They say guys don’t stop to ask for directions. I’m not sure if it’s because of my gender, but I think I’m lost.

For the first time in my life, I’m questioning just how the hell I got to where I am. It’s as if I woke up one day and everything changed. It’s surreal.

Everyone has seen one of those nauseating Hollywood movies that contain the scene where the protaganist wakes up, hits a metaphorical wall, steps back and muses out loud, “How did I end up here?” With a cinematic montage resembling a near-death experience, a visual summation in fast forward of childhood through adulthood memories, complete with a soft-photo effect. Problem is, as cheesy and modeled as it seems, that’s what is going on with me right now.

The past day or so I have felt like an alien. Outside the comfortable boundaries of established routines, far from feeling “planted” or even having anything resembling traction in my life, I’m off balance. I wake up in the middle of the night disoriented and not knowing where I am. I sit in my new office, on someone else’s computer with someone else’s boss down the hall. My days are spent in a complete fog, disconnected from everything (including emotions). It’s as if I’m acting a part, living someone else’s life. None of this belongs to me.

With every other aspect of my life being so planned and logical, it seems reasonable that this life change could very well be the first time that I’ve really questioned what I’ve done. To be honest, every other life change I’ve passed through (going to high school, going to college, first job) was almost pre-planned. They all seemed natural. It’s not as if I wouldn’t go to high school. Everyone at my high school goes to college. Even finding my first job was almost a joke because it was at the same school I graduated from…nothing unfamiliar or scary in the slightest.

But with my decision to leave, my decision to quit my job and move to another state all together…this was perhaps the first time I’ve directly dictated the direction of my future. And frankly, that scares me. Not because I’m not sure if I made the correct choice, but rather that I’ve accepted every other fork in the road with such passivity and blaisé nonchalance. Have my eyes been asleep in childlike blind acceptance for 24 straight years? Why does it feel as if I’ve been completely blind to every other major decision up until this point in my life? I pride myself on the conscious act of choosing, respecting choice as one of the most powerful tools we’re given as humans. What the hell is going on?

Perhaps this change is merely masquerading itself as something larger, something more significant, because of the convergance with other changes in my life (marriage?). I’m not sure. But this simple act of quitting, moving and finding a new job has poked a red-hot iron into my psyche that I never expected.

I think the final reduction of all of this, again, is simply that I do not deal well with change.