with no direction home, like a rolling stone

I don't know what to do.

I don't even know where to start.

Sigh, I'm getting old.

The first time I felt that way was at 23, when I graduated from college. I could look back at the kids who were still going to school, and feel old. That hadn't happened before- when I was in college and looked back at high school, I was glad at the progress I was making. I didn't really envy the youngsters one bit, and 'older' was only ever relative. When I was done with college, 'older' suddenly meant a lot more...and tended toward the negative.

Every year afterwards, I laughed at how young I'd actually been when I'd felt old before. People who are older than you will always say "Oh, you're still young." If I live to be sixty, there may be an eighty-something that still thinks of me as a spring chicken. But to everybody else in the world, we'll both just be Old People.

When I was a child, anybody who was a full-size adult was old. Once I was in my teens, I amended that to include anyone over, say, 20-25 years of age, but the main idea was still the same: adult equals old.

Adult equals old, which equals Serious, Responsibility, Stability, Substance. Adult means old, which means you get a job and work and pay bills, and maybe squeeze in a little bit of living if it's possible. This continues ad nauseum until you can't do it anymore...you either die while you're doing it, or waste away with failing body and mind, a pity or a joke to everyone who still matters.

I'm slightly more sophisticated now, and I know there are many ways to define age. I've met people in their 50's and 60's who are still hanging with the twentysomethings when it comes to spirit, energy, laughter, and love of life. And I've met not a few twentysomethings who are already on the slick downhill slope to stagnation, decay, and senility.

So I can't honestly use words like "adult" and "old" interchangably, or even individually with the same sort of clarity. I know at heart that I'm not old yet...I just feel that way. And I know in my heart that I'm not really an adult yet, except biologically. It's the exact opposite of what I believed as a kid: maybe I'll get to be an adult when I finally get old, rather than vice-versa.

I screwed myself out of my 20's, plain and simple. I was caught between two somewhat mistaken and conflicting beliefs: the desperate feeling that I had to become a responsible and successful adult NOW, and the carefree laissez-faire outlook that none of it really mattered, and I could just wait and see what would pay off, what would come to me. Both beliefs helped me make bad plans and decisions, and the conflict between them kept me confused as to what I really wanted out of life.

I'll be 38 this year. That's old, if only in the sense that it's too old to not know what you want to do with your life. I'm not really all that good at anything, and I don't even have enough experience being mediocre at any given thing. None of the things that I like or like to do can be made into a career, and the list of things that I know I can't do well is getting long.

I suppose it doesn't matter too much...with the economy the way it is, I coud just as easily have had a steady and lucrative career for the last fifteen years and still found myself pretty much in the same position. I wasn't very successful competing against the other barely-employable people out there, and now we're being joined by a lot of people who have substantial experience and references to draw upon.

My daily struggle is simply not to give up hope completely. I don't always win the battles, but the outcome of the war is still in question. I guess that's something, right?

I don't have much to offer anyone. In my 20's, this was almost okay; nobody really expects most college degrees to count for much these days, and a lack of history and experience in those first few years afterwards doesn't immediately send your resume to the reject pile. It doesn't help, but it's not an automatic Do Not Hire when you're still more or less just starting out.

However, I can see where prospective employers might question a decade or two of useless, mostly unrelated jobs...interspersed with extended periods of unemployment. I'm not whining about how I never got a break, or that I worked hard for years and what have I got to show for it, et cetera...no, I understand the situation pretty well. I'm just not that much of a marketable commodity. There are too few higlights on my resume, and too many empty spaces.

It's pathetic, but I don't even know how to go about asking for help in getting started. I've browsed job listings until my eyes glazed over. I've examined continuing education and training programs. I've spent every day for the last decade or two looking at everyone, trying to figure out what they needed to know and where they needed to go and do in order to get where they are.

I've entertained the possibility that I'm just lazy, and I've considered the possibility that I'm mentally ill. I think either or both could be true, but ultimately I don't have the luxury of fixing myself before I forge some sort of career. You might say that actually getting a career is the best option for fixing myself, rather than the other way around. So that line of thought is just a dead-end, just a waste of my attention.

I'm not going to be able to get much better. Call me a defeatist, but late-30's is pretty late to be just getting started. At this point, it's not a matter of not being a prodigy, of not having hedged bets and head starts...it's a matter of sifting through a short list of remaining options. If I was to suddenly realize or decide upon my calling right now, I'd still have a tough enough time learning the ropes and getting up to speed...and not much time left before I really am too old, by any definition, to become proficient and productive.

And that's only if I found my calling. As I stated before, I still don't know what I want to do, or even how to start figuring it out.

My point is that such an outlook is pretty much expected at 20, and commonplace at 25. At 30 it starts to be a little bit of a problem, and at 35 it's a damned bad sign. At 40, very few people would diagree that it makes someone a BUM and a LOSER.

So I don't have a lot of time to get my entire life moving in the right direction. I understand that. That's why I feel old, whatever the objective truth of my age.