet for doing really poorly on a math test, and when the teacher asked me if I needed help, I started crying. In front of the whole class. Several people started laughing at me. Which is understandable, looking back several years, but in 8^th grade, being laughed at in math class for crying  is something you continue crying about. It wasn’t that the teacher was criticizing me for anything – she had a legitimate desire to understand what was wrong and why I hadn’t done well. And I had a legitimate desire to…something. I’m not sure what it was at the time. I think, knowing what I know about myself know, that it was a desire not to create a fuss. I wanted to be independent, and to admit, to the teacher who was supposed to be teaching me these things, that I had not understood it, had not asked a question about it, and imply that however she was teaching it didn’t make sense to me, was more than my pride could stand. Hence, the bursting into tears.

I think that’s why I started crying today. Here is my boss, a man that I have known for about a month now but who continually amazes me  with his willingness to grab a problem by the throat, to think in big pictures and who has worked at some of the largest and most reputable museums in the world,  and he is  asking me what I want to do with my life. Because, as both of us know and neither of us will say, I cannot stay working two part time jobs forever.

There are other things that go into the crying besides that. There is the implication that I still need to make something of myself, the realization that I do not actually have a good answer to his question, the implication that going to grad school takes money I do not have and my parents will be unable to help me because they’ll be sending three children to college this fall, and my mother is getting a second job to help with that. But mostly, it comes down to the fact that I am a little ashamed of myself for not having a clue where I want to be in five years.

Now, that is not entirely true – I have a very good idea of where I want to be in five years. I would like to be a museum educator in a costume somewhere cooking over a woodburning stove or darning socks or making butter-- creating, manipulating, or explaining some physical product so that children will understand what life was like in the past. The problem then becomes a question of how to get there.

I get asked a lot at the lobby desk whether I have a degree in history. I always feel ashamed when I say that I don’t, my degree is in English, but I really love museums. I never get a good feel for what people think about that, but after I say it, it always comes with a sense of failure. I’m not doing something related to my degree. I spent four years on nothing. I have a teaching certificate I don’t want to use.

I have good reasons to say all these things, and I’m not lying, and yet I still feel guilty about saying them. Some part of me feels like I’m not allowed to go for a museum studies degree. I haven’t earned that privilege by writing lots of papers or slaving over a thesis or spending months on end doing original research. I don’t have the right background. I am unworthy of a professor’s time.

Which is what finds me in my boss’s office on a Tuesday afternoon crying for a five year plan I don’t have. Let me say it is a credit to my boss that he maintained his calm as I proceed to blubber and cry for the next twenty minutes and explain this mishmash of ridiculous reasons why I am in tears in his office after an absurdly simple question. It is also a credit to him that he made sense out of all of it, addressed my fears about being fired and a failure and bad at my job, and somehow maintained his aura as one of the nicest human beings I will ever have the pleasure to meet in this universe, and probably the next several universes as well.

I finally stopped crying. I blew my nose several times. I went back to work for another hour. And then I got in the car to go home. I plug in my Ipod, and Rufus Wainwright’s “Hallejuhah” comes on. He’s singing about David’s psalms and the secret chord that David played to please the Lord and  I start crying again. And I let myself cry, and somewhere in the midst of that silent, sobbing wreckage there is a prayer in there of some kind or another. It probably doesn’t sound like much, more an emotional cry  to the universe and whatever version of the Deity is listening that I need help, and I just need someone to listen for  a moment. I realize while I am crying and driving that I have been living hand-to-mouth in the way of life experiences for the past three months. I go to work and I go home – that’s it. I have not taken myself out to do anything un-work related. I have not had a legitimate conversation with anyone outside my family or my coworkers in months, and I have not talked about or discussed my emotional health, my plans for  the future, or something other than history with anyone pretty much since I got home from college. I have no friends in the immediate vicinity to talk to, and I am too afraid of interrupting anyone else’s life to call them.

Just when I’m getting over “Hallelujah” Coldplay’s “Fix You” comes on, and I am still in tears, and wondering what crazy program is picking all these songs I can cry about, because after that Regina Spektor serenades me with “No One’s Laughing With God” and  between these three songs, I spend my fifteen minute commute in tears. I park my car, I go inside, my mother asks me if I am okay, and I respond with a heart-shaking ‘NO’ and start crying again.

This is the last thing I wanted to do, and I make even less sense of the reasons behind why I am crying as I explain to my mother. My mother has enough problems in her life – she does not need any of mine. I am her oldest child. I have a college degree. I should be able to take care of myself. Yet I am living at home, still letting her cook me dinner, still living on my parent’s good grace. Yet I am still her problem. And I am crying in her office, trying to explain why I spent a good forty five minutes of my afternoon in tears. It doesn’t make as much sense to her as it does to my boss, because I don’t talk about the second job thing (she didn’t have to get a second job to send *me* to college) and I don’t do a very good job of explaining my guilt about the scheduling conflict between my two jobs, because she keeps telling me if that happens too often someone’s going to fire me, which leads back to that sending three kids to college problem, and I’ve figured out the less I say about calendars in her presence the better it will be for the both of us.

She gives me the answers she always gives – maybe your boss is right. Maybe you do need to make a plan. Maybe you need to look at museum studies programs. Maybe you need to move. Maybe you need to give up one of these jobs. All these things make sense, but they do not comfort me. Moving, museum studies programs, plans down the road, all of these things require money, and money is something I do not have a lot of. The newspaper reminds me of this nearly every day. I am part of the generation who seems to know awful well how to spend money for education, and doesn’t know a thing about getting an education they can actually use, or a job that will make it worthwhile. It’s this realization that scares the shit out of me. What if I’m just another college graduate getting a Master’s Degree that I can’t pay for? Why not stay where I am with my two jobs I have to juggle like a crazy person and build a little insulated place for myself where I save a little, spend less, volunteer, and try to be a nice person?

I try to tell her that I feel like I am not setting a good example for my siblings, and this, at least, she understands. She leaves me alone for twenty minutes to write this blog post, and then returns downstairs and tells me that what she thinks is really bothering me is staying at home. This is probably true. Maybe I do need to move. Maybe I do need to start looking at jobs outside the state of Illinois.

But before I do any of that, I would like to talk with someone. I would like to talk with ANYONE. I would like to see if my fears make sense.

As I seem to end all my emails at work, “Any help you can give in this matter would be invaluable.”