I think that my quarter-life crisis has (thankfully) come and gone. At 28, I feel secure in the decisions I've made for my life. But that doesn't mean I don't sometimes get a bit wishful about the things I could have or should have done.
I was watching one of those wedding shows last week. The ones where, of course, a well-off couple is planning a lavish to-do. Because, let's be honest, it's just not that much fun to watch a lower or middle class couple plan something on a shoestring budget. The planner enters a fabulous building in Manhattan to meet with the bride. Turns out, this is where the bride works. In an office bigger than the first floor of my house, with a fabulous view of the park. The bride can't be more than five years older than me, if that. She's rich and seemingly successful. What exactly does she do? It seems to be something creative. Whatever it is, every now and then I fancy myself with that level of success and wealth.
I could have been a writer. If discipline is something you could purchase and it had been something I could afford, I could have done it. That seems to be the thing that stands in my way. I imagine myself getting up at the crack of dawn (I'm a morning person in this fantasy) and opening my laptop at my dining room table while a fresh pot of coffee brews. (I also imaging living in a climate cool enough to allow for year round coffee drinking.) I could see myself having moderate success as a writer. A novelist? A blogger for one of my favorite liberal feminist sites? It could have been.
Sometimes, I wish I could have been a dancer. I was decent when I was younger and taking dance classes. Ballet was a favorite of mine, and if I could go back to being a child, I would likely demand a more strenuous ballet class. Year round. Maybe today I'd be living in a tiny closet of an apartment somewhere in New York, auditioning and making a livable but meager living dancing. Soon, I would plan to teach dancing full-time. After all, 28 is ancient in that world.
And in the most far-fetched of my fantasies, I imagine myself as a doctor. After all, there was that one week my freshman year of college when I considered going pre-med. Then I remembered how much I hated biology class when I was in high school, so I moved on. But still ... having the title "Doctor" before my name? Would be so very bad ass.
