I have been in the 'working' world for more than 27 years. In that time I have worked for 10 companies. The experience ranges from youth coach to web consultant with desktop support thrown in just to keep it interesting. I have worked for city and county agencies, the federal government, private mom & pop companies, and corporate American. Know what they all had in common?
They never captured my imagination. I worked because I had to. I worked because I was supposed to. (Well, except for the coaching job. That one was fun.) I worked because at that time I didn’t know that I was free to create my own reality.
One of the absolute truths about humans is that you can't make them give you 100%. Especially if they are doing something that they have to do. I am no exception. How many jobs have you ever had that you gave all you had on a daily basis? For years?
I gave a lot of myself at first. I gave heart, emotion, energy, loyalty and most importantly I gave my time. (The only thing there isn't much of.) I trusted that what I was told was true, and I did my best to help add to the overall apparent facade of the company. I’ve told blatant lies to people to help toe the company line. I’ve had to correct the thinking of people who have been sold a bill of goods from sales reps who couldn’t care less if the product was needed.
And in all that time, I never really paid attention to how I felt about it.
Jimmy Buffett has a simple answer to the question of ‘What do you want to do with your life? In his book “A Pirate looks at Fifty” he states that after being raised in a fairly claustrophobic catholic school environment his answer was kind of a no-brainer. What kind of life did he want to live?
A pretty interesting one.
Okay, let’s back up and recap a bit. I have lived in Germany, Spain, Korea, and Honduras. I have eaten food that I couldn’t identify while sitting on the veranda of a restaurant in Costa Brava (wow, the sights on the beach in that place…). I have driven a 15 ton truck loaded with several million dollars of military hardware on a road as wide as a goat trail while insane South Koreans zipped their tiny little cars under me like I wouldn’t squash them to paste. And although I have never fired a weapon in anger at another human being, I know that under the right circumstances, my reaction would be instinctive and deadly.
While those events were wonderful and exciting while they were happening, they are in the past. It’s been any number of years since I have done real traveling. My jobs have been pretty sedentary and so limited in pay that traveling to the far corners of the Earth became a sick joke. That’s mostly my own fault. I accepted jobs that paid well, but had precious little else going for them. My fucked up desire to save everyone kept me in the customer service arena way past the point of sanity. Now, after 25 years of jobs answering calls from phone loads of people screaming at me, I won’t even touch the phone in my house. It could be two inches from my ear and I will ignore it. To be honest, I think that I could survive just fine without a phone at all. So long as I have email I am just fine. I don’t feel any pressing need to talk to people, but I do love to write.
I've written about a dozen short stories (or pieces of stories). I have 4 novels in various states of completetion. I have begun creating podcasts episodes of one and I'm struggling to finish another one before this years NaNoWriMo. Oh and I am doing NaNo again this year. I may not make it all the way through, but I intend to try. I've never stopped writing, but I have gotten in my own way so often its frightening. But one thing is very true, I have NEVER stopped believing that one day I would succeed.
It didn't stop me from putting my own dreams on hold on a dozen occasions. Jobs, kids, moving from state to state, a divorce, a marriage, alcohol, a brain aneurysm, accepting a bad job, quitting a bad job, falling off the back of a wrecker truck and bouncing off of my head - just a few of the events that I used as excuses to stop. And I do mean excuses. Despite the fact that I recognize my failings, I still do it on a regular basis. Excuses are easy, pages of text are hard...
So, all of that brings me back to my central point. Why is it that I was so willing to be productive for others and managed to spend the last 25 years ignoring my own needs? I’ve been told by those wiser than me in the ways of the world, that there’s nothing special about what’s happened to me over the years. ‘The Universe doesn’t care.’ was the mantra. While I understand and agree that the Universe doesn’t care, the knowledge doesn’t fill me with hope that giving all of my time to someone else is healthy or wise. In fact it makes me pretty sure that this is nothing less than a psychotic attempt to hide who I am from who I should be.
So far as I know we only get to go round this existence once. Since I am a fan of science fiction and fantasy novels, I tend to want to believe that things like reincarnation and living forever just might be possible. But lacking evidence I have to bow to conventional wisdom.
One go ‘round. Now that’s a truly scary concept. At some point along this time line there will be no more ‘me’. All that I knew will end.
I remember standing on my grandfathers’ grave more than 13 years ago and realizing that all that was left of the man who shaped a good portion of the good in me was a collection of bones, skin and bugs. The ‘man’ who taught me to pay attention to the world around me so that I wouldn’t miss anything was gone. It also occurred to me that despite what he taught me, everything that made up ‘him’ had gone with him and guess what sports fans…it will happen to me too.
I stood there on that little grass hill and had a fucking epiphany. Perhaps the logic is flawed, but it’s what went through my head. Nothing, and I mean nothing of who I am will survive me dying. It doesn’t matter how good of a job I do teaching my children to be decent human beings (who also know how to take care of themselves). It doesn’t matter if I pull my head of my ass and write 30 novels. In the end IT DOESN’T MATTER!
Cool, another case of The Universe Doesn’t Care. Okay, I can accept that. But as a living, breathing human being with an emotional and physical attachment to being alive, its shocking. Not cold water in the face shocking, more like ‘What the fuck!’ shocking.
It was that shock that got me to wondering why I seem to be unable to run my own business well enough to support my family. What in the world is left that is so much more important than my own ability to be honest to myself? What, I owe some employer more than I owe my wife or children? More than I owe myself? Fuck that.
I suppose that’s an answer in itself. It’s easier to put my own needs to the side in favor of someone else because it’s safer to deal with other peoples shit. I get to spend less time in my own head. Trust me, my head is a scary place filled with knives, daggers and other sharp objects. It’s not a comfy vacation spot.
Despite the disconnect that this way of thinking eventually leads to, it’s less taxing. Less emotion to have to deal with and to me that’s a good thing. I’ve never been comfortable with my own emotions. Thinking that and realizing how many people I know that flee to drugs and alcohol makes me realize that I’m not alone in this. I only know two people who are truly trying to make their lives measurably better by dealing with the programming that they’ve been dealt. They have made just enough progress to be considered abnormal by people who don’t know them.
The problem is, it took me years to end up like this, but I don't necessarily have years to fix it. If I ever want to get to Alaska, it's going to take a massive effort now. A complete retooling of who I am.
At least the answers are coming now. Maybe the tunnel isn’t quite as dark as I thought.
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