Is There Something I Should be Doing?

"I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet." ~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Chapter 7

Missed opportunity is nothing next to all the opportunities laid aside when the time comes to choose.
No one says it quite like Plath.
This quote spoke to me deeply in high school. Emerging from my parents' home and from the school system that raised me, I had the entire world at my feet. All I had to do was choose where I wanted to be and set the goals to get there.
I wanted to be an artist, a writer, a teacher, a psychologist, an historian.
I damn near threw it all away when I chose not to be lonely and marry my ex-husband instead.
Apparently I never had to worry about the figs rotting before I made up my mind; I had to worry about my inability to delay gratification.
Always I was worried about living my life and making a choice that would negate all the rest.
That is what is called "All-or-Nothing" thinking.
A person is made up of many parts.
I have found that I can teach, write, paint, date, analyze people and events all I want to, all at once.
No, my current weakness is procrastination.
I've heard it called fear.
Fear of what?
Both failure and success, they say.
I'm not afraid.
It's not really so much that I procrastinate as it is that I am easily distracted from my goals. I tend to be obsessive. If it's the novel I'm working on, then that's all I do for days, forgetting to eat and losing all kinds of sleep.
Delayed gratification is still an issue, for I'd rather write, for example, than fill out one single more extensive online application for a petty job somewhere working outside my area of expertise for a salary that wouldn't keep a hole in the ground.
And yet one more pointless job pays the rent and keeps me living in that hole instead of on the street.
This is the week of job applications and home hunting.
Next week I must concentrate on packing for the home that I don't have that I can't have until I get the job that I don't have.
Right now I can either research more jobs or go to bed.