Invention is the Mother of Self

So I graduated last week. I mean I really graduated: wore a cap and gown and Master’s hood, listened to speeches, heard my name called after the words “receiving the Master of Fine Arts,” walked across a stage, and shook the hand of the university’s president. My family took me out for a special dinner afterward; we took pictures and exchanged cards for my graduation, mother’s day, my husband’s birthday.

After that heady weekend of lofty speeches and heartfelt congratulations, I’ve experienced a lull. I am now officially unemployed. I do not know how to handle that. I’ve been a student for almost eight years. Before that, I went from job to job with no downtime in between. From the time I finished high school until last weekend, I was unemployed for maybe a total of three months. And that’s over a span of some twenty-five years. No wonder I feel at loose ends now.

A lot of people have asked me over the past few weeks: “what’s next?” I’m sure these people have the best of intentions, but I have grown to dread and loathe that question. Because I do not know what’s next. For the first time in maybe twenty years. I do not know what’s next.

Some well-meaning friends say that that’s a good thing, that it’s very exciting, that I’m lucky to have this chance to reinvent myself.

The thing is, though, I’ve already reinvented myself. Several times. As a non-traditional student, as a licensed optician, as a childless-by-choice wife, as a writer. How many times do I have to “invent” myself before I can just be who I am already?

Where others see excitement or luck, I feel trepidation, uncertainty, chaos. I’ve had solid structure to my days for a long time, deadlines and requirements to meet, clear expectations and goals. But these were all imposed on me—with my full assent and cooperation—from outside agencies. I’ve spent these decades fulfilling requirements, thinking I would find…what? Approbation? Fulfillment? Success? I guess I thought that someday, somehow, all these programs and structures I was following would lead me to a revelation about who I am, who I want to be, what I can do with my life.

Every single one of these outside programs I’ve followed has lead me, instead, to disappointment or frustration or disillusionment. I often glimpse the me I want to be, but she always dissipates like a mirage in the desert. She is subsumed by the static of life, the advertisements that tell me to buy things, that tell me I’m not making enough money, that tell me to put demands and templates on myself that someone else dreamed up so they could make money off my uncertainty.

Well, now I don’t have as much of that static around me. Being done with school and without a job, I am in a calm, quiet place where I can see the falseness of that static, hear its corrosive influence, recognize its artificiality. In this island of peace, free from the structures on which I have depended for so long, I am trying to find that image of myself again, the self that is true and pure and one hundred per cent me, no artificial colors, flavors, or preservatives.

If I could just hold that image—the image of me as a strong, capable, valuable individual who contributes to society in a meaningful way and loves and accepts herself, warts and all, with unabashed pride—if I could just hold that image in my mind long enough and believe in it enough, I think I could stop re-inventing myself and just be me.

But that seems disingenuous, as well. I don’t want to be static, rigid, unchanging. What if the real, true me is in a constant state of flux? What if the real me is still evolving, adapting, growing? I am not the same Sharon who delivered singing telegrams for a living, or the Sharon who drank a case of beer every weekend, or the Sharon who worked 9-5 in a doctor’s office for eight years, or the Sharon who dyed her hair a different color every month and pierced her ears four times. I am Sharon 2014. I am the me of today, right now.

So, I guess the answer to the question is infinity. I have to invent myself infinity times. Every day that I awaken, alive and alert, I am inventing myself and my world. Every time I apply for a job, or introduce myself to a new person, or walk out my front door to engage with the world, I am inventing myself.

The trick is to enjoy this reinvention, to embrace it and see it as the joy of living in an unpredictable and ever-expanding universe. The trick is to accept fear and uncertainty as the only certainties we have, and to harness them as energy for exploration, discovery, unending curiosity about what’s next, what’s new, what’s around this corner.

Tonight, I am attending the New Volunteer Orientation at Project Learn of Summit County. I have an opportunity to teach a conversation class for ESOL students of very high fluency. I am excited and terrified of this opportunity, but I am going to dive into it and let it take me somewhere new. Perhaps I’ll find my new self in that new place, just waiting to be invented again.

I'll keep you posted on that.