Continuing what appears to be my new trend of updating this blog once a semester.
My last update was at the end of spring semester last year. Over the summer I started working at a treatment center for at risk youth. I HATED it there, and was so glad it was over. But I’m very grateful for the experience, even if it’s not the experience I expected.
What I did expect:
1)The work experience is going to look AMAZING on my grad-school applications.
2) I got to try out being a confidant for some very troubled people, to see if I would be able to handle the psychological toll of listening to someone’s most traumatic memories. Turns out I can handle it just fine, and even come up with some good advice at the end. Woot!
What I didn’t expect:
1) I LOVED those kids. I’ve never been very comfortable around kids, and I received many severe warnings about how violent and crazy and manipulative these kids would be and that I would probably hate them, but I needed to be careful not to show them my hatred, that I needed to still treat them like normal people. Turned out those kids and their crazy antics were my FAVORITE part of the job. If it was just being with those kids and listening to their stories about hanging out in their underwear as decoration while their gang-boss boyfriend sold drugs, and trying to explain to them why that is a slightly less than amazing relationship model, or listening to their stories about being abused by their parents and letting them cry and trying to find the right thing to say to help them let that pain go and move on, if that was all the job was it would be THE BEST JOB EVER! What made the job a pile of shit was my coworkers, who DIDN’T care about the kids like I did and really DID see them as disgusting vermin. I found that my job every day was trying to protect the kids and fight back against the bullshit system of that facility. There was only one other person who seemed to love the kids as much as I did which brings me to #2:
2) I met someone. His name is Korey, and he is the sweetest thing ever. I’ll do a separate post later to update you on how we ended up together. It’s a pretty hilarious story that involves a bitchy ex girlfriend who tried her damnedest to sabotage my job and a couple of kids from the facility playing mini cupids and trying their best to set us up. But the important part is that for once I chose someone based on friendship and comfort instead of just blind sexual attraction and I’m SO GLAD I did. After two months he ended up moving in with me. It was supposed to just be temporary, but I was SOOO not bothered at all by his presence here, that I just never kicked him out. After 5 months he continues to be the first person in my life that HASN’T annoyed the shit out of me AT LEAST once. It’s amazing, and is quite possibly my first remotely healthy relationship EVER.
3) I made some good friends. Most of the coworkers blew, but a few were cool and I now have people to hang out with in this shitty town full of meth heads. But I also made friends with a few of the kids and kept in touch with them once they left. Technically, that’s against the facilities policy, but I quit there anyway and while a lot of the kids were real assholes, a few of them were actually incredibly good kids who just had a shitty lot in life, and I knew I was gonna be worried sick about them if I didn’t at least get a quick message once a month to let me know they weren’t in jail or dead of a drug overdose in an alley. I am so grateful to have these kids in my life now. And it is such a huuuge ego boost to know that a message from me every once in a while helps them stay focused on whats important and helps them keep stay positive now that they’re back living in the shitty situation that drove them to a shitty illegal lifestyle in the first place. It helps me feel like I have a purpose in life and helps keep my own depression at bay, which makes me think that being a professional psychologist is not only NOT going to throw me into an alcoholic depression like I was afraid it would, but it might actually have the EXACT OPPOSITE effect. So that’s cool.
So then I quit and I missed my kids like crazy, but then school started and it was a WICKED INTENSE semester, so I was fully distracted. I had a pretty full schedule with a few too many hard classes scheduled all at once, including Anatomy, Statistics, and Physiological Psychology. However, not near as hard as next semester is going to be, but that’s going to be another entry as well. For now, I think that’s enough to get you roughly caught up on time.
A while back I posted a copy of the essay I was writing for college admission. It was supposed to be about my journey to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up, but ended up being mostly about my ex-fiance. So I scrapped it and began a search for a new topic. Someone told me to write about my military experience and how it had made me a responsible mature person who would excel in a college environment. I thought this was a little too cliche. I’m sure EVERY prior military member who has applied for college has written about the same thing. But I gave it a try anyway. It ended up being an essay about my Father’s parenting technique. So I scrapped that too. Then I tried surrendering to the path my mind was apparently trying to follow and just write about how my life has been changed and directed by the men in my life…but that was a trainwreck from start to finish. Finally a good friend of mind helped inspire me with a new topic idea and I think it turned out really well so I wanted to share it with you guys. I think it does a pretty good job of defining who I am and what makes me unique and special.
My parents got divorced almost as soon as I was born. I was obviously too young to remember the event, but I am pretty sure that even as an infant I wasn’t surprised by my parents’ separation, and understood it to be both natural and necessary. The fact that an uptight drill sergeant and a rule breaking hippy even came together long enough for me to come into existence is a sort of weird glitch in nature. When I asked my mom why it ever happened, she said that the universe saw fit to bring together two conflicting energies, two forces that should never have met, so that I could come into being because I am meant to accomplish great things in this incarnation. My dad says it happened because he was about to deploy overseas and thought he was going to die and wanted to leave a genetic legacy behind, and my mom happened to be there and willing. Whichever story is true, whatever brought them together; it kept them that way just long enough for my successful birth, and then set them free to realize what a horrible mistake their marriage had been and part ways as quickly as possible. And their exit from the stage leaves us to focus on the main subject of this story: Me.
My name is Megan Whitt. It is a very simple and uninspiring name that I have often been frustrated by, but more than that, it is deceptive. My plain-Jane name lends the idea that I am a simple and easy to manage person. However, someone only has to be in my presence for a few days to realize that I am not a simple person. I am, in fact, quite the opposite. As a good friend of mine put it, I am a living embodiment of contradictions.
One would think that having two parents so vastly different from each other, I would have taken after one or the other, especially since I was completely raised by only one of them. But, in actuality, I grew up to be a chocolate-vanilla swirl of the two. As if I were two completely different people sharing one body, I somehow manage to be both obsessively structured and artistically sloppy, both uptight and easygoing, both rule enforcing and rebellious, all at the same time. Sometimes my contradictions refuse to blend and then the two halves of me are viciously at war with each other; one part desperate to do what she’s supposed to and please her superiors and get that gold star while the other side of me rebels and rages at the very notion of bending to other people’s expectations and longs to float away on the gypsy breeze. But most of the time, my contradictions manage to coexist so that I become a perfect embodiment of compromise; I can see both sides of any argument as if they were my own passionate cause and am able to see the common ground between the two and walk a perfect line right down the middle that makes everyone happy.
I had always been aware of the odd hybrid nature of my existence, but it was only recently that I consciously put words to it, and finally doing so caused an epiphany that ended the desperate struggle I had been undergoing for 6 years to figure out what career field I was destined to pursue. Over the course of this struggle I had orbited ideas like psychologist, data analyst, receptionist, author, editor, veterinarian, doggy day care owner, librarian, curator, barista, bartender, baker, and even tattoo artist. As this list clearly shows, my interests are rather diverse and since I wanted to do them all, I was having a very difficult time limiting myself to only one of these interests for the rest of my life. And as the end of my military service and the beginning of college quickly approached, I was starting to get very worried that I would never be able to make a clear choice and would spend my valuable college time lost in indecision without any clear goals to guide me to a successful graduation. But then, during a routine casual lunch date with a good friend, I defined my contrary nature out loud for the first time, and suddenly I felt my whole perspective on the world shift. It wasn’t a big shift, only a few degrees to the side. But those few degrees were just enough to let me catch a glimpse of a space I hadn’t been able to see before, and through that space I could just barely see the answer I’d been seeking:
The key to finding my perfect career, my perfect job, my perfect major; that one place in the world that’s custom fit for me and that can’t be properly filled by anyone else, is to focus on what makes me different from everyone else. Previously, I had been focusing on things like my talent for listening to people’s problems, my love of reading, and my love of all things artistic. Those were not things that were unique to me. I shared those traits with millions of other people. But I have never met or even heard of another person as contradictory as me, so that is what I needed to focus on.
At first this realization only served to frustrate me more. The question “How is being contradictory going to be a benefit in any sort of job?” continued to perplex. Then it hit me: it wasn’t a matter of my unique trait being desired by others. What was important was using my contradictory nature as a guide to help me find a place where both sides of me would be fulfilled and happy. If I could find a place where both the artistic whimsical side of me and the well-organized obsessive part of me would both be satiated, then I would be twice as happy and twice as productive as compared to a job where I am only being artistic and my more rigid half is left to become a wilted lump in the background, quietly weighing down the rest of me, or vice-versa: a job full of organization and numbers where I am starved of creative outlets. But where would I find such a job, a place where I could be both artistic and logical, both rigidly organized and free of constraint?
Then I found it, or more like re-found it: Editor. More specifically, book editor: the job I had been circling back to over and over again ever since I had heard about it shortly after first learning to read. It so perfectly mirrors my own nature in its blending of two different worlds that I couldn’t believe it had taken me so long to decide it was the only obvious choice. The act of systematically working my way through chapter after chapter enforcing grammar and spelling rules would be a thrill to my inner OCD perfectionist. Meanwhile, the act of coming up with creative solutions to more abstract mistakes, like taking a paragraph that doesn’t quite flow with its neighbors and finding a new home for it elsewhere in the book, would allow my inner artist to breathe a contented sigh of relief. And once I’d made the decision to make this my career of choice, I remembered so many other things to love about it, like being surrounded by books (my one true love) all day, and being able to help another person make their dream come true and put their story, their heart and soul put on paper, out into the world.
My Dad used to say everyone is a different kind of light source. Some people, like my sister, are like flashlights: not a particularly powerful or noteworthy source, but long-lasting and reliable and all the light going in one clear direction. He used to say I was more like a nuclear reactor. He said I had so much energy and fuel I could do anything, but without a clearly defined outlet, a goal to channel all my energy towards, I went into meltdown and sent little bursts of insanely powerful energy in every direction, burning and destroying everything around me. For a man more prone to simple facts than philosophical ideas, this was a surprisingly insightful description to how I felt in my younger years. Without a clearly defined goal to work towards I would pour way too much of myself into all areas of my life, I would often go so in-depth at the beginning of an essay, I had to rush it at the end to make the deadline and ended up with an overall shoddy and unbalanced piece of work or throw myself so fully into a new potential friendship or relationship it would actually scare the person off. But, now I know which path I want to follow and what direction I want my light to shine.
My Dad said something else too. He said that so long as I lacked direction I would continue to self-destruct and achieve little. But one day when I found a single goal that I cared about enough to allow me to channel all my fuel in one direction, into one single beam of energy, that beam would be so insanely powerful that God help anyone or anything that stood between that beam and its destination.
So now, I have that single goal: to work for a publishing company taking people’s dreams and sending them out into the world. Also, at long last, I have a strong sense of who I am. I am a child of contradictions, and knowing myself allows me to sit comfortably in my own skin as I leave the safe haven of the military and embark unto strange new territories in my quest for a brighter future. My engines are revved and ready to go, and my inner fire is burning as hot as the sun. Now I just need to take the first step down my chosen path; first a college classroom, next the world.
I finally settled on the decision to stay in San Antonio Texas. Now begins the very busy and very stressful process of finding a job and applying for college. The very first step, of course, is applying for college, then I have to apply for my military gifted college funding, which will make finding a job much less pressing of an issue, and then finally I’ll start my job hunt.Of course, part of the application process involves the COLLEGE APPLICATION ESSAY. At first I couldn’t even remember what you’re supposed to write about in these damn things, so I did what any American adult does when faced with something they’re not sure about: I Googled it (no I didn’t fucking BING it, that’s bullshit). So I just finished the first rough draft of my essay, and I THINK I’m on the right track…but I would appreciate if I could get some feedback from you all. But even if you don’t care enough to comment, reading this will give you some insight into my current mental state which will take the place of my post for this week. So…enjoy!
The View Through My Own Eyes
When I graduated high school, I had no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up. I had been offered a one year all expenses paid scholarship to the university of my dreams, but I had no idea what major to use it on. I spent the entire summer sifting through my long list of diverse interests, from art to psychology to bartending, desperately looking for some kind of elusive common thread that would lead me to my perfect future career. Eventually I ran out of time and my father convinced me to join the military so I would at least have a good paycheck while I took the time to figure things out. Four years later the time was approaching for me to get out and I was quite dismayed to realize that I had no more of an idea what to do with my future than I had when I first joined.
I voiced my worries to my fiancé and he offered a theory that my ability to visualize my own future was being inhibited by thoughts of his future, and of our future together. He advised me to try picturing a future without him in it in order to figure out what I wanted to do with my life purely on my own, and he said that once Id figured that out, we could find a way to fit our two futures together into one. So I tried to follow his advice, and was quite alarmed to realize I couldn’t picture myself doing anything but being with him. I told him about this problem and together we came up with a plan: we decided that in order to clear up my mental block, I needed to remove his distracting presence from my mind. So we broke up, temporarily, and agreed to get back together once I had things a bit more figured out. I changed my Facebook relationship status. I juggled the hundreds of incoming questions and exclamations from concerned friends and family. Then I spent 3 weeks glued into my sweatpants, shifting back and forth between my bed and the couch, surviving off pizza and ramen, crying every hour, and drinking myself to sleep. But after those 3 weeks passed, I felt the fog lift and the mental walls drop. The exercise, although excruciatingly painful, had worked, and suddenly I knew what I wanted. Or more accurately, I REMEMBERED what I wanted.
I remembered that in first grade, when I was rapidly eating my way through the library at the local high school, my father had told me that there was a job out there where you got paid to sit around and read all day. At the time I had thought he was teasing me, no way could such a magical job really exist. But then in sixth grade I found out it DID exist. It was called being a proofreader; it meant reading various kinds of books or documents and checking them for errors in grammar, spelling, or generally bad organization. And in that moment, at the ripe old age of 11, I had known without any doubt that this was the perfect job for me. And all these years later when this memory resurfaced, I fell in love with the idea all over again. During the period of time when I couldn’t remember what I wanted to do, I had been circling around the idea of helping people. I had considered becoming a psychologist, but realized that I am too strongly affected by other people’s emotions, so it would be very unhealthy for me to be around that much concentrated misery. I lost hope of there being such a thing as a position where you could help people while also being in a positive environment. Generally when people are in need of help, negativity follows. But when I remembered my dream of being a proofreader, I realized this was the elusive unicorn I had been searching for. As a proofreader, I could help people by using my skills in writing, organization, and my general tendency to be a spelling and grammar-nazi, to take someone’s piece of writing, their heart, hopes and dreams on paper, and reformat it to help it to convey the desired message, attain the desired response, and to not be tragically misunderstood. And rather than being surrounded by people sobbing as they uncover childhood traumas, I would be surrounded by people filled with electric excitement and enthusiasm to share their ideas, the dreams and imaginings, with the masses. Not to mention the fact that in this career field I would finally be able to make use of my natural skills of being able to read twice as fast as anyone else I know, and being able to type 80 WPM even while carrying on a conversation. It really is the perfect job for me and I couldn’t believe I had ever forgotten about it.
I tried to call my fiancé-turned-temporary-ex to tell him the good news, that our plan had worked and I had figured it all out and we could now get back together, but he was working and couldn’t answer his phone. Since I wanted to surprise him, I left a very brief message that gave away nothing, only let him know that he should call me back when convenient. While I waited for his response, I started doing some research into what I would need to do to become a successful proofreader. As my eyes scanned a specific webpage, I suddenly felt my heart drop. I had just realized why I had forgotten about this particular career option. According to this webpage (and several others I went to afterwards), in order to ensure a successful career as a proofreader, I would need to work in a publishing house for several years. I would not be able to move around until I got to a point of prestige in my career where I would be able to work from anywhere with internet access. This was not a situation that would meld well with a marriage to a US Navy all-star who needed to move to a new base every 3 years. My subconscious mind, in its infinite wisdom, had realized all of this. It had also realized that if it allowed my conscious mind access to this information, it would have resulted in some Romeo and Juliet level heartbreak. So my subconscious mind had locked that information away where I couldn’t find it, and had only allowed me to access it after I had broken up with him and experienced heartbreak anyway.
Eventually my love called me back and I told him all that I had discovered. He was, of course, very upset. However, he agreed that despite how much we loved each other, it would be foolish and unhealthy for us to try and stay together knowing that it would be so many years before we would be able to be in the same city again. We had a good long sob-fest together and said goodbye, agreeing to check in with each other every 5 years or so to see if our situation had changed, and perhaps talk about trying again. I was very sad for a while after that. But eventually I began to forget what it felt like to hold him, I lost the ability to predict what he would say about something if he were there beside me, and I began to feel his presence fade from my heart. And after some time went by, I realized that everything has turned out exactly as it should be and that I am actually a stronger and happier person without him. Of course, I don’t regret being with him. We had a lot of fun together while it lasted and our relationship taught me some very important lessons. The biggest lesson I learned is that I need to always ensure that I am experiencing the world through my own eyes.
In the past I have seen the world through the eyes of my father, making every decision with the goal of obeying his beliefs and fulfilling his expectations. I have also seen the world through the eyes of the men I have loved, liking things because they liked them and doing anything and everything to ensure their happiness and success without paying any attention to my own. This is the first time in my life I have stepped out and stood in the world alone, exposed, without the protection of being hidden in someone else’s shadow. It’s lonely, and intimidating, and terrifying, but also exhilarating and freeing. It’s what I imagine it feel s like to jump out of a plane for the first time. And as I feel myself breaking free of all my safety nets, and setting down the weight of all the advice and expectations from those who love me, I will now take off the many pairs of glasses that have been clouding my vision all this time, and I will see for the first time what the world looks like through my own eyes, as I take my first step down a road that is all my own.
I’ve been on a real positive and motivated trend lately. Very upbeat, very calm, very driven toward the future. Well, that all came to a bit of a screeching halt yesterday when I was informed that I have 3 months until I get out of the military, rather than the year and 3 months I THOUGHT I had. As you can imagine, this is putting a bit of a kink in my plans ans is putting me into a bit of a panic.
I was actually way more pannicked yesterday. I was trying to decide between staying in San Antonio, TX and going back to Colorado. It was a really hard decision until I made an itemized list of pros and cons like the anal little Virgo I am. I would like to share a condensed version of that list with you now:
Colorado:
Pros:
Free rent (my Dad will let me stay at home for free)
No 120 degree summers
A whole state worth of people who think the same I do
Cons:
Would have to live with my family, who are prone to negativity and stress (and I’m not good at tuning that out)
Would have to be in a house and city full of bad puberty-soaked memories
Would have to drive an hour to find a decent job and 4 hours for a decent college
The unsettling feeling that I’m going backwards (unacceptable after all the forward progress I’ve made)
Would have to abandon a relationship that’s only just getting started, and that has already proven to be very healthy for me.
Have to uproot and move, which I just did a few months ago. And I’ll have to do it again after college is over.
Texas:
Pros:
I’m comfy here
Good English program at a nice college right down the street.
I’ve been in a very positive, motivated mood here lately, and I’m afraid that moving will disrupt that
Get to stay with a wonderful man who has been very good for me, and see where that goes
Get to work on looking for a job before I get out, whereas if I go to Colorado I’ll have to start from scratch after I’ve already lost my paycheck
Get to keep my privacy and independence
Get to relax and settle in one place for awhile
Settled into my area, already have healthy studying atmospheres picked out
The only person who can disrupt my studies is me
Cons:
Its SOOOO hot here
Once all my friends move to new bases in the next few months, I’ll have no support system, I’ll be all alone.
What if things with this guy don’t work out and it turns out that he was really the biggest reason I stayed without my realizing it?
Generally speaking I’m not a huge fan of Texas
It’ll probably hurt my family’s feelings
I’m a little worried about being able to support myself, especially for the next few months before my college money kicks in
That’s all I can think of right now…but so far I really think I’m leaning towards staying put… Any thoughts?
Journey to the Good Place. 