A Day in Life

I’m not sure how I’m supposed to be looking at this prompt, but if I read it as “you have the chance to do a dream job for only one day, what’s going to fulfill your wildest fantasies?” the very easiest answer for me is: no job.

I think back on every time I answered this question throughout my life, and every answer I’ve ever given has reflected things I’ve enjoyed doing, but the idea of having to earn a living with any one of those things so immediately saps any motivation I have to pursue them.

My list of “when I grow up…” jobs has included artist, veterinarian, writer, and actor. There are probably more, but I know that the first two were ever-present hopes before I became a teenager. The very last one was a comment I verbalized in first grade, which was an experience that came with enough regret that I still cringe internally when echoes of the vague memory come back to me.

The writer one though… I wouldn’t want “writer” to be my job. Every time I’ve been tasked with writing something for work the amount of anxiety I’ve experienced has made it so onerous. I’m sure I could trace some of that back to a severe case of imposter syndrome, even if I did spend most of my last semester of college writing everything under the sun.

So no job, I’d just like to live life. So much of my existence is focused on the past or the future. I’d like a day where my brain isn’t bouncing back and forth between regrets and potential disappointments. It doesn’t even need to be a day where I achieve the maximum potential experience or anything, it’s just a day where I’m in that day and I’m not stacking it up against every day before it, or mentally preparing for the chaos that comes after it; I just live.