|  Lately, I've been doing a lot of stock-taking about where I am compared to where I always imagined I'd be. This is a little unnerving because the years since graduation have been marked mainly by a nebulous lack of any real interest in the "goals," "dreams," "plans" that made up so much of my self when I was in school.
I always pictured myself, wherever I was, whatever I was doing, "writing something." Maybe poems on park benches in big cities like Boston or London; maybe snippets of an emerging novel on stolen legal pads during my lunch break at some unspecified publishing house. But writing, something, and constantly, the way it always was when I was younger. Stories, and their accompanying extremely real-to-me characters, followed me throughout the day once. Now I haven't written anything of any real note since I graduated three years ago--and even the things I was writing then had sounded trite and forced for some time.
And it leaves me with less of a sense of regret than it used to (or than it ought to). That, I think, is what really bothers me now. Not the fact that I haven't written, but the fact that I've gotten used to the not writing, and that I am eerily not all that worried about what this might mean. Does everyone just need that period (even three years' plus of one) in which to wander, drift, do not much of anything ambitious in order to find themselves and their true passion? Is it just a matter of waiting and letting "life" prepare me until I stumble upon the subject that finally motivates me again? Or does the voice of my former self ring truer when it tells me that apathy and mediocrity are the ultimate threats to ever stumbling upon anything, or being open for motivation if I do?
How much of the apathy is apathy, and how much is a defense against the thought that I'll never be that authoress I always told everyone I'd grow up to be?
More relevantly, perhaps, how much of this is the same struggle everyone finds themselves dealing with? (If I've lost the writerly tendency, I certainly at least haven't lost the overly dramatic tendency that often drives it...)
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