Crossroads

I don't know. I should go to bed now, so this will be brief. I'm getting married in a week, which is very exciting. But I lost a potential job today, which is less so. I can soothe my frustration with the knowledge that I was a finalist for the position, but once again the reasons for my not getting the job sound horribly similar to the sounds of my scampering away from a PhD, in a fruitless search for more normal pastures.

My dad says I run away from who I am, which is an "intellectual" (a curiously 18th century word, really, more applicable to those amazing female salonieres; to a time when it wasn't pretentious to self-identify as thought-full; a word allocated to Oxford men with pipes and tweeds, and not to me). I don't know. (Again.) I'm not so brilliant. I knew that at school, and so left. There were a few professors who enjoined me to stay, but I never understood why. My writing can be disorganized. I don't always speak articulately. Benjamin and Deleuze and Levinas swam in my brain, pausing for brief moments of clarity and application before getting lost again in their strokes. I am not so brilliant. But then, I am not its opposite, either. There were moments.

So what do I do? My dad says quit the menial job and dedicate myself full time to teaching. Live off my savings for a while and stop exhausting myself with these 70 hour weeks for a pittance. Doing so scares me. I don't like not making money. A big part of me just wants a "grown-up" job like my friends have, where they sit at a desk and have meetings and behave in adult and scheduled ways. But I know, deep in my gut (or maybe this time, it's my brain speaking), that I'm not like my friends. I can't sit at a desk and push (important) papers around; I'm not ultra organized; I don't know and don't care about PowerPoint presentations. I don't ever get the office jobs I apply for, and apparently I've taught "too much college" to teach high school.

Am I failure? Did I run away from the PhD because I fell in love, and because I was lonely, and because I saw brilliance in others and mediocrity in my own ideas and I grew afraid? Yes.
Yes.

I ran away, but there's nothing for me here like I thought there would be. So what do I do?