Throughout my life, there have been several times when I have spent the better part of days or weeks obsessing over the question "What am I doing with my life?"
Today is one of those days.
Last night, I met up with my girlfriend, Jenny, for dinner. Jenny and I were very close friends in high school, and still keep in contact and get together several times a year. I love talking to Jenny. She's witty and intellectual, and self-deprecatingly honest about her own vanity and superiority complex in a way that makes it more relatable than snobby. It's uncanny how similar-minded we are, which is probably why we've remained such good friends all these years. Our lives have taken similar paths since we met-- through middle school, high school, four years of college at universities, and starting our first "big girl" jobs-- the exception being that after graduating from college, she married Allen, and I, of course, didn't. My indefinite single-hood never seemed to change our friendship, because, as her husband often jokes, they just pretend we (meaning Justin and I) are married. Since we basically live together, it's basically the same thing, he says. That's a lot of "basically"'s for me, but I guess I see his point. We do things together as couples, so it doesn't feel like we're really in different places in life.
All this changed last night when Jenny told me she's 14 weeks pregnant.
Admittedly, I didn't react the way you're supposed to when someone tells you they are with child. After asking her to repeat herself twice and picking my jaw up off her kitchen counter, the first words out of my mouth were "Are you sick?" Like, morning sickness, is what I was thinking. It was 5:30 in the evening. My second question was worse, which I realized as I heard myself say the words "Was it on purpose?" Yes, they were trying, thank God, because how rude am I to ask if she's pregnant with an accidental child?! The next thing I said was something about how I felt like she had aged ten years in my mind since I walked in her door several minutes before having this conversation. To that she crinkled her nose and retorted "I'm still me, you know," obviously not pleased with my reaction to her big news.
I know this sounds like I'm making a big deal out of nothing. Well, not nothing, but something that is a normal life occurrence for pretty much everyone all the time. But, it's Jenny. She's the first of my friends that I grew up with, that I consider on my level, to be pregnant. Sure, I know plenty of people my age that have babies, but I can always write them off in my mind. "You're pregnant because you're stupid" or "because your life has no direction" are two of my favorite excuses that I give other girls my age who are pregnant. But Jenny-- an intelligent, educated, practical career woman-- I can't use any of those excuses for her. For all intensive purposes, I've considered her life and her plans to be synonymous with my life and my plans up until this point. Which leads me to today, "What am I doing with my life?"
As humans, we all have a tendency to compare ourselves with other members of our species. It's ingrained in us. It's why people watch television, and follow fashion trends, and get plastic surgery, and go bankrupt trying to "keep up with the Jones's." It's a sickness of sorts, always being compelled to compare what we see in the mirror with what we see all around us and obsess over how we stack up in comparison.
Yesterday I would have described myself as being relatively content with where my life is right now and where I see it going within the next few years. But tonight is a different story. I feel like I'm in last place of a race I didn't know I was running, and I can't even see the person in front of me to know how much distance I'd have to make up to be back in the pack. I'm stuck in a spiral, questioning everything, and feeling like I'm stuck going nowhere. "Am I settling?" I wonder, "Is this really the life I want?"
What am I doing with my life?
