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I'm having, as John Mayer puts it, a quarter-life crisis.

I applied for this fellowship yesterday. It feels good to have it finished, and I should find out in about 3-4 weeks whether I get to interview. To those who gave me feedback-- thank you! If I get it, it would be a really great opportunity to get down in the trenches of a community to help improve food access, and then I'd get to go back to DC to try to stir up some action there.

But the thing is... if I take this fellowship, it still only solves my problem for a year. What am I going to do with my life after that?!!! (Yes, this question does merit three exclamation points.)

I have all these grand plans, but I get really discouraged when I think about how most leadership roles require sitting on my duff in an uncomfortable chair for 8+ hours a day. I really think I should be over this by now, but I'm not. Sitting for hours on end is my deepest circle of hell. It's uncomfortable and boring and makes me want to scream because bodies were made to move. I hate not being able to concentrate because oxygen has stopped racing through my brain and is, instead, oozing.

I was puzzling about this today (until my puzzler was sore) trying to figure out why I didn't realize this in college. I've been working since my sophomore year of high school, so why am I suddenly having such a hard time working? And then I realized that every single job I've had so far has had me moving and interacting with people and things around me. I feel like a child with some sort of stimulation deficit-- or an attention deficit. I need to break things up. I CRAVE it. I liked having multiple patients every hour and having multiple responsibilities during the day so that desk time was confined to 4- or 5-hour chunks. I liked getting immediate feedback from my environment (instead of just staring at a screen). And I liked the seemingly paradoxical security/instability that comes from working with people; I can be safe in my competence but still get a welcome and vigorous challenge from unpredictable and unique people.

I also think some part of me needs to be standing up at the front of a room drawing things on the board and talking to people about things we care about. I really think my dream is perfect-- carrying a half-time patient load as an outpatient dietitian, and leading diabetes group management programs the other half of the time. I'd get to move. Engage. Teach. And the desk time would have a visible end. Basically, it would be more immediate gratification, because I'd get to see people processing things everyday, even before the total program impact is clear.

But boy is it hard to find a position like that. And p.s., I'm not a stinking dietitian yet. I mean, how do you summarize that dream into a nice Google-friendly search term without using the word "dietitian"? It's like playing an unfortunate game of Taboo.

On the upside, I'm pretty decent at Taboo. :) Wellness coordinator and health coach have been doing pretty well for me so far, and I'm sure I'll find something. There's even a company in Chicago that looks promising. And if nothing else, I have a lot of options in the fitness industry. The thing is, I really want to help people love themselves and it's just more effective to start with food. Most everyone likes food, whereas not everyone likes exercise --yet.

So I'll keep looking. I just really want to do something I love and I also really want to live in a city because, let's be honest, I miss roommates and I miss boys. And I want that city and that job to be awesome enough to hold my attention for a few years, because otherwise I start to feel unbearably flighty and might do something drastic like move to Alaska. Or Spain.

Anyway, for now I'm here and that's good. And by this time next week I'll have started class again and will also have started a cool social marketing project at the department of health. Tune in next time... :)