The Beginning of my Odyssey Years

I decided to attend college because I was afraid. I was afraid that the three years after high-school would become my life pre-retirement. My first job after graduating in 2000 was working at Victor’s Pizza, a mom-and-pop Italian-Greek restaurant. At the end of my employment, before I quit to preserve my mental health, I was working eleven hours a day, five days a week.

I then worked in the stock room of the two-level Target (the first of its kind in the state of Virginia). My experience there was so mundane and mentally debasing that I forced myself to forget those many months. I hardly remember working there. I’m serious. I really don't.

My last job before attending college was working in a frame shop of a Michael’s Arts & Crafts. Overall, it was a creative and fun environment. I enjoyed using my artistic faculties, I enjoyed (for the most part) the people with which I worked, and I especially enjoyed the relatively lax dress code. But it wasn’t what I wanted for the rest of my life.

Four and a half years later, I’m back at the same point. Mere months away from graduating with an English degree, I have absolutely no inclination as to what I want to do. I think of the movie Lady in the Water, and its theme of finding one’s purpose (not to mention the arrogance of those who think they know it for you). Although the film is rich in fantasy, it nonetheless tackles a point that many, like myself, have felt before.

Casually reading The New York Times today, I came across an op-ed by David Brooks titled “The Odyssey Years.” In it, Brooks writes of the changing understanding of life’s stages. Sandwiched between traditional notions of adolescence and adulthood is the emerging recognition of the odyssey years. In this time, Brooks writes, young twenty-somethings change careers, fall in and out of love, live with friends, even living back at home for a time. It is a life of improvisation. It is a life that I will enter later this year in December,

So, as I dress in business-casual attire tomorrow to attend a college Job Fair, and as I worry about finding my purpose just as Cleveland and the tenets at The Cove did in The Lady in the Water, I will remember that I am not alone. Odysseus is traveling along side me as we search for our Ithaca.