on highlight reels

Earlier this week I was running on a hopeless hamster wheel of despair, and it went a little like this:





So what's the next step?
What do I want do?
Is what I want to do even a viable career option?
Are any of those jobs even available?
I should probably check that again.
Wow OK, I'm not qualified for any of these...two listings.
Who's ever gonna hire me?
How will I ever get There?
Will I ever get There?
How will I support myself in the meantime?
Should I just move back home?
Would that be giving up?
What would I even do if I went back?
Ok, let's say I get the dream job.
What is the dream job?
I want to write. I want to cook. I want to write about food.
I think I could be good at those things.
But what am I working TOWARDS?
I mean, even if I got a PERFECT job, would it be a MEANINGFUL one?
Would I be doing something that really MATTERED?
Is it possible to do what I want AND do something meaningful, or is what I want inherently selfish? Do I just want a nice job, a nice apartment, a nice family, a nice salary and an all-around picture-perfect, Instagram-friendly life?
Better yet, would I say no if that were an option?
Would I even hesitate?
And, when I don't, because I wouldn't, would I end up hating my life?
Are my dreams too big or are they too small?
What kind of PERSON do I want to be?
Is everything meaningless?
HOW AM I GONNA PAY RENT NEXT MONTH?
So what's the next step?
What do I want to do?

[My career advisor: "Oh wow. You do overthink things."]

Yeah.

See, I'd be so picky about what I want to do and who I want to work for and where I want to live and then I'd zero in on all the talent and training and personality traits I don't have and everything I don't know and everyone I haven't worked for and everything I haven't done...that I'd self-combust and mourn over my ashes before giving anything a shot.

I'd read depressingly impressive bios like this one:

AMANDA HESSER has been a food columnist and editor at The New York Times for more than a decade. She is the author of "The Essential New York Times Cookbook," the award-winning "Cooking for Mr. Latte" and "The Cook and the Gardener," and editor of the essay collection "Eat, Memory." Hesser is also the co-founder of food52.com. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Tad Friend, and their two children.

and this one:

MOLLY WIZENBERG is the voice behind Orangette, named the best food blog in the world by the London Times. Her first book, "A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table", was a New York Times bestseller, and her work has appeared in Bon Appétit, The Washington Post, The Art of Eating, and The Guardian, and on Saveur.com and Gourmet.com. She also co-hosts the hit podcast Spilled Milk. She lives in Seattle with her husband Brandon Pettit, their daughter June, and two dogs named Jack and Alice. She and Brandon own and run the restaurants Delancey and Essex.

I'd read them and think, Damn. Daaaamn.

*cue hamster wheel*

After listening to another one of my (trademark) dramatic monologues, my best friend gave me a little a huge piece of advice, which I'm definitely taking credit for in future conversations:

Don't compare someone else's highlight reel with your behind-the-scenes.

And, as people with that kind of nonchalant genius usually are, she's so right.

Because highlight reels are like a person's life, freeze-dried forever into something impossible to righteously experience. They don't include the sleepless nights or the daydreams or the every-15-minute fears or the stress-Netflix-and-ice-cream binging, the blinking cursors or the burnt cakes or the piles of bills or the unanswered emails. They don't mention the days when the future was so totally unclear that all you could do was focus on finding ingredients for the Thai jok you needed to make that night, or the time you showed off your fresh basil purchase to your friend like a new handbag and realized, to your relief, you may not be normal, or the elation of being affirmed by your boss in a beginner's job and thinking that maybe, maybe you can actually do this, or the hours spent engrossed in the various schools of steak-searing, which shed much-needed light on where your passions must really lie, or the time your friend asked if you’d be doing the same thing if money didn’t matter, and you answered "Yes" without hesitating and even you were surprised, or the time you wrote all this down and felt a little more certain that everything was going to work out, that indeed, everything was being worked out even in that moment.

They don't include any of that, but I think they should.

And because that one book is basically a well-stocked cabinet of remedial quotes, original and otherwise, I sign off with this:

E.L. Doctorow said once said that 'Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.' You don't have to see where you're going, you don't have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice on writing, or life, I have ever heard.