Questioning

I'm not exactly sure how I ended up in this position in life, teaching at a university. I'm trying to remember who I was when I started all this. I think I was pursuing graduate school for the wrong reasons. I think I had some idealized notion of what being a professor would be like. I wanted the prestige, the freedom to pursue intellectual interests, the autonomy. Now that I have grown older and changed bit by bit, I'm not entirely sure whether this is what I want anymore. In a sense, this is what I want. But, the ideal never matches reality. The ideal never was, and may never be. The reality consists of too much teaching and not enough research. I had some hyped up image of myself as a researcher when in reality most of what I've done is very amateur-ish. And my teaching has lots of room for improvement. I used to think that if I found what I was supposed to do in life that it would come easy, and I'd be very good at it. Would something else be easier, more fulfilling, and more enjoyable? Do I need to change my attitude so that I don't feel pangs of anxiety surrounding my job or do I need to change my career choice to something less anxiety-provoking? Sigh, or maybe I haven't found my niche in academe yet...it could take years to find that.