Welcome to the Quarter Life Crisis...

Barney the dinosaur always told me I was special.  Steve from "Blue's Clues" told me I can do anything that I want to do.  Since I was in the generation that had these children's shows, my parents naturally echoed these sentiments.  The problem was, I decided this meant I could and would do everything that I wanted to do, and made me deathly afraid of the pigeon hole and the stereotype. 

I always felt bad for the smart children in movies.  These were people who excelled in every aspect of school, especially very generalized subjects like math.  Usually they came from a very low-income background and a teacher took him or her under a wing. The end of the movie always showed that this person went on to found this particular business in this very specialized subject, like rocket science or neurosurgery.  Yes, it's all very successful.  But why did they put themselves in a corner?  I thought this would be the next Leeuwenhoek or Newton, with accomplishments across the board in math, science, religion, and history.

I didn't want to do this to myself.  I knew I had very marketable skills and could adapt to almost any profession, given the tools and the training.  The problem came when I had no experience to show off my talents and no idea of any specialized field in which I wanted to practice them.  This sparked the quarter-life crisis that has lasted now for about three years, and will probably continue for some time.

It isn't all bad, though.  Constant turmoil brings perpetual change.  Change brings new experiences.  The habitats that have the most rich diversity in organisms are in places where one type of habitat dramatically and sometimes violently meets another type: estuaries, marshes, and deltas.  The point is to explore the richness of a constantly changing life or we wash away with the tide.

This is an exploration of that richness: in being a mom of two, a woman who loves to cook, and someone in the job force who still has no clue what she wants to be when she "grows up."  I hope you enjoy my Quarter Life Crisis.