My addiction.

 I am addicted to the beginnings of things. Audition, application, registration, flirtation, anticipation. I love blank pages, uncut fabric, canvas, yarn, empty rooms, flour, brown sugar, first days, interviews, new schools, new majors, new careers, new plans.

 I hate to minimize the concept of addiction here, by pathologizing a mere habit for maximum metaphorical impact.

One of my many, many majors -and the only one to result in a degree, thus far- was psychology. I loved psychopharmacology and neuroscience. It drives me up the wall when people talk about just any recurrent, self-reinforcing maladaptive behavior patterns as "addiction." Shopping. Pornography. Overeating. 

(I am confident in the above opinion as only an undergraduate psych major can be.)

I'll embrace the  metaphor today, though, because the open call can't assume that the majority of us are physically and psychologically addicted to some substance...so I'll read the call as

"Tell us about an experience, behavior pattern, or habit in your life that is so consuming and overwhelming that it is as if it were an addiction."

 And starting things is mine. 

I'm not bragging. I'm not disguising a resume as a confession. This may resemble the call of the dread overacheiver, cloaked in false modesty, but it's not. I have the resume of a maniac, in the old sense, and sometimes I wonder if I am just smart enough, just sane enough, just well-supported enough to keep pulling the pieces back together after I retreat from a well-started, unfinished autorenovation.

Addiction has  to have three of six of these elements, diagnostically speaking:

Tolerance, withdrawal, large amounts over a long period of time, unsuccessful attempts to cut down, interferes with social, recreational, occupational activities, continued use despite adverse effects.

I've never been more isolated in my life. 

I moved to a new city two months ago, for almost no reason. I still attended school in the old city. I had a hundred mile round trip daily commute to school; now I have the same commute to work. But, as soon as I started to look at those...damned...apartment listings - I had to go. So here I am. Justified by finances - but if I were honest to myself, I'd admit that the savings on rent is entirely lost to the expensive new commute and wear and tear on my car.

I registered for the LSATs immediately after - or on a commercial break from - watching Legally Blonde, drunk. If Elle Woods can do it in a montage, certainly I could do it myself. 

 I never wanted to be a lawyer.  Fuck.  Never.  I wanted to be, have always wanted to be (.something else.)

Finally admitted it in front of a classful of collegues, two weeks before the end of my last term. I credit my success in lawschool entirely to not wanting to be there.

Things that you don't really want have much less power to hurt you. $125,000 later I'm trying to find a job in a an oversupplied profession, one that I'm good at and enjoy, but don't care about.

 A clarification: It's possible to enjoy a job without caring about it, to the exact same extent and effect of having athletic and engrossing sex without tenderness or affection. The experience of either explains why I plan to remain an an attorney, despite my absolute non-attachment to that role.

I have studied five languages, no, sorry, six. I can read in each of them, but am fluent in none. I had to stop, cold turkey, when I realized that if I take a language class, I will fail any other class I am taking, neglect, not only other studies - but other people. And of course, I will, inevitably drop it just at the point where fluency is a breath away. I am permanently marooned as an eavesdropper, perfectly able to listen, incapable of any real expression.

 I have masqueraded as a painter. Acrylics delighted me. Thick bright colors that stay where you put them, dry in a minute, and come so satisfying from the tubes. I have a good sense of shape but a lousy sense of space. Complex groupings go flat in my hands.

Oils killed me. Sanding and gessoing and stretching and nailing, before the canvas is even ready to become a painting...oils and mediums and waiting and waiting and waiting and learning so much.

My peculiar reaction to the solvent allowed in the studios at that college gave me a voice like Kathleen Turner for the four months that I was a painter. 

I'm told it was hot. 

Soon enough, I hated it. I could almost get at something - something I wanted to show or make - and got three quarters of the way there. Even when finished, my paintings looked like I was just about to get to the point. I loathed them. 

When I moved to this apartment, I took all my stored canvases and all my old paint, and mixed all the old paint until I had three bright colors, and painted over every single picture, in one color, with a roller. My livingroom is rimmed with battered and concealed attempts at art. 

It's almost sickening to me to go through it. 

Acting was the same as painting; I am too heavy for an ingenue, and (was, at eighteen and nineteen and quasi-virginal) too naive and, frankly, unimaginative for the rare complex women's roles.

My teacher, refugee from daytime television, told me that I had the face of a character actor, and no sense of the fourth wall. Translated:

You're ugly, and I'm sick of your blank mug turning towards the audience.

Recovering from that insult, and realizing that I hadn't enjoyed a minute of it, I began to quit theater, by stages. I continued acting for a bit, or trying to act, until I started to be as embarassed by myself as my aimless paintings. It ended. Thankfully. My last part was as an intern, turning the lights off in the last scene of a friend's undistributable student film. I think the role was listed as "Chuck."

Someday I will have a puppy and call him "Chuck."

I will avoid long-winded enumeration of the attempt at screenwriting (nearly sold one, unfortunately, it was unfinishable), and costume design (liquid latex, met a woman with three breasts, still uncomfortable with people who call themselves "dancers"). The pattern was nearly the same. 

Enthusiasm. A sense of "Finally! this is what I want to be! It fits, it finally fits." Shortly following, increased contact with the truly dedicated reveals that I don't, actually, care about what I'm doing -regardless of whether I have talent or aptitude for it.

Shortly following that, I become increasingly tired of being full of shit all the time. Shortly following that, I quit, leave gracefully otherwise, fail, or burn the place the fuck down. (Metaphorically, thus far.)

I've begun training for a half marathon. I'm considering dedicating serious time to discovering whether I could be a successful stand-up comic. I'm leafing through job descriptions to see if I can find anything that requires serious travel, or "must be able to consider relocation." 

My personal life, my emotional life, are like the above, restrained by only loyalty and emotional ties to the sleeping man across the hallway, and my growing isolation from everyone I actually know. Partially caused by the sleeping man across the hallway.

It may seem right now that I'm nothing but a dillettante, disguising soul-searching and the hyperactivity of youth, as some kind of unique compulsion. Everyone changes majors, and reaches for some artistic goal or another, before settling down and finding a career - and perhaps, that's true.

But I have never actually finished anything. I graduated from college without warning; the registrar's office charged me for a yearbook, and that's how I knew I was finished. Given greater warning, I think I may have dropped out.

I am not just searching, here. I am building to destroy. And sitting in the rubble makes me sick, every time. Once or twice I've managed to explode every part of my life at once - amazing.

It's like falling through a house, breaking boards in the attic, crashing through plywood and carpet tiles on the second floor, hitting a weak spot in the lino. in the kitchen, then looking up from the basement floor - and seeing the person-shaped hole where I broke through each time. If I'm in an indulgent mood, I'll lament fell from the attic, instead of through the roof. Because if there were just a hole in the roof, I could see the sky.

I failed out of that art school that let me try everything. It was sudden. I pretended not to see it coming. I broke it off with the gentlemen I was seeing at the time, and cocooned in my parents' house. Everything that made up my life was gone - my friends, my plans, my place to live...

After a bit, though, I was off and starting things again. Three jobs passed by that year. Two, no, three, colleges. One only lasted two days. I got together applications for two more, and was rejected out of hand. Things were dark for a while, as it felt like I couldn't quite make anything happen...then they did.

Four majors in the three terms I spent at the college I eventually graduated from. No extracurriculars, thank god. My energy was dulled by the need to work a full-time job, so I didn't have the time to run away with myself.

I did have the time to write two theses. I did have the time to start writing for a friend's magazine. I did have the time to get in to a long term, long-distance relationship. 

Then law school. Six different plans, thankfully unspokenofaloud. Again, saved from the impulse to start too much by being too busy. Then second year came. Threw in my name for Editor of the legal writing thingie, and got it. 

Probably wouldn't have put my name in, if I wouldn't have been the first Editor to publish a journal in this school in...decades. I hate playing by someone else' rules. If I can't create the position, I usually have no interest in it.

I also started kickboxing. Gloves at the ready. Strange pains in parts of my legs and abdomen that I never knew before.

I also started running. Two 5ks down, in May, the half marathon. I also took on the job of running the biggest annual fundraiser for one of our student organizations. The stand up. A routine that contained the phrase "rectum" three times, and "rectal" once.

I also started a novel. Ten thousand words. I also started writing on Open Salon. I am just about to turn in a proposal for an article to a scholarly journal. I send out three to five resumes a week.

On Monday, I started a full-time job. 

 I can't stop starting. 

It seems that this may be...healthy. A way to build a strong resume, to become well-rounded. I promise that it's not; that it's actually incredibly maladaptive and self destructive, driven less by ambition than by fear. Fear of loss of an opportunity; fear of death without accomplishing something; fear of getting older without accomplishing something. Fear of waste.

"There are geniuses in the Pine Street Inn, sweetheart."

These are my father's words of wisdom. (The Pine Street Inn is Boston's  oldest, largest homeless shelter - the watchword for desperation and destitution). As a child, these are the words which came at any evidence of laziness. Attitude problems were encouraged; active decisions to screw up were taken in stride. If I talked back to a teacher, cut classes for weeks at a time, if I found myself struggling with a subject because I didn't understand it - all of these things were forgivable. Obstinate laziness, apathy, and failure to work hard...these were not.

I actually grew up with the belief - and maybe it's actually true, that greater intelligence leads to a greater chance of failure. Greater potential isn't just more to lose - it actually creates a greater temptation to fail. 

It's true. I was just smart enough to get through public school without ever really working hard at anything. I didn't study until my last term of college. Easy is seductive. Outhinking the game is more fun than playing it. 

Then I hit a wall, when I failed out of school. My father's prediction seemed like it would come true. I would be a genius in the Pine Street Inn, or at least a marginally above average, well practiced scam artist, and fraud, in the Pine Street Inn. 

So since then, I never stop moving. Instead of charging as hard as I can, in one direction, then stopping hard and running the other way as soon as things get difficult or dull, I go in all directions at once. I go double time. I don't know what hard work feels like, so I go for exhuberence cut with panic.