Confusing Life Paths

I've been meaning to write sooner.  I've been meaning to do a lot of things, but it's this coming-to-terms with myself that has made me take a long hard look at lots of things in my life.

Anyway, I've been a little scattered, and tonight I tried to get to bed at a half-decent time.  But since my body is confused by the fact I'm trying to use some common sense, I cannot sleep, and so I figured to stop procrastinating on my blog and update it.

When I came home my life was in flux and it still is.  I suppose life will always be in flux because that's simply the nature of it: things are always changing.  If it weren't changing/growing then it would be that terminal opposite of life.

My transition back to American life has been far easier than any of my other transitions, with the possible exception of coming home from Germany.  But it has been hard too.  Whom should I blame the difficulties on?  The economy and the shitty job market?  That would be easy, but pointless, because that's just how it is and it doesn't solve anything.

Should I blame myself?  I suppose that would be easy, too, and in some senses more practical, because in everything "bad" that's happened to me, I'm the one constant.

But that's also a bit pointless if you take the point of view that everything you do is part of a learning process, even if you fuck up a lot.  To use that tired old cliché about the baby walking and stumbling, a baby doesn't stumble once; it stumbles a lot.  But it can't give up....and it also can't afford to sit around philosophizing about how often and how hard it falls.  That's also a stumble, I'd wager.

I must be a late-bloomer in life, or at least that's how it feels.  One of my friends is constantly happy and chipper and sometimes I don't know how to relate to that.  I don't know how to relate to that because my compass in life is spinning around like mad.  I look at envy at those around me who have some kind of path: nursing, law school (or grad school of any kind), and who are in a place where they can meet people their own age and form relationships.

But I'm struggling on finding a path to go down.  I know it is something international, and something with languages.  TEFL teaching is fun, and I'd like to do it again someday, but probably not as a career.  Peace Corps is in the same category, although I'd be more inclined to do that on a permanent basis as there are more things to it than just English-teaching.  I'm certainly interested in finding out more about other development groups, as well as refugee groups.

I thought about becoming a professor, but TEFL-ing more or less showed me that teaching and all that goes with it isn't really in my blood.

Travel writing/photography would be great, maybe.  And as I've mentioned before, I've thought of translating, which I haven't ruled out yet.

But how do I get established?  I'm not in any position to work as a free-lancer yet, and frankly at this point in my life I'm not yet interested at all in freelancing.  Someday maybe yes.  But not today, or even next year.

Mostly I'm tired of negativity and have been working very hard on changing my attitude and becoming more positive.  And I've made a lot of progress but it's hard not to fall back into old habits when the going gets tough or when the environment around you is full of negative people.  I think the secret is to simply not believing your own thoughts, an appetite of the mind as it was once put, but under a barrage of frustrations, it's hard to keep one's wits about.

And finally, I often need change, I've found.  Whether it's in my reading material, or my work activities, or the languages I'm learning, or my hobbies in general, I tend to cycle among interests ranging from writing, to photography, to drawing, to learning the piano, to running, to learning math and history, and so forth.

But first thing's first...I need to save enough to move out of my hometown for good.  I was hoping that when I left Prague, that would be it, but as that didn't go as planned I had to come home.  However, this most recent home-coming has only solidified that I cannot stay here.  It's shaped a lot of who I am, and I'm happy to call it my hometown, but I've long-since outgrown it, and it can't be a lifeboat for me forever.