Underachieving

I am an underachiever. I should have done so much more with my life. I was given an abundance of gifts and I have squandered them. I am not successful in any meaningful way. I am unemployed. I am unchallenged. I am sitting. Here. All day long.

I have not always been unemployed. I once was a nurse – but if I had pushed myself, I could have been a doctor. There is no reason other than sheer underachievement that I am not a doctor. I was female when the field was begging for women to enter. I was smart enough, a good enough student. And my father said he would pay for med school if I would just go.

I have never wanted to be a doctor. I wanted to be a nurse. I was a nurse.

Doctors work 16 hours days and I wanted to work 16 hour weeks. I wanted to raise my own children. Doctors hire nannies to do that. And then wonder at the distance between them and their offspring. That wasn't what I chose to do. I wanted to be the person to screw up my own kids. And, by God, I did.

I could have chosen a different path. I could have pushed more to get work published – and I still might. But at this moment in time, I'm basically an unpublished writer. Okay, I'm published, but I'm an unpaid writer. While a couple thousand people read or skip over what I write, it is sent out three times a week.

I'm asked what it is that I do. And I can't really say because I do very little. I do laundry. I cook dinner. I make coffee. I keep the crap from piling up to the ceiling. I occasionally, very occasionally, dust. I read a lot, but mostly fluff books. Or even fluff magazines.

I don't think deep thoughts. I just go about my day looking at the world go by. I know that many people have done more with less than I have. That's somewhat disturbing. I chose to be less than I could have been because I'm lazy. And unmotivated. And while I am a consummate consumer, I'm apparently not greedy enough to strive for more money to spend.

I tell people I'm retired. That sounds better than I'm a slug. But the truth of the matter is that I am a slug. At the end of the day, as they love to say in the business world, my day has been filled with essentially – nothing.

And yet … I've chosen to live this way. If I didn't want to live this way, I would chose differently. I'm not driven to achieve great things. I enjoy learning little bits and pieces here and there. I enjoy volunteering. And water aerobics. And sitting around doing nothing.

What do you do? Nothing – much. But I like it.