I wrote my job, my life, into existence. What's next?

I didn't sweat it too much when I got laid off from Duquesne University in June 2009. I knew it wasn't a forever-type job. (It was a program through the school of business that connected high school students to volunteer mentors.)

It was the most money I'd ever made, sure: 35k a year was a come-up from the 90 bucks a day I made as a substitute English teacher. But I had three months' severance, and I assumed I'd find a new gig by August. I even bought a new suit a week after the layoff. I should have been more frugal, but the girl working at Benetton was cute and I wanted to stunt.

August came and left. I blinked and 2010 came too. By then, my severance had long dried, my savings had long depleted, and my only income was the unemployment benefits extended because of the recession. My ambition, from the time I graduated from college, was to find a way to write for a living. Every job I held felt like an existential placeholder.

But then it was less an ambition and more a dream. Maybe even less a dream and more a wish. Because dreams at least have some grounding in reality. And having a life where I was able to sustain myself through writing felt as realistic then for me - an unemployed, 31-year-old, Pittsburgher untethered without a placeholder - as building a time machine.

Today, at 43, I'm the author of an award-winning memoir and signed to a multi-book deal at a "Big Five" house. I have two weekly columns in The Washington Post, and I've been a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times and a columnist at GQ. I've written for a TV show, I have a podcast that revolves around my parade of neuroses, I negotiated a deal to sell my blog to a network, and I'm regularly invited places to speak - a still surreal phenomenon where people pay me money to talk about the things I've written. I haven't just surpassed those ambitions from 2010. I've lapped them, twice, and I'm running backward.

And so - and this is a question I've had since roughly 2017 - what happens now? What do you do after you dreamed a thing, and then the thing that happened was better?

I've wondered if this just means that I wasn't ambitious enough. I'm sure some will agree. ("Your dream wasn't to walk on the moon or cure cancer or even just to invent a calorie-less milkshake but to ... write a column?") But you have to know that economic stability is something I never had, and something I began to doubt I'd ever get. I just wanted to be comfortable. Which is something that probably needs context here too, because comfort means different things to different people. For me, comfort meant that I'd be able to pay my bills and have enough left over to buy an occasional sneaker or two.

Homeownership wasn't even a goal. Buying a home felt like wanting to buy the color blue. Or the sun. I just wanted to live somewhere I wasn't ashamed of, and I wanted my writing to provide that. Breathing seems unambitious too. But not to a man stuck under a boulder.

There's also dread.

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I can't think about dreams without thinking about dread. About losing everything, everyone. Which is something that could happen, at any time, to anyone, true. But the more successful I am, the farther my ambitions are in my rearview, the worse, in my head, the calamity that finds, cripples and kills me will be.

And sometimes I think that me not knowing what to do next is just a product of me not wanting to think about what to do next because thinking about what to do next means also thinking about all the ways I'm inviting and inventing cataclysm. Sometimes I feel like my life is testing fate. And with each success, each accomplishment, each validation, the test becomes more like a tease. And then more like a taunt.

There's another thought circulating too - the question of whether I've peaked, and this is it. That maybe what's next is sustainability. Which would be fine, I think. I'm in a good place. But I also think that the peaking thought is connected in a way to the dread, so I can't quite trust it. I'm just not in the right space to assess whether that's fear talking to me.

I think - well, I hope - what's next is a mission to locate a different type of comfort. Where I can finally exist in the now, and just be, instead of this ceaseless toggle between the trauma of the recent past and the angst of an unpromised future. Maybe once I get there, if I get there, I'll be able to reconfigure my ambitions.

Today, though, I think I'm going to buy some new shoes.

(COMMENT, BELOW)

Previously:
• 08/30/22 The fake hustle of self-righteous NFL critique
• 07/29/22 Haircuts were $10. Now they're $40. They should be more
• 07/08/22 How to be an effective oldhead on the hoop court
• 06/15/22 I tried it: The day I wore 'hoochie daddy shorts'
• 06/09/22 I'm still haunted by the U2 spyware on my iPhone
• 06/02/22 Why the Jack Harlow-led 'White Men Can't Jump' reboot should never happen
• 05/26/22 I avoided covid for two years. Until now. Here's what I've learned
• 05/19/22 A bidet changed my life! Why don't I own a bidet?
• 05/12/22 A letter to that man who emailed me to correct my grammar
• 05/05/22 No, I will absolutely not switch airplane seats with you
• 04/14/22 How do you mourn the end of a friendship?
• 04/08/22 Living in introvert heaven?
• 04/01/22 We don't need to talk about Kanye. (I do, though.)
• 03/16/22 Am I leaving Spotify? That question is dumb
• 03/10/21 A story about some words I can't say
• 03/01/21 Invisalign at 42. Here's why. (It's about more than teeth.)
• 02/17/21 Meet my dad --- the Grim Reaper's publicist