When I was 27, I hit the quarter life crisis thing pretty hard (which is funny cause I’m not exactly expecting to live to 128). It was also the year my best friend and I jumped out of a plane because I thought, if we die, I don’t have to figure out what I want to do.

We lived.

I didn’t exactly figured out what to do. I stayed on ships a little more than another year and then joined a circus.

Maybe I’m not the most decisive person about my own life. I sort of just wander. It seems to have worked out mostly ok.

Well today I would like to ponder the idea of a 1/3 life crisis? Also not that I expect to live to 108 either, but still.

I’m sure this is also a little pandemic fueled because in a pandemic free world, I would just be off somewhere stage managing something and too busy to sit around and wonder what I should be doing.

I’ve spent the last few weeks in a very empty Outerbanks town and one of my goals was to clear my head and figure out what on earth I want to be doing.

I feel like I’ve just been treading water for 9 months.

I also know my main goal is to not live with my dad, but even that just opens up more questions. I was trying to buy a house before the pandemic.

But will work be as reliable as it has been the last few years for the next few?

I have a totally unscientific gut feeling that it may not.

So then do I keep on this path of trying to buy a house, which comes with the knowledge that I have to make X amount of money a year and that I need to be in it sometimes to make sure it hasn’t burnt to the ground or been overrun with squirrels or… whatever you need to check in a house.

It limits some of my ability to travel. Not a ton I can still do a few weeks or even a month or two places, but I don’t think I should like… go to China for two years or anything like that. And what if that’s the only place there’s work for the next few years?

That’s probably unlikely… but I’m spiraling out a bit, friends.

So then do I just rent somewhere? And where do I even rent? I had planned to buy down by Atlantic City. Do I rent down there? My family lives up by Newark. Do I rent up there?

Can I be an AirBnB vagabond and just wander America month by month? …this is kind of appealing.

But then also what am I doing with my life?

I made three columns on my pros and cons list.

Stage Managing, School, Corporate

If school weren’t ungodly expensive, it would probably win. I liked teaching. I would like to be able to do it again further down the line. I need a terminal degree.

There are not a lot of funded theater doctoral programs. And I’m pretty sure in my last two attempts at applying to doctoral programs, I applied to all of them and did not get in. I love failing at things.

If I have to actually pay for the whole thing, it makes sense to go back to England, but either way I slice it, it’s looking like close to $100,000 to do this.

And while an M.F.A. seems fun and interesting because who doesn’t like talking about stage management, it also seems like I’m paying an awful lot of money to learn how to do what I already do while losing out on three years of just doing the thing.

And it’s not much cheaper than a doctorate.

And I totally shouldn’t buy a house. Actually, if I decided to just never buy a house, then I could use house money for this and I would probably graduate with only a little debt. But that would put me back a square one of saving for a down payment at 40.

Stage managing is what I guess I would prefer to be doing, but who knows when those jobs will start happening again. And what the pay will be like at them. And how many there will be.

But it was the only job on the list that got the bullet point that it makes me happy.

This also doesn’t solve the house conundrum. Actually, picking this path tells me I should keep it together and stay with my dad until the world reopens.

Or hop from long term AirBnB to AirBnB. So maybe that.

And then there’s corporate. The company I freelance for offered me a full time job a week ago and I nearly had a panic attack. I’ve never turned something down so fast. Being chained to a desk is just… not an option.

I’m already going a little nuts that both of my jobs require hours and hours of just staring at a computer screen.

But in its current freelance version, this corporate job is not terrible and if I were still doing it when the world reopens, I could do it and travel, which would be pretty cool. It’s also incredibly flexible.

I’m also aware that every time I’ve tried to do something corporate, I’ve been so miserable that I only lasted a few months before quitting. I don’t even do as well in large corporate theater structures compared to more freelance ventures.

I am so tired of all this and I have no idea what to do.

Someone just decide for me?