i mean i actually would pick a career i loved over a capital-R Relationship that lasted forever
like, no question, oh my god NO QUESTION AT ALL, the easiest choice ever. meaning: i want, badly, to find/work my way to a career i love and care for, and i… don’t actually want a Relationship? i’m not against them, or against my having one. it’s just not something i really care about. i keep saying to people “you know, i could see myself never falling in love again” and they tell me i’m being stupid and of course i will and not to worry but what i actually mean is i don’t actually care if i ever fall in love again. the idea of it not happening doesn’t bother me. i am a little freaked out by that? but i think that’s just because we’re so expected to want to fall in love that it makes me feel like, well, a freak. and, hey, i am terrible at meeting people in general, and it is extraordinarily rare for me to meet a person and have any sort of romantic inclination at all - it’s happened five times in my life that i can count (which… is actually not that few for a 22-year-old, WHATEVER), so like statistically based on my own life this would just be very unexpected anyway. and… that’s chill with me.
i don’t like that if you badly want a romantic relationship and don’t care about your career (or… some non-career thing that serves kind of a similar function, if that makes sense? since having a career to care about is SO RARE, even expecting it as a possibility in your life is SO INCREDIBLY RARE and i am well aware of how extraordinarily lucky & privileged i am to even have this consideration - but i feel like there are things maybe that can be “equivalent” to how i feel about the career thing, like i dunno activism a person does, or something), you don’t get a second thought over that, but if you care about your career and don’t give a fuck about romance, you’re considered deficient somehow. i don’t like, as always, how only certain priorities are considered signs that you are a healthy person.
(in some feminist circles do women get shit for prioritizing a romantic relationship over a job? yes and that is a shitty thing to do and it’s a shitty thing to encounter, i can imagine, if you are one of those women. but i kind of feel like that’s like the christians-in-progressive-circles thing, where yes in some progressive circles i do think that christians are marginalized & treated shittily & have all sorts of bad assumptions made about them etc. but in society at large that is not the case. this is to clarify i guess that this is me talking with society in general at mind, and if you are like “but hey in some places the opposite happens” i am right there with you! just not thinking of that sitch at the current moment.)
in educating esme: the diary of a first-year teacher she talks about how the job has been super rough on her relationship, and how she can see why so many of the teachers of her school are either single or divorced. it is hard, i think, to have two things you’re that invested in. and even if YOU can do it, your partner might not want to “share” you with another thing. and… you know, i don’t want to have to make that choice ever, but i think i know which way i’d go - which in itself is a dealbreaker to a lot of people.
my mom told me that my aunt said that as much as she loves her husband and son, and she absolutely does, the most important fact of her life, the thing that sustains her, is her job, teaching. i think about that a lot. i kind of want to be like that, and i kind of think i already am, in terms of how i’m wired. my aunt and mom joke a lot that they somehow switched kids - i have a lot in common with my mom, but in a lot of ways i’m more like my aunt, especially temperamentally.
besides, i have so many people already that i love (and am already so bad at keeping up with them!). i don’t like that people associate intimacy only with romantic relationships. i don’t think i have a problem with intimacy - i mean, geez, i share like 90% of my innermost thoughts with the fucking internet, if anything i have the opposite problem. i’m scared to be vulnerable, but i’m also really, really incapable of doing anything to prevent that; i can’t relate on a personal level to stories about people who manage to put up walls of any kind to protect themselves because they’re scared, because since i fell in love (and this was the biggest thing, in retrospect, about being in love, and not one, i think, i’ll be able to have again, since it already happened) i haven’t been able to do that, even a little bit. i have no control over my emotions at all, and i feel pretty much all of them really intensely; the LAST THING i think of myself as is emotionally shut down, man. like, I WISH sometimes. but mostly not.
i want love, most of all, but that’s part of what i want, eventually, out of my career, also. some people want a creative job, some people want an intellectually stimulating job - i want, it’s true, an emotionally challenging job. not taxing in the way of doctors or police officers - i couldn’t handle that. but challenging like, if you’re not actively caring, you’re not doing it right - that’s important to me, if i can get it. that’s what i liked about NYNP the first time, even when that’s also what made it hard. and outside of that, i have a lot of love in my life already. i resent that not putting a specific kind of it on my checklist of things i want marks me as weird or deficient or whatever.
