Still sitting on the runway.

A few months ago, my bro Mark was feeling particularly downtrodden about his life. Like many of us do from time to time, he went into his office and vented his frustrations with his colleagues.

"Do you ever feel like the joy has just been sucked out of your life?" he asked them. "What am I doing here?" he brooded.

Of course, Mark's office is an after school day care center for middle school children, and his colleagues are 10-12 year olds.

An autistic girl laughed at him. That was all the insight they could provide him.

There was a line that I wanted to write here, but I removed for fear of distastefulness and loss of employment. I think "for fear of distastefulness and loss of employment" has destroyed any atrophied writing ability I had left.

The line was: "Well fuck you, too."

At this point, I'm all out of distractions. I go on Facebook and look at old friends, classmates, and colleagues and where they're going in their lives. Their grad schools, their new jobs, their new cities, their -- God help me -- marriages. At once I am filled with both condescension for the banal paths they have chosen as well as envy for the direction they have found and progress they have made.

And yet here I live, in their world. What am I doing here? Where am I going? And why, five years out of college, am I still asking the same questions?

Since childhood, I have been marked with the curse of potential. When you're young, you're tall, and you speak coherently, people tend to expect things out of you. My first job out of high school was for this sales firm selling Cutco knives, still the best cutlery I've ever used and a luxury that I wouldn't waste money on if I were 1991 MC Hammer-rich. We interviewed as a group, and I was in the first pair selected and hired. After my first all-hands meeting at the company, they tapped me to be part of the key employees group to lead and mentor other employees. It's fair to say they had some expectations for me.

A few years later, I found out my friend Gerald from college also sold these knives for a summer, made thousands of dollars, and, with proceeds from his other jobs that summer, bought his first BMW. Let me tell you how my only two sales went. First I gave my entire long presentation to a friend's mom. She wasn't interested. Her husband came home around then, took a look at the knives, and bought two without listening to a thing I said. The second and last sale I made was the fire sale I had trying to get rid of my stock about 10 days after I started. I worked at Old Navy the rest of the summer.

Here's what I learned from that experience. If you think it's stupid for someone to pay $760 for a fucking box of knives, Cutco's standard set at the time, you're probably not going to convince anybody to do so. Whatever I've been trying to sell myself about my career and my future for the last five years of my life, I've been doing it with the same disbelief that I had trying to convince middle-class Ohio housewives they needed $760 knives. I'm not buying it.

At a certain point in life, all the potential everyone had once seen in you becomes overshadowed by the reality of your production. I am well passed that point, and my list of accomplishments is noticeably empty, even if my resume appears filled with experience.

That will change. Soon.