Kim Priore

Have you ever noticed how tiring it is to constantly second guess yourself?  I feel like I live in a perpetual state of second guessing, and I’m really exhausted by it.  I just came back from a weekend in the nation’s capital, spending time with some great friends and revisiting some old haunts.  And even though these friendships are as current and relevant to my life as ever, many parts of my trips were like walking down memory lane.  Or at times, glancing down the lane of what might have been.  You’d think that after 5 years back in Boston I’d have made my peace with my decision to move back home after my intern year was over.  But I still wonder what my life would be like now if I hadn’t done that.  The friends I was visiting this week chose to stay there.  They now have boyfriends, husbands, jobs, degrees, houses, and babies on the way.  In some ways, I feel like their lives have kept on going forward while I remained kind of stuck in neutral, spinning my wheels.

As I tried to remember my way around the streets of DC, I also marvelled at how I was able to strike out and move there in the first place.  It was so uncharacteristic of me, and I haven’t really done anything that brave before or since.  The period of unemployment and the loss of my Nana Mella and other family members after I came home were the first time in my life that I came to the realization that I couldn’t do everything.  I realized that the president’s charge to the graduates at my college commencement was kind of a load of crap, that I might not be able to save the world AND make millions of dollars AND have successful relationships AND achieve inner peace.  It shook my confidence in a way that I never really recovered from.  Which I suppose is good, the hubris of the young is something that’s supposed to die out and be replaced with a sense of realism.  But as I was driving around DC, I realized that’s really what I missed.  Not so much the constant construction and gridlock, not the flood of tourists, and certainly not endless housenight meetings.  Rather, I miss the sense of confidence that I took to DC with me, and that I somehow managed to lose somewhere along I-95 on the way home. 

But so now as I try to make decisions about how to move forward with my summer plans and how to structure my studies and internships and budget my time and money, I find myself missing that confidence and instead feel exhausted from the process of second-guessing decisions that haven’t even been made yet.