Posted by:
Cold-Dodger
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Date: February 24, 2017 12:51AM
What do you do after BYU and resigning the church? What do you do with a general studies degree? Even if I had finished the English degree... what do you do with that? I think I was so consumed with my religious anxieties, I forgot that one day, one way or another, my undergrad days would end and I would need to go out into the world and provide for myself somehow.
I just spent the last hour reading articles about the cold hard reality of humanities degrees and job prospects. Should I continue my education somewhere? In what? English? I don't know... all that debt and what job prospects to show for it?
I'm glad for the time I had to read and research and study and get good at analyzing information and reaching out to people by explaining my thoughts and feelings. It has affected who I am forever. But... did I waste my time at BYU?
I have had so much anxiety, awful awful anxiety, since I was kid. It seems I was doomed to be an anxious person, and Mormonism is not fully to blame for that. But it is a fact that Mormonism took up so much of my time, so much of my mind, and so much of my stress for so long... and it didn't help my anxiety problems. If it didn't make them worse, it really set me back. But I think it did make them worse.
I feel like all my accomplishments in life are purely in the personal development department and I still need a lot of work.
Everyone keeps telling me I'm so young. But I'm 28 now. In two years, I'll be 30. I haven't really been giving the necessary thought and effort into a career. Right now, I'm doing the same service job I used to have. I hate it.
Not feeling a lot of hope right now. I'm just taking it day to day, fighting with my anxiety to do my blue collar job without having any panic attacks. I'm so close to family and to my old prisons and triggers. Would I be happier if I just upped and moved elsewhere? I've thought of settling in Phoenix and seeing if I can get into Arizona's ailing public education system somewhere. Az sure isn't paying its teachers a whole lot right now, but there are plenty of job openings.
I guess I had delusions of academia when I applied to BYU in the first place. I thought I was going to be a FARMS guy, or a CES instructor at least, or... maybe a professor at BYU? Then the first year broadsided me. And in the second, I started addressing my doubts about Mormonism... the rest of it is all on this board.
I feel different from others. I feel like I was made for academia, maybe. Someone once commented on one of my posts that they would hunt my down if I didn't do something with my writing. I don't know if I'm particularly gifted in any way that someone would pay me money for anything I can do. I have a college degree now, from an obscure religious college with an emphasis in nothing in particular, and shit list of blue collar crap on my resume. I struggle personally to express myself to begin with, but there's also this whole religious vs. post-religious thing. Who am I? Who is my tribe? If I could say what I was, what is my relationship to other tribes? Oh boy. So much to think about.