Thanks to Chelsea I’ve spent the evening trying to figure out an answer to this question.
You would think it would be an easy one to answer, a person with as many passions as moi should be able to come up with at least one thing she’d be monumentously happy doing. But, alas, that’s not the case. This is due, I feel, to my general personality as a realistic dreamer.
I love to day dream. I spend hours imagining things, different paths my life could take, different people I could meet or be, different characters in my head, etc. I love it more now that I’m in my twenties than I did as a girl. And though the first answer to this question that jumps into my head is “Write a book,” realistically I don’t think that’s really the right answer.
And I think this comes from realizing that my favorite daydream characters, while fun to play with in the Barbie Dream House of my mind, never really do anything that American Jane would want to read about in a book; thus dashing my hopes of ever becoming a best-selling author.
Pair that with the fact that I KNOW fiction is not my forte, instead, for better or worse I’m a poet to the core. Much less commitment, much less acclaim. Thems the breaks.
That’s why I really don’t think “write & publish a book/series of books” would answer the above question for me. Not because it wouldn’t be awesome, but because it’s really not me, or wouldn’t be blissful or self-defining for me. I’d like to take a shot at it once, to say I did, and to cross it off my to-do list, but as a career? No thank you.
You know what I would really like to do? Start things. Just start a whole bunch of things, one at a time. Get them running and successful…and then move on to the next thing. I love the beginning part. I love the planning and the organizing, the brainstorming, the learning-as-we-go. Then I get bored. I have so many ideas, so many times where I think, “someone should really….” but the idea of doing anything forever, or even for a couple of years make me antsy.
I hope that one day I find a solid answer to that question. Maybe I’ll end up owning my own business and follow that no-fail plan I’ve been considering for years. Maybe I’ll earn my Ph.D. do some incredible research, tour the country on speaking gigs, become the next Jean Kilbourne, and convince the Smithsonian to build the National Women’s History Museum and hire me as the curator. Maybe these characters in my head will finally do something and I’ll write a book that O-to-the-Prah touts to a best-seller.
Or maybe not.
But right now I’ll just savor the possibilities.
