Lost

I'd applied for a job and had gotten an interview, which happened earlier today. It went fine, I suppose, although I was told not to expect to hear back for a little while. Which was also fine.

What I feel now is not nervousness or anticipation, but aimlessness. My life progresses in fits and starts. Sometimes I feel like I live in a cocoon, and reality touches me only briefly. And each time it does, it hurts. I took a seminar in college - some psychology or communications thing - in which I learned that the twenties are the era in a person's life when his or her identity is being shaped. Thus, it is a turbulent time for most people. I think about this a lot, and about the professor who taught it to me. She had written me a recommendation for my law school applications. I wonder if she anticipated the turbulence that fills my life now.

I am back in my home, surrounded by my things and my documents and my photographs - all the records of my life. Today they look so unfamiliar. Digging through one of the folders in my files, I came across memos I had written, and a piece of a story. And I thought, This isn't bad. In fact, maybe it's even pretty good. But, who am I, writing this? Who was I? Sometimes the writing works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes the tormented artist in me escapes to the surface: the fragile, vulnerable, fundamentally weak and fearful person in me of whom I am deeply ashamed. I spend a lot of time and energy keeping her down. I only want to be the calm, rational, strong and aggressive me. I know which me is more valued, at least in worldly terms. But who would I be without the other me? The me that I can't help feeling is the truest me?