The vocational crisis.

It's the summer holidays. I'm in Sicily. So why can I not sleep? Well, it's not just any old summer holiday, it's the summer holiday before finals. Which means it could potentially be the last summer of it's kind. Who knows if next summer I will have already entered into the world of work, I may not even have a summer holiday. It's definitely unlikely that I will ever have a summer holiday as long as the ones that I have been used to all my life. I didn't realize how lucky I was until now. Being a grown up is going to suck. Maybe I won't find a job though. Except then I'll have lots of time but no money, and that's probably worse. Hmm. I think I've figured out why I can't sleep anyway; Since I arrived in Palermo, everybody I have met has asked me the same questions: what are you doing now then? And what will you do after you graduate? Such a stomach churning question for someone who has no clue. I need to find a solution but every time I do, I change my mind a few minutes later. Maybe that's the beauty of life though; not knowing where you will end up or what you will do. It's surprisingly exciting.
I remember when I was little girl, being sat in church listening to a priest talking about vocations. He told the story of how he finally heard his "calling" one day. He went to mass one day and suddenly had this feeling of duty and love and that was it. He knew the only person he could marry was God. I remember wondering when I would find my calling and where? In a dream? From an old lady? From a little boy/girl? An angel? Or would I wake up one morning and just know? From then on, I carried on with my life, just kind of following the social norms, plodding along, hoping one day it would all suddenly become clear; The meaning of my life.
   I chose my GCSEs, then I chose my A levels. As time went by, my options kept becoming narrower and narrower, and then one day I found myself packing the car and going of to university. I still believed that by graduation I would know what I was going to go on to do. I took a kind of que sara' sara' outlook on life.
  Except now I'm in final year, and I'm starting to feel a little bit anxious. Nothing is any clearer. I haven't got a clue, not the slightest idea. It's starting to bother me more than ever. I feel like I should have had this calling by now. Most of my friends have, in fact, when they chose their degrees they had already pretty much figured it out. But I have a languages degree; that could be used for so many different things. That's one of the reasons I chose it in fact. It was the only course that accommodated my indecision as to what I wanted to do after university. Now all the social conventions of what people do in life can't help me anymore. There's no clear structure for me anymore. After university it's just "work" or "Masters/PhD" but work is such a HUGE umbrella-word. Finally I'm free and no-one is telling me what to do anymore, but am I happy? No. I've followed the rules all my life. Now there is no one telling me what to do now and so I'm lost without instructions. I need to step up to the plate and decide for myself. There is no other option.
   Funnily enough, I went back to my hometown and discovered the very priest that gave that sermon on vocations is actually no longer a priest. He fell in love with a woman in the parish and left the Church. So now I'm screwed. I spent all these years believing this "call" would come, only to discover it was a false alarm anyway! He might have heard his calling, but he heard a different one later. Maybe I should find comfort in this though. Maybe we have more than one calling. That would mean that even if I have missed mine, or the first one is delayed, I'll be ok. I'll fall into something for a while and then one day I'll have another calling and change the direction of my life altogether. Maybe that's what makes life exciting. Nothing is set in stone. Humans are designed to be adaptable, we can change career paths all the time.
   Right now, I'm beginning to wonder if writing might be my calling. I mean its 3.48am and I can't sleep and  felt this sudden need to write down everything I was thinking/feeling. Maybe it's what I'm destined to do? Or maybe I just need therapy. In any case, I feel better for doing it. On that note, I'm going to try to sleep now. If my 'call' comes tomorrow, I need to be awake and ready.