Through the eyes of 8-year old me

I always try to imagine being a little girl and seeing the full grown up version of myself that I am now. I wonder if the 8-year old version of me, clad in rollerblades carrying a Judy Blume novel would be proud at what I have become.

You live your whole life with this ideal of yourself and soon you become who you are and you can't remember what it was you idealized. You thought you were going to be a writer, a painter, a photographer. Travel to space. Fight fires. Be brave. Be strong. Change the world.

But none of these things just happen. There is never one brave decision to make or one big fire to fight. It's a series of little decisions all stacked up on top of each other until they have made all the big ones for you. Until it seems like every cup of coffee you ordered was ultimately determining your place in the universe somewhere.

Somewhere in all those little decisions, I lost my focus on the big plans. I lost the vision of my 8 year old self. I always thought I would be a writer. And not a chick-lit novelista either; an important world-changing author. And everything that got in the way was just the research I was doing. The life I was living so that I could write about it later.

And then I graduated. Creative writing degree in hand, Kerouac-ian destination in mind. Things came together for me in the conventional sense; I look really good on paper. I do event marketing for a Gen Y award winning agency and travel the country going to well-attended events promoted products people already love. All in the name of "life experience."

But here I am at the 1.5 year mark. In true agency form, I put in my share of 80 hour weeks; nights up til 4 setting up and up again at 7 to execute events. I worked weekends, took calls at family reunions and cabbed it home from the office past 8 PM a fair share of evenings. I put in all the time, all the work, all the effort for the promotion I wanted in 2010. And I didn't get it.

They didn't give it to someone else; it just didn't happen.

The way they delivered the news, so casually after the gossip of a failed dinner date a few nights prior; they had no idea what I had stocked of myself in this position. But worse, neither did I. I didn't see the blow to my self esteem coming. I didn't think I would feel like this after one small rejection from a job that was really just all about gleaning more "life experience."

8-year old Alison wouldn't have spent sunny summer afternoons at the office. Wouldn't have shown up late to the Halloween party. Wouldn't have snapped at her friends because she didn't have time for lunch. 8-year old Alison wouldn't understand why it was stressful; why I had to sync my email to my phone.

And now here I am, my self-confidence so intertwined with my job that I lost the intention of what I have set out to do here. I am crushed; there's no going back on that. But the investigation of the crushing is the most important. Figuring out where I went wrong, where I lost sight.

The older I get, the more I pull away from my 8-year old self, the more I realize that life is about little but balance. You can't work too hard, you can't play too hard. You can't examine too hard. And you can't waste time falling too hard. You have to reach forward and kick back to hold yourself upright.