Last night, I read the following passage from a book my mom gave me to read, Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés:
“Imagine a smorgasbord laid out with whipped cream and salmon and bagels and roast beef, and fruit salad, and green enchiladas and rice and curry and yogurt and many, many things for table after table after table. Imagine your survey it all and that you see certain things that appeal to you. You remark to yourself, ‘Oh! I would really like to have one of those, and one of that, and some of this other thing.’ Some women and men make all their life decisions in the way. There is around and about us a constant beckoning world, one which insinuates itself into our lives, arousing and creating appetite where there was little or none before. In this sort of choice, we choose a thing because it happened to be beneath our noses at that moment in time. It is not necessarily what we want, but it is interesting, and the longer we gaze at it, the more compelling it becomes.”
I thought about the times I have done something because it was convenient, all the while subconsciously convincing myself that it was exactly what I wanted to do. I thought about how easy it is to get sucked into this trap in which what is available is more enticing than it would otherwise be, just because I am desperate for something. I thought about relationships I have had not because we were compatible, but because I wanted a boyfriend, and he was there. And then I thought about Teach for America, a program I applied for because it looked interesting, and I felt I needed a plan.
Sometime around October, my friends started getting job offers. All of a sudden, it seemed that people had plans for next year, and that my friends and professors and family expected me to have an idea of what I was going to do after graduation. But I didn’t have a plan, and what’s more, I hated answering the “future” question with an apprehensive, “I don’t know yet.” I wanted to be able to provide an answer just so I could rid myself of the uncertainly.
I first entertained the idea of applying for Teach for America at a time when I thought I wanted to spend one year doing non-profit, water-related work outside of the U.S. before applying to graduate school. All of my googling had left me disillusioned when I started to realize that non-profits don’t typically hire students straight out of college. And even if I could land a job, or secure an internship, how would I possibly choose between the thousands of non-profits that do the kind of work I might be interested in?
Suddenly, a two-year teaching program in the U.S. that was actively recruiting engineering students (an opportunity that did not line up with the priorities I had previously laid out for myself) started to look really intriguing. After sending in my application, and being selected for a phone interview, I felt the excitement building: I was finally close to having a plan! I thought about how awesome it would be to teach math and science to disenchanted students. I thought about interactive learning experiments we might do, field trips we could take, and how I would decorate my classroom. I thought about the impact I would have on the future leaders of our country, and how it would be an incredible learning opportunity for me to work in this environment.
My fantasies put me in a state of denial about what I truly wanted to do next year. Teach For America appeared on the smorgasbord alongside roast beef and yogurt and green enchiladas, and I started to realize that I never asked myself what I was actually hungry for. As you might have guessed, I was not accepted into the TFA program. For various reasons that I attribute to fate, (because I was too blinded to differentiate between what I wanted and what was convenient) my phone interview was a disaster, and only after I hung up the phone did I admit to myself that it wasn’t what I wanted, after all.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés says that most of the time, what we want is probably not on the smorgasbord. “We will have to quest for it a little bit – sometimes for a considerable time. But in the end we shall find it, and be glad we took soundings about our deeper longings.”
I'm the kind of person that will make the most of any situation, and I know that Teach For America would have been a meaningful experience. But I'm realizing that I don't want to live the kind of life where I'm making decisions based on what's easy and accessible and possible at the moment. I think, at least for now, I'd rather sit with the uncertainty and know that when I do finally decide to reach for something, it will be because I have been honest with myself about what I want.
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