Losing My Way

I have become deeply convinced that I have lost my way.

Oh, things are going swimmingly of course.  I am making more money than I ever imagined.  We have heat and food and clothes and cars.  Everyone is healthy and happy.  The bunny is well and the dog seldom manages to run out the door any more.

And yet, I am as deeply unsatisfied as I have ever been.

Life seems to be a long series of work, sandwiched between weekends trying to recover my good mood and energy.  I have to force myself to open my e-mail at work in the morning for the overwhelming amount of e-mail I get. My day is spent answering questions, refereeing arguments, and checking and double checking documents.

Oddly enough, I find that I enjoy precisely none of this.  It has become a great burden I shoulder Monday through Friday (and sometimes Saturday).

I have started asking myself if this is really it.  I should really be more grateful, yet my feelings vacillate between anxiety of not being able to complete the job and a growing sense of depression that what I am doing is what I will be doing for the rest of my time.  Any sense I have that I am filling a role that God has called me to has completely escaped me at this point.

I have tried to pinpoint - perhaps uselessly - the precise moment when everything went astray.  I think I know when it was, although I have no guarantee that the outcome of my life would be better than it is now.

It was 1996 and I was splitting time working at my cousin's Mini-mart and doing business college teaching, which I enjoyed although it always was struggle knowing if I had a job the next quarter.  I had just gotten a position at a second college for teaching when my Brother In Law called with a potential job offer in his industry (biotechnology).  It had benefits which my then-current job did not, so off I went with the responsible "adult"position.  I did enjoy teaching political science more, but benefits were benefits.

And if I look back, it always seems that my choices after that date have always come back to "follow the money"- even the time I tried real estate and came back (crawling) to biotech.  I suppose there is nothing wrong with that per se - after all, we all need to eat and make a living.  But following that path has gotten me to this point, where the connection between myself and my dreams (whatever are left of them at this point) seems completely divorced from my actual 168 hours of life a week.

I find myself torn.  On the one hand, I have to keep doing what I am doing to be a responsible husband and father.  On the other hand, the sense of not fitting in - and as result of that not being the best person for the job to the point I fear I will make an error - continues to grow.

There is a resolution of sorts here, something beyond my vision that I cannot fully see at this point but I know to be there.  No matter how I squint my mental eyes and look though, I cannot make it out at this point.

If I had more wisdom I suspect I would know better what to do.  Right now all I can do is sit and think and drive to work and do the work and continue to feel that something is fundamentally, terribly wrong.