As soon as I try to type out a thought, it gets scrambled.
For whom am I even trying to type it out? Me? You? Are you me, or am I you? Bhahaha that’s really dumb. But really, target audience is…. whoever happens to be reading it, that’s as specific as I can get unfortunately.
And why am I even trying to type it out? Who or what is this supposed to serve? I guess ultimately that would be my Self. I am doing this because I am suffering, and I am desperately grasping at inner peace. This seems like a odd way to go about that, but it’s less about a bid for blogosphere fame and more about full expression of authentic self. That’s the goal, anyway, we’ll see how successful I’ll be at that. Like everyone else, I have a tendency to let my ego weasel its way into my thoughts and actions too. It will be obvious when that happens, to you the reader of course, not to I the author. If it was obvious to me I would quash it, right? Ok going too far with this…
Why the blog then? Why can’t I just fully express my true and authentic self to the real-world instead of the internet-world. Well I do try that too, but I get frustrated. I’ve been having a very hard time figuring out how being my authentic self can actually help me pay the bills. I am an adult now, technically, I am trying to start a family, I have to bring in some coin to participate in society. Is my authentic self valuable to society? I have had jobs, you might even say an attempt at a career, but I have had little success. I stayed in the lines and went to university, graduated, got a job that was just fine but not terribly fulfilling. I stayed there a year and then left for grad school. I did well in my courses, opted to write a thesis for my masters degree, did… not super great on my thesis but good enough to pass. I really hoped to stay on the project and redeem myself to my Self by kicking ass on a PhD dissertation. It didn’t work out, I got stuck, didn’t know how to move the project along into something worth publishing. My advisor tried but he didn’t know how to un-stick me either. So I left. I got a job that I liked for a small company, but there too, I struggled to contribute equal value to what I cost the company in salary. I did some things very well, but the things that mattered, that counted toward my own growth and the growth of the company, pushing through them felt like swimming through molasses (which is also how one of my first therapists phrased how depression feels, going through life day-to-day is like swimming through molasses…). I left that company after finding what I was sure to be the answer to my career difficulties: a job, nearly exactly in a field I wanted to work in, in a city that my then long-distance girlfriend could move to without major career interruptions of her own. So I gave my two-weeks and moved north, far north by my standards. If I hadn’t left that company then I imagine I would have been fired after not too long anyway, but I had high hopes for the new gig.
I’m going to try to wrap this up, I have other shit to do today. Basically, at this new job, I was struggling yet again. I was working my ass off, long days at the office, then I would come home and work more. I tried so goddamn hard to provide value to the company, but the long hours I put in was not recognized as value, just a lot of time without much to show for it. But I was learning! I was improving! I started to realize how much I was letting myself get distracted away from the task and its deliverables toward trying to define processes and methods of getting to the deliverables, which truthfully were not nearly as important as the deliverables themselves, and if they are important it would be recognized that way by the company and the company would launch an initiative to define them. That became clear and I was fully on-board for it; it came as an a-ha moment, totally crystal. I started pushing through my tasks in well under the time estimates, and turning in high-quality deliverables to boot! But the decision had been made weeks before, and I was fired nonetheless. Eighteen months I spent there.
After leaving I recognize that it was not a great environment anyway, upper management sold themselves as caring and supportive, but then they spent all day running around like the sky was falling (at least that’s how one of our former co-op students put it when I ran into him recently). They also sold themselves as having a “mistakes happen as a team and we fix them as a team” attitude, but they spent a lot of time and energy blaming and guilting people who they perceived as being solely responsible for deficiencies or mistakes (not just me, everybody made mistakes, even the high-ups, but they never saw it as a team effort, it was always somebody’s fault).
That last paragraph might have just been my ego making my Self feel better about my own faults, but there is enough truth in it for it not to be totally dismissed.
So anyway, where am I now? Unemployed, draining my severance, applying for unemployment benefits, applying for jobs, losing my hair, trying to keep my relationship from crumbling, feeling like a square peg in a round hole, wondering if I will ever be successful at work given the repeating pattern of failure, flabbergasted that I’m struggling to be successful knowing that I can actually do a lot of things really fucking well, honestly.
Ah, that’s the point of all this. I can do a lot of things really fucking well, but damn if it ain’t tough to demonstrate that to the world or leverage what talents I do have to support myself financially. So I thought that I would just throw my Self out there, do the things that I am naturally inclined to do, show them to whoever cares to look, and hope that somewhere along the way I find where I fit in this world.
Annnddddd publish!