I was a clueless twentysomething

While talking about World of Warcraft's 20th anniversary, I've been finding myself thinking back to my university years (since I was in my early twenties when I first started playing WoW), which is a time period I generally avoid thinking about.

In many ways those years were good times - I made friends online who actually shared my nerdy interests for the first time, and I got to visit different countries across Europe because of that. I was also still living with my mother and generally pretty carefree in terms of everyday things I had to worry about. However, over all of that loomed the shadow of causing parental disappointment and being filled with existential dread.

You see, I was the Austrian equivalent of a straight A student, always succeeding at everything in school without having to put too much effort in. Then I graduated from high school and life suddenly got complicated, because I was supposed to pursue a career, and one that required a university degree please, as my mother - like so many well-meaning middle-class parents - obviously only wanted the best for her daughter.

The problem was that I didn't just lack ambition, I was utterly clueless about how life outside school was supposed to work. I didn't even have a clear concept of what it meant to have a full-time job, because my mother had been a housewife for all my life and my dad had retired when I was still very young, so they were both home all day. I mean, I knew logically that generally people had to go to work at some point to earn money, but I didn't really understand what that meant in terms of your everyday life. I just wanted to continue to be told what to do every day and then be praised if I did it well - which, ironically, is an attitude that actually meshes quite well with being a good little capitalist worker drone, but I didn't know that at the time either.

All I remember is being taken to various fairs and taking various quizzes to help with career choice, but never truly coming away with anything useful. In the end I tried my hand at studying some subjects that kinda interested me at uni, but I always felt miserable there, which is quite a contrast to the many comments I've heard about university being "the best time of your life" or whatever. I was not really prepared for the degree of self-sufficiency that many courses seemed to require, and without being given explicit homework every week, I just did nothing most of the time (because at school just doing what I was told had served me more than well enough).

The one bright spot in all of this is that at least access to university in Austria is quite cheap, so all of this didn't set me back financially. I didn't even understand the concept of "saving for your children's eduction" or student loans until I got to know people from the UK and US.

Anyway, I kind of dragged myself along at university for several years, until I suffered a bit of a mental breakdown one day from the constant pressure of lack of direction, fear of disappointing my mother and deep unhappiness about my time spent at university being so utterly overwhelming. This resulted in my mother taking me to a counselling session, the main takeaway of which was that it was okay not to get a degree if I didn't want one and then led to me dropping out of uni.

A few more uneasy months followed during which I still didn't know what to do, until getting a new boyfriend gave me a goal to work towards (earning enough money to be able to move to the UK) and I took on a job in a bakery. I remember my mother was kind of surprised how well I got on with menial work, even if that job had issues of its own. However, I was glad to finally be doing something at a level that I understood (come in and do what you're told, then you can go home and forget about it for the rest of your day) and that didn't require me to have some deep and meaningful investment in the notion of a "career".

But yeah, that's why thinking back to my twenties is still somewhat painful to me sometimes. I just can't remember the good times with my friends without also recalling that looming shadow of dread cast by the question of "what do you want to do with your life" and having no idea what to answer or even how to come up with one.