This evening, while sitting at the kitchen counter eating the sugar cookies that we had painstakingly and somewhat sloppily decorated there a day before, my four-year-old daughter recited the self-affirmational blessing that her pre-k class apparently chants before starting their lunches. She wanted me to repeat it, line by line, and I obliged her – up until the moment where she said, in her sweet little drawl, “I have a purpose in life.”
It is on-brand for me to bristle at the things chanted in groups which I already feel like a marginal participant in – which is to say, basically every group I’ve been a part of. But I’m not a part of my daughter’s pre-k, and I’m not sure I was bristling at her little affirmation. I was thinking, but I couldn’t possibly have a purpose in life.
Admittedly, it has been a weird couple of months. A weird couple of years! The reasons aren’t worth going into; they’d drag on for pages, and anyway it wouldn’t serve my purpose to divulge them. The point is, I think, that a large part of my life feels as if it’s been shaped largely by chance. The way I spend my time; the places from which I derive meaning; the places where try to make my mark -- I arrived at these things not via a well-executed plan but by bumbling about, barely looking where I was going.
Recently, while I was saying something about my relationship with writing, someone asked me if I thought I suffered from imposter syndrome. I honestly can’t tell; it’s not so much that I mistrust my abilities as a writer, but that I find myself more compelled by the physical problems around me.
An example: A few hours before I equivocated about my purpose in life with my four-year-old, I gave myself a half-hour break from editing (a task which makes up a significant portion of my actual job) to go and clean out the bathroom sink drain. It was a perfect task: The sink was draining like crap, and I fixed it. The biggest factor in my favor was the fact that I was willing to get just a little bit messy; once I accepted that fact and put on a pair of gloves, the project was basically finished.
One thing I’ll give myself is that when a problem is physically in front of me and not an immediate crisis, I’m reasonably resilient to the hurdles it presents. The issue is that I’m addicted to non-crisis physical hurdles.