Stifled by Possibilities

Oh, to be a red arrow.*

I don't often feel like I'm swimming upstream with a gimp fin, but I do today.

It wasn't provoked, like a sense of nausea one feels after eating too much pizza or the knowing that one will spend the day a dull-eyed, zombie-ghost after pulling all-nighter. Instead, this morning's stressball under my left rib seems to have come out of nowhere.

"Out of nowhere." I suppose that's not really true. After all, I freak out for a finite number of reasons. And today's finite (as of 12:05 -- who knows what the *rest* of the day entails) is direction-related. In that I don't have any. Direction that is.

It's one thing to be working a suck job in the industry. If you want to be an agent, welcome to the mail room. If you want to be an actor, welcome to a life of endless auditions and constant rejections. CEO? You'll have to start as a junior analyst. But all of these are rungs on specific ladders and at this point, I'm unclear which ladder to choose, and that's another thing entirely. As a consequence, all I see is the success of others, hard at work climbing their ladders, and the gulf between my indecision and the largeness of my own dreams - a house, a car that doesn't make me want to kill myself, and a family of cats emotionally-supportive cats.

The result is a stressball. Under my left rib. Despite my aroma-therapy lavender body soak.

Soothes and calms, yes. But can it make my decisions?

And why is it always a stressball? Why can't it be a stress ovule? A stress rectangle? A stress trapezoid? I don't want relief, really, just a different shape of anxiety.

The experience reminds me of all those career aptitude tests we had to fill out in high school. All those games of "Life" when I drew a specific card and had to settle for my annual salary and that was that. Not so much the case anymore. And not so easy. At present, I'm just stifled by possibilities.

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*Incidentally, the title of this randomly-selected graphic is "Choosing a Career Direction." Irony not lost on me, sir.