Rant: A career in Psychology

I often debate with myself that I should have elected psychology as a college major.  My level of interest in intrapersonal dynamics far exceeds any dalliance with accounting.  At the crossroads of choice I found my gender and pragmatism trumped the indulgence of placating human weakness.  I saw the construct of psychological counseling as flawed, superfluous and gaudy with delight.  The very core capabilities within myself that would probably lead to my immense aptitude for such a career led me to devalue the framework of it as beneficial to our collective.  

I have been an introvert since birth spending hour upon end wandering the catacombs of my own deliberations and considered the avenue that others requiring another individual or team of individuals in assisting them in navigating such coffers of identity and ration was like trying to sell water next to flowing river.  This isolation of contemplation kept me from seeing that which one finds facile is not necessarily common and is in all probability the greatest demarcation for the lost to uncover a compass within one’s own rations.   

The shadow of additional college debt in context to my undergraduate scholarship and the perilous unknowns of funding for graduate school placed a constitutional mandate into my personal definitions of gender.  I saw manhood constricted and defined by self-sufficiency.  After mistakenly dabbling in engineering, accounting felt like the most conservative and pragmatic of skillsets about the kingdom of elections.  I understood my path through this world would most likely be a solitary one and if I had any hopes of managing such a trek or to sustain another traveler in my caravan my own self-sufficiency was paramount.  

I now am over a decade into a career devoid of the subjects of my greatest intrigue: the human mind, our universal connection, and the context of deliberations.  I find the irony numbing that the very path of finding another traveler and the collateral damage of bonding provided by what I assumed was an asset has and is my greatest emotional and financial deficit.   

The option of changing my career into the corridor of psychology still sits like a financial hellhole and an emotional jubilation.  The educational debt and lost salary required combined with my escalation of commitment and investment in what I and a great number of members of society would consider in accounting to be a premium option, leave me stoic and resigned to construct financial statements, audit data, and opine on the validity of historical financial performance.   

This leaves me hungry for writing poetry and exploration of the psychology of mankind.  I am parched for spiritual equilibrium diving down into the depths of depression, madness and visualizing what is and is not pertinent to our existence.  I so often considered myself incapable of performing as a counselor because of these divergent compulsions and have only in my age seen that it is these divergent aptitudes which are in fact the precious rarity to support my endeavors.  

For so many years now I have sat at the financial mercy of the vindictive whim of another.  My career has been mummified before my very eyes in this rural sarcophagus.  I know what the recruiters and the employers imply and confer from my career chronology.  I see the weakness and lack of inspiration in the sterile environment to interact with fellow economic thinkers.  I so often feel death arm-wrestling with boredom around me.   

I plead to satiate my body with knowledge that is alive and prosperous, but in this economy the need and deprivation is so expansive the avenue for self-fulfillment is, as my former wretched-Catholicism taught me, of prominent importance to repress.  I have lived under the mantra of it could always be worse.  The repetition of this addiction left to the cul-de-sac of my own head has left me depraved and worse.  I am awash in an ocean of apathy.  

The cities, the roads, the faces are blanketed in nonsensical nothingness.  The oblivion of futility is such a dangerous mask, yet I am prone to wear it and affix it like a pair of goggles to see what I know to be beneath as fanciful, beautiful, horrid and splendid admixed in this bountiful psychology that I so rarely get to interact.  I hunger for the deep caverns of emotion, of thought, to simply listen.  I could be a horse at journey’s end drinking from an unending troth with an insatiable thirst to listen to the dilemmas and debates of others.  To be able to assist them in the process would be like getting paid to send oxygen into my lungs.  I would have such joyous blood.  

Yet I sit here in this limbo, not myself, not anyone of note, but an accumulation of this calculus of why that then and why this now and the dollars sit like madmen gangsters for a man obligated in debt to the mob.  I know what must be done, what may be possible, but is not likely. I know what those who would like to love me would have me do.   

I see the house-mothers on television having Doctor Phil tell them how a stay at home mom is three jobs or some bullshit.  I call that life, a choice, not a bonus round or contribution.  I know its trappings, blessings and tethers.   

In Gen X we all must work; there is no escape from this economy.  It is a leviathan of reckoning.  I see the jobless psychologists buried under their graduate degrees and the health system cutbacks to pay for the retiring Boomers and private health insurance fascists.  I see it even clearer with my damned accountancy studies and macroeconomic visualizations.  I see why we are on our knees and why we will continue to cry for breadcrumbs.  I see death gripping the necks of the oblivious panic gentlemen and ladies of indulgence.   

For now I have reduced my focus to location to end this Sisyphus rolling in my rural perdition.  I am trying and contemplating, but aware so aware of the ladders of man.  The doom of beginning, of choosing for every step up requires an equal step down and an additional step up any other assent we ever hope to achieve.  Career is of such a lower priority in the debates of my mind in comparison to the other wars.  I only mention it now as a morsel of torment.  For what would I be without these denotations; numb so numb, so comfortably ignorantly numb.