decide what the hell I would like to do with the rest of my life

Although, I started to deliberate early about my career path, as early as freshman year of college, I graduated quite confused about career paths that were actually meaningful to me. In college, I was an anthropology major. Post-college, for lack of better ideas and the need for structure, I entered a master’s in public health program. The experience is actually quite grating against my learning style and interests as I don’t get to explore issues in depth or do much analysis.

Interests I’ve tossed around haven’t always been real or focused, and have in fact often been flaky, scattered and lofty. I was once interested in writing, an interest I’ve long retired as a suitable avocation. Also, I had a strong interest in medical anthropology. The thing is that the career paths for anthropologists aren’t clear.

Recently, I read one of Arthur Kleinman’s book and felt like I had finally stumbled on a career niche that I could pursue. Kleinman is an anthropologist and psychiatrist who writes about the social construction of disease. Reading him helped me articulate in interest in researching the cultural mechanisms that produce disease-mental illness-in particular. But in retrospect, I feel that I’ve just come down the med. anthro road again and have stumbled upon something that is academic, hard to maneuver and doesn’t involve practical research.

So, right now, it’s back to the drawing board. Unless, I can navigate and discover that social medicine is a separate field than anthropology. And that I wouldn’t be in a ridiculously elite and enclosed career field.

I know the gutter feeling all too well.

I can’t quite get my life to align—the basics and the mature grown up me future. I feel miserable, lazy, aimless because I’ve lost touch with a balanced life and am not working towards a balanced life. Neither the past, present nor future work for me.

I’m whittling away my break within the 2 ft sphere of me, reading books but mostly watching movies. Mindless.

I want to have some kind of passion, to be able to constantly feel rewarded by healing others in doctoring or some other profession. Or have some goal to working with abstract ideas that doesn’t detach from the realm of social reform. Yet so much is hindered by my vague, undirected mind.

I need to figure out how to spend the next two weeks so I at least get some life together.

My broadness/unfocusedness is making me AND other people nervous these days. It’s discouraging to lack a clearer sense of my short and long term goals.

But now the long term is of more concern since the short term shouldn’t be as difficult.

In my mind, the areas I want to contribute to are education/educational media. To an extent I could see myself working in developing/working on educational programs for tv or radio org.’s (yeah still noncommitted)

More strictly education-wise, I’m interested in nonprofits and alternative education, integrating multiculturalism and expression into curriculum. Generally, I think I would work on this issue from an angle of policy.

What upsets me is that my jobs are behind the scenes because I can’t think or name a job that is on the scenes that my skills match or that appeals to me. I don’t want to be a theory-head for my career, but I would get really bored of daily practice tihngs like a fair amt of teaching aspects. I wish I could think more flexibly in terms of positions, job areas out there that would allow me to combine these two separate modes in one job.

I’m ultimately overwhelmed by the world of possibilities especially as I am a perfectionist.

What I tried to do was make a plan for deliberate research on this topic. I intend to do 4 hours at least of research on this career finding project. Clearly, I need to be able to be more concrete in my research goals. I intended to acquaint myself with key features in my search by starting out at some key education blog hubs.

For something like an internship for the fall or next year, obsessing about the perfect opportunity or being clear-thinking enough isn’t getting me anywhere.

In college, especially liberal arts colleges, people supposedly have accumulated internship after internship and by senior year have gone out and done work in the community.

I am the odd duck who is still strugglging, and hopefully beginning to struggle differently, with study skills and other living well skills.

I feel that the internship and pre-work experiences would have been not only perspective widening, but also key elements to getting a life direction—or the career part at least.

As is, I don’t have direction in many areas of my life and this has been maddening me this summer.

The kicker is that I am attracted to activities which are not necessarily the most automatic for me, not that anything is. I’m attracted to teaching, social action, english language and other issues which are rooted more in my mind than in the world.

How can I become more directed about what I want from the world if my internal sense is so lacking? How can I do this with such little world literacy? How do I balance the internal and external seeking of perspective so that I am not being more thought than experience?

I’m whittling away my college summer before senior year. By the fall I would like to have 3 career options to pursue and an idea of subject interests, not just topics, that could sustain me. Where do I start with building this foundation of knowledge? I need to be somewhat focused to go do research or converse with helpful advisory figures.