Small Talk: What Exactly Am I Doing With My Life Anyways

So vacation is a week over, and let me tell you, the vacation hangover stings something fierce. It doesn’t help that this work week was messaged directly from Satan himself.

My week in the mountains, hiking around in poison ivy-free trails, swimming in a cold lake, and laughing every day with family I only see every decade or so, was simultaneously amazing and trying. Trying not because family, no matter how much you love them are still family, and sometimes you need a break after so much quality time, but because of my life. Small talk is an act of torture by and of itself when you’re an introvert. I can do it, and I can do it well, but it’s never pleasant, and I always find myself wondering desperately, what is the point?!

Sometimes I wonder if I really hate small talk, or if I simply hate talking about work. Because when it comes to small talk as an unmarried, childfree woman of thirty, after the weather, the only thing people will inquire about is my job.

Let me start with a statement: I hate the company I work for. I don’t really hate my job, like the day to day what I do, but I loathe, with every fiber of my being, the corporation I slave for day after day. I work for the same company I have for ten years. Like so many of my peers, my “get me through school job” became my “desperately trying to pay my loans off” job. To say I’m underemployed is putting it mildly. Despite the increasing number of applications I send off, the hours I spend scouring ads and online job listings, I remain where I have been.

I’m not embarrassed or ashamed to be underemployed. There are a helluva lot of jobs and even more people applying for each one. But I hate wasting my life where I’m at, and I have begun slightly embittered because it feels like I’ll be trapped forever at a place which, at every turn, has proved untrustworthy. So when my great aunt wants to talk about what I’m doing with my life, “rolling change and stocking floors” doesn’t really stimulate much discussion.

Another downside to small talk? It launches me into a downward spiral of existential crisis. What am I doing with my life? Does my life have meaning? What if no one remembers me when I die? What if I die alone? Have I accomplished anything? Will I ever see the sailboat?

I don’t know what I’m doing my life. Ten years ago, that didn’t bother me because I was young, and I figured I’d eventually find what set my soul on fire. I still don’t, and even though I believe too old isn’t a thing, I do wish the universe would clue me in to whatever it is I’m supposed to be doing.