Oh How The Times Are Changin

Oh how the times are changin.

Or are they? Sometimes I can't tell.

This world, always exposed to me;

I can click to see it move, see it evolve.

But what world evolves?

Is a world in which I am unchanging, unmoving,

Still the world?

To me?

To anyone else?

Sometimes I can't tell.

Sometimes I don't know.

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My days are starting to run together, it seems. I wake up - sometimes at 4:30am, sometimes at 9am, depending on the job and the hours - and head to work. I come home. I work out. I look for jobs. Sometimes I read. Sometimes I knit. Sometimes I paint. At all times, I think. I think about one thing.

Am I even meant to be an engineer any more?

Sometimes I wish that an employer would just do the deed. Look, maybe this isn't the line of work for you. Maybe it's time to find your calling elsewhere. Just so I would finally know to stop looking, to start "considering my options." But no one does. No one says it. You're a great candidate they say. I have no doubt you'll be incredibly successful in engineering. But not with them, apparently. This....this is what's driving me nuts.

So I keep going. Even though this dread - this awful dread that being out of engineering so long has made me unemployable - makes me doubt every step I take, makes me second guess every application I fill out. I keep going. I am meant to be an engineer I say. The options, always drifting in and out of my mind, grow more realistic and yet more disgusting everyday.

How can I know I'm not meant to be an engineer if I've never been one? Who will let me be one?

I decided a few months ago that this waiting, this unbearable reliance on everyone else to make me an engineer, was too much. So I started to think of the things that I could do to get back in the game. And, given that no one takes a chance on me in the next few months, I've formulated a plan.

I've applied to go back to graduate school, part-time, in Philadelphia. I will pay for it myself. I will find some job, closer to the city, that allows me to pay for maybe one class per semester, maybe two. Allows me to pay my bills. Allows me to finally move. Allows me to finally feel like I'm doing something. I will work and I will study. I will be an engineer.

This past year, I have worked 60+ hour weeks at two part-time jobs - sometimes working harder than those lucky sonsabitches with full-time jobs. It kills me that I'm working this way, at jobs that have nothing to do with engineering, just to get by, just to pay off my college loans. But you know what? I own it. I work hard and I own it, because I know that people have gone out on a limb, giving me jobs that I'd like - more than anything - just to escape from. And if I disappoint these people, what's to say I won't disappoint those people in the future who rely on me to be an engineer? So I don't disappoint them.

Maybe I'm not meant to be an engineer. Maybe someday, down the road, I'll discover my true calling.

But that will not be until after I have tried, have worked and made it, as an engineer.

"No one promised you there would be universal justice, you know."

A smart quote from a good book written by a smart man. Look it up.