Between the two phone conversations I had with my friend Dwaine (whom I’ve known since junior high) today, we talked in depth for 2.5 hours. We don’t talk often, but when we do it’s major catch-up and we’re on the phone forever. He’s a bit tough on me sometimes, but that’s okay, I believe him when he tells me that he just wants to see me happy, that my happiness is what he truly desires for me. With the assistance of his tough love, I realized something potentially monumental. He’s damn right that I’m generally unhappy right now. But here’s the twist: what I think I’m unhappy about is not what I’m actually unhappy about, but rather the symptom of a more deeply-rooted discontent on a larger scale that is so huge that I’d formerly just pushed it back, pushed it back, not dealt with it even in thought. Every time it began to rear its head in my mind, I’d hammer it down out of sight like those plastic gophers you slam with a padded mallet at Chuck E. Cheese’s.

My life is not fulfilling. My life is stagnant. It is in the exact same place today as it was when I was 23, 24. That was the last major thing I did for myself — I bought real estate. It may have been a great accomplishment in my early 20s, but now that I’m approaching 30, everyone else has caught up and surpassed me, and what does it really matter that I’ve had this house for this long already? Only that the years on the mortgage are less. My low expectations for myself when I was in high school was “college, then job, then marriage and kids.” Well, the marriage and kids ain’t jumpin on silver platters and sliding themselves over to me, so here’s the real ideal: a career that I’m passionate about, that truly taps my talents and benefits others. Nothing neutral like the job I have now, which position is by law required to be exactly that — neutral. I want to make my mark and I want to contribute. My want my handprint on Planet Earth to truly matter and mean something to the future inhabitants of this planet. I want to write. I have been writing since I was 6 in the nonsensical limitations of a language I was just learning and forcing to fit around the shapes of my limitless imagination. I’ve been fooling myself when I’d tell myself, “My life is great, it’s low-maintenance, I can do and can afford to do whatever I want, it’s stable, it’s great, it’s everyone’s envy.” That is not me. I don’t like complacency. I got lazy somehow, or maybe I lost direction. This was supposed to be a temporary job while I figured out what to do next. I’m restless and antsy as a hermit crab (I AM a Cancer, ya know) in a shell that I know I’ve already outgrown. I also fooled myself when I said this job is gonna be the low-maintenance, easy money, great benefits provider as I do what I really want to do, which is produce The Great Asian American Novel. Have I written one short story since I’ve been hired on in 1999? No. The thing that fuels my poetry is the need to write for emotional therapy, and I’ve published one poem since I’ve been out of school. Who am I?!

Who I want to be is someone proud of her career because she knows it’s a good fit. Creative advertising, copywriting, writing a regular column or contributing wide-range articles and features to different publications, commercials, TV shows, counseling/advice columns, short stories, novels. That’s me. Anyone who has known me awhile knows that’s me. Since day 1 of my hire in the job I have now, I have been told by peers, supervisors, managers, that I’m too good for this job and they don’t know what I’m doing here, and now what they’re saying is that they’re surprised I’m still here and I need to get out and do better for myself, because I can. I love most of the people I work with and respect them immensely, and I in no way think I’m better than they are and therefore need to get out of “the rat race,” as one retired coworker had always put it. But I don’t think this job is a fit that maximizes on my fortes.

And perhaps I obsess over minute details of a bland life as a distraction so that I could continue to blind myself to my lazy complacency. Perhaps I nit-pick and overdramatize on non-problems because there is nothing else to feel anything about. Idle hands are the devil’s playground, right? I focus on stupid shit because I can’t step up to the big shit.

Everywhere I look around me, people are coming into their own. Diana, the young lawyer just tapping into her potency in an area that’s new but that she’d always felt an internal gravitation toward. Vicky, the doctor pharmacist with her interest in medicine and talent toward sense and order. Karen, who just passed the bar exam (congrats!). Other ex-classmates of college, in prestigious positions that inspire them to rise to new heights and challenges. A security guard buddy downstairs who just passed the sheriff’s department exam and is finally on his way to realizing his current goal of becoming a deputy sheriff. Brad, who just bought a new house. Dwaine, in his recently-purchased new house, in a relatively new career in which he’s climbing the success ladder so fast he’s skipping rungs, with eyes still on totally different and higher ladders in the near future. The list is endless. Even other women who are newly engaged or planning their weddings, they are on their way to their own dreams. Each time I hear of wonderful news of people around me, I’m happy for them while pushing away a feeling in myself that can only be described as feeling left behind. And I have never been left behind before. I led the pack. I used to always have a next goal. Get the class, get the grade, get the college applications nice and juicy, get into the college I want, get the grades there, get the job, get the house, get the financial security. Now that I’m there, I’ve stopped reaching because I’ve stopped dreaming.

When I turn on my cell phone, you know what it says? It says “Peace is being calm in your heart.” It used to say “NEVER stop daydreaming.” When I was in elementary school, every open house in school my parents went to, the teacher would say what a well-behaved kid I was, if only I could curb my bad habit of “daydreaming too much.” First grade, second grade, third grade, all the same thing. In indignance a few years ago, I celebrated dreaming. And now, focus on the dreams have been replaced with focus on emotional recovery from the recent trauma. I began this blog in therapy, hoping that I could achieve inner peace and stability again. I think it’s time to start dreaming again.