Wasted / 55
is—the only way to get the thoughts to slow down, planning my life out step-by-step, how I would get everything done in time, how it would all be okay. I plotted, mostly, careers—doctor, actor, politician, writer, geologist, singer, violinist, soccer player, Olympic swimmer, professor. Everything seemed possible. Everything also seemed deeply necessary, and, of course, I had to start preparing for every possible career right now or it would be too late. Essentially I worked myself into a tizzy. I was going to too many rehearsals, sports practices, music lessons, reading under the covers late into the night, reading in class, reading in the bathtub, asking my parents over and over, Do you think I could do this? This? This? Sure, they said. Why not? When I was about twelve, I developed an obsession with time, always sure that I would run out of time, time was awastin' and I wasn't Great yet. I started reading college catalogs and began badgering my parents to let me go away to boarding school, in hopes that it would get me Somewhere faster. Faced with what seemed a staggering number of possibilities, I quit. The ever-expanding sea of thoughts that wash over one at a particular point of mental development is, in fact, a bit overwhelming to a person who is still trying to figure out tampons and the etiquette of writing love notes in grade school. I wanted to be a surgeon and I wanted Chad to give me a Valentine. I wanted my mother to let me sit on her lap and I wanted her to send me to college, immediately. The dissonance in the brain is extreme at this point. Some children have the capacity to bore through it. I didn't. The idea of my future simultaneously thrilled and terrified me, like standing at the lip of a very sheer cliff—I could fly, or fall. I didn't know how to fly, and I didn't want to fall. So I backed away from the cliff and went in search of something that had a clear, solid trajectory for me to follow, like hopscotch. Like a diet. In [Young women] can experience [professional liberation] as a demand and feel that they have to do something outstanding. Many of my patients have expressed the feeling that there were too many choices and they had been afraid of not choosing correctly.11
11
Hilde Bruch (1978), viii—ix.