Who am I next?

Who am I?  A question I’ve been struggling with lately.  As my long overdue graduation approaches in a few short months, I feel the pressure to decide who I am going to be in the next stage of life.  I almost avoid family phone calls because inevitably I will be asked, “What are you going to do after graduation?”  How am I supposed to answer such a question?  I feel like in this generation, with this economy, it’s an impossible question to predict until it actually happens.

For the past few years I’ve known who I was – a free spirited wanderer/a college student/ a young woman struggling to make it on her own/ a professional Craigslister/ a dancer/ a traveler/ a millennial trying to “find herself”.  I’m afraid it’s not cute anymore.  You see, I’m the baby of four children and the only girl.  I didn’t choose to be a princess, but I won’t lie, I know how to work my situation.  Two of my brothers are much older, 15 and 13 years, and have been successful since I was in diapers.  My other brother who is just two-and-a-half years older, the middle, sometimes forgotten child, took a very practical approach to life – undergrad, masters, marriage, house, governmental job.  This left me to be the independent, creative, girly, vagabond I am.

As a kid, probably in an attempt to separate myself from a boy centered household, or unknowingly pushed by my mother finally having a little girl to rear, I was extremely, typically girly; I studied ballet intensively, was a competitive figure skater, and liked dolls, playing dress up, and everything pink.  My Olympic figure skating ambition (which was my entire youth), ended in a car accident at 14.  This is when I lost direction, but gained a new world of possibilities.

My family immigrated from Canada while I was away at boarding school, so when I graduated high school, I felt like I had no real “home” to go to and the freedom to roam a new country.  I au paired in Connecticut, danced at Disneyland in California, moved to New York to go to Hunter, left New York because I was partying too hard in the Lower East Side, moved to Las Vegas to go to school (my parents live there), taught tap dance to inner city kids, moved back to New York to finish at Hunter, working in restaurants to survive, thus leaving me at 26 and only about to graduate.  What am I going to do now? … The question everyone wants an answer to…

When I first told my family I was studying Media, I would say I wanted write a sitcom.  I still do. I have he pilot and first few episodes written. I take inspiration from the irony of life’s timing – reoccurring numbers, the collective conscious, friend’s overlapping paths, ect.  I like art that is over-the-top in a subtle way—the campy mundane.  I am aware of the cruel world of “the industry” and can only hope to be lucky enough to get my script into the right hands.  Until then, I’m afraid that who I am going to be next, is a slightly older, young woman working some shitty entry level job in Los Angeles, hopefully in television development with room to grow, trying to make it like everyone else.  At least it will be sunny!