To pull myself together...

I have this sort of mental issue with goals.

Throughout my life, whenever I've really, really wanted something, I never get it.

The more I express excitement or joy over a particular possibility, the more I allow my mind to imagine my potential future as impacted by whatever it is I want (a job, a man, a contract, a raise, an item), the less likely that possibility seems to occur.

It's quite frustrating.

So I don't set goals for myself. Not actively.

And I don't let myself daydream about stuff that might at all be possible. I reserve my daydreams for the land of complete fantasy.

It's not that I feel that I don't deserve to be happy.

I am happy most of the time.

It's just that a major part of me feels that my desire for something will, somehow, have a negative correlation with the chances of me getting it.

Like I'm not allowed to have dreams that come true.

For instance, there is a company that I've wanted to work for for years. It's been a dream employer of mine, something I thought I would never get because my lifestyle does not allow for the hours or wages I would receive.

Suddenly, I'm put in the position where I can take the hours, where I can take the minimal paycheck that starting there would entail.

And, on top of that, I'm able to go back to school to get my Master's in the field I actually want to go into, which I wasn't able to do for my BA. This job's hours would complement the hours I would be going to class. This job could keep me employed for the next three years with a stable company that is barely impacted by this recession. I would be working with my kind of people, with people that I've known for years.

And I'd be able to sleep in my own bed during the week, as opposed to the couch-surfing I'm engaging in now which, while I've gotten used to it, leaves me little of the alone time I so desperately crave.

I submitted my resume in early May, through one of their managers.

I have multiple, shining references all over the field, within their own company, and companies that they partner with.

I have years of experience with their products. I speak their language easily.

It's almost mid-June.

This is taking forever.

The more days pass the more I wonder if this is just another one of my dreams. That I hoped too much.

I don't even vocalize my goals to people, for fear that even saying the words aloud will make them not come true, so often has this happened.

I pushed back my school schedule for an entire semester so I could potentially get this job.

Is this going to be the rest of my life? Too afraid to set goals, too afraid to acknowledge and pursue dreams because I've convinced myself over the years that I will fail immediately once they are spoken aloud?

All I've ever wanted to do was make enough money writing so I could travel all over the world and write.

I've always been addicted to stories, following around my grandparents and parents, cousins, aunts and uncles, in-laws and neighbors, harassing them for tales of their youth. I know so much about my family, about what they were like as children, what pets they had, their hare-brained adventures, their traumas, their high school life, their family issues, etc. Even now, I have an ability to somehow make people open their lives to me.

It was pointed out to me that this is because I am so honest and disclose so much of myself, that wakes up things in people that make them want to disclose as well. And then the floodgate bursts open.

My head is a mass of stories.

I wish I could take all the stories I've heard and put them together. I know so many random, interesting people with such colorful histories, and each of them has a tale or twenty that is a moment in time, this perfect snapshot of intense emotion, emotion so overwhelming that there is nothing but honesty, nothing by this pure experience.

I wonder, sometimes, what would happen if I took all my writing from over the years and somehow managed to consolidate it.

That would be converting notes, napkins scribbles, sketchbooks, journals, and class notebooks partially converted to the written word, into text files. That would be bringing together all my old work, scattered across the internet and hidden in various email inboxes, into one location.

My writing is, apparently, nomadic in nature.

We hunt wooly mammoths together, with keyboards for shields and pencils instead of spears.

I am such a dork.

Everyone is a story.

I love to people-watch. I love to find a corner in some horribly crowded area and sit and listen, sit and watch how people interact with each other, wonder about the story behind a well-used hat, faded tattoos, a scar running up someone's forearm. Accents and voice patterns, inside jokes that cause only a few people to laugh and the rest to stare on in confusion.

I approach strangers fairly often. If I can, I get information from them. About them. People like to talk about themselves and I like to listen.

I would rather write about myself, anyway.

The keys beneath my fingers open up more inside me than any conversation could.