Lately, I have been having this tug of war inside myself. On the one hand, I know I need to feel good about myself and appreciate myself. My head says I'm unique and have something to offer society. However, I look at my life thus far and I just feel like such a failure.
I'm in my late twenties and I just got divorced. I remember how the teenage me envisioned myself at this point in my life and I am so far from that. I'm divorced, unemployed, and just generally lonely. I've been told all my life that I am smart. I got good grades in school and graduated magna cum laude from a good university. I guess I thought doing well academically would set me up for a good life. Yet, here I am, almost thirty and feeling so uncertain about everything. I thought I would have a career by now. I thought I would be in a happy marriage and getting ready to have children. I thought I would live in a nice neighborhood with a nice house and be surrounded by people with the same interests as me.
While I did well in school, what I studied apparently didn't prepare me for anything more than doing administrative work. I often feel that I could have done that without going to college and accruing all this debt. People often say that a college degree show you have critical thinking skills which impresses employers but now I feel that all the people who say that are full of crap.
So I'm pursuing a Master's degree in Library Science. I thought this would finally get me on track. I love books, information and libraries. Being a reference librarian is something I could see myself doing. Plus, I read about all the supposed openings that would be coming because of all the baby boomer librarians retiring. However, not too long after starting the program, I started to read on various library blogs how the librarian shortage is hoax and how hard it is for graduates to find full time positions with a living wage or even any position at all. I've talked to young librarians who confirm this. Now I seriously wonder if I should continue this degree. More importantly, I wonder what I will do if I don't continue.
I just want to be successful and yet it seems that everything I do leads to failure: getting a degree in the wrong major, getting married too young and not knowing enough about my now ex-husband, picking a useless Master's degree. On the one hand, I feel like I did what I was suppose to (education and marriage) but because I never do it "right" it blows up in my face anyway.
I look at my friends from high school and even college and everyone seems to be doing so much better than me. What did I do wrong?
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