As I begin this post, it is Sunday evening, soon to be night. I really need to get my sleeping pattern together, and stop staying up into the early morning in order to write. Of course, that means that I’ll have to then wake up earlier; I’ve been sleeping in, in order to avoid getting sick.

I had to go to the dentist’s office not long ago, and took a PCR test tonight, due to suspicions that I picked up a pathogen there. I have been feeling better; especially since over the past three days, I’ve been going to bed either when I’m tired, or after I’m tired. Tonight, I may turn in by 11 PM or earlier. I am already tired; I’m just trying to avoid my body thinking that I’m taking a little nap and will be up again by 1:30 AM.

Is it normal to feel a little, “off,” when you breathe the same air (unmasked, indoors) as people outside your household for the first time in months? Anyhow, the PCR test came back clean. If I do have COVID, it’s the Stealth version.

I really need to get a lot, together. Right now, I still have the time to do so. Particularly, I need to figure out what I really want to do with my life, outside of what the government would prefer.

Since I was young — at least since Middle School, I’ve had this dual drive between art and writing. Both of these factors are, interpersonally speaking, a bit fraught. I’ve been practicing art on my own since at least the eighth grade, but there were complications around it within my family (I come from a cluster of artists, and wanted to be different from my sibling — which is [I now realize] a silly reason not to have majored in Art, when I had the chance).

If I look back on it, my entire post-secondary educational history has been marked by committing to things before I knew what I was getting into. Sometimes, as with my Creative Writing degree, this kind of fumbling in the dark has actually led me to gain productive skills.

Seriously, I didn’t realize how badly most people write…

But there is always the question of how to translate that to the job market. I would like to write, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I want to be, at least, a B2C Copywriter. (Being a B2B writer, is different.) I don’t (yet) have the skills to be a Technical Writer. My style tends towards the lengthy, intricate, and verbose; not the short, succinct, and unambiguous. The latter, for me, is achieved by paring down and excising large amounts of the former.

I majored in Creative Writing, that is, not Writing. Not Business Writing, not Technical Writing. While I may easily be able to create an academic journal article, I may not be the best person to write an Abstract for that article. But if I am going to write a journal article, I had better understand what I’m writing about, first. That infers either further training, or in-depth scholarship on my own.

If I’m going to do in-depth scholarship, I need to actually pick a field of specialization…which depends on nothing except myself. I am not sure I have the heart or the guts to specialize in Sociology. Library Science — I’m not sure what I would write about (for a popular audience, at least). Art? I love Art, and I love Art History. I just get seriously piqued when Art History is, by default, Eurocentric.

But maybe I’d make a good author of non-Eurocentric Art History texts? Or, maybe I’d be a good Museum Librarian (an early dream of mine which was crushed in the Public Library setting)? I could then, also, become an Art History Subject Specialist/Departmental Liaison, in an Academic Library setting?

Realistically speaking, I’ve grown up in a household where one parent graduated from a University, and that parent was the first in their family to do so. Right now, I’m a member of the second generation on that side to have a degree (well, seriously speaking: two degrees or more)…the point is, I didn’t have a lot of guidance where it came to my major. I didn’t even know it was important to have a lot of guidance.

Without a strong post-secondary Math background (for a path like Accounting or Computer Science), and without strong interpersonal skills (which may be typical for a Writer), I’m not sure where that leaves me. (What is also typical for a Writer is having to have a day job to pay the bills.)

I mean, do I really go back into Art (and, I’d say, somehow try to make the, “people,” angle of Graphic Design, work — except it seems to be entirely people work)? Do I look for Administrative Assistant roles — even though they require answering random phone calls, and greeting guests? (M did say that I may be good for a File Clerk position…)

The major issue I’m confronting right now is the frequent request for an applicant to have, “excellent interpersonal skills,” to be, “service-focused,” and to care about, “people.” (This includes the Library field.) I mean, seriously? If I had known that interpersonal skills were going to be so indispensable, I wouldn’t have studied so hard over the last 25 years. I would have partied, instead of wracking my brain to the point of tears, over Honors Math.

I mean, am I just looking in the wrong places for jobs? Are the administrative people who are hiring everyone else, the people who were partying while I was crying: and they want to hire people just like them?

Gah.

In any case, I’m trying to figure out how I want to spend the rest of my life, given the assumption that I have a choice about it. I think I may have reached a good point in the above when I began speaking about Art History. It’s a thread of hope to follow, at least.