Last night I dreamed that I was organizing a river cruise in the mountains. This was triggered by a number of external factors, as was the overall mood of the dream.
In the dream, many of my best friends had supporting roles…though I’m not completely sure how supportive they all were.
One bought me plane tickets to fly back to the mountains….but the plane crash landed.
Another friend was giving me a ride from the airport to the port in her car…but ran into an electric pole.
Shaken, but unharmed, I Ubered on….until we were held up by a train wreck.
Eventually I made it to the boat. A Bon Voyage party was held to celebrate my survival, arrival, and the upcoming voyage. Well wishes abounded. It was going to be a grand old time, a fascinating new adventure…the ship listed starboard, capsized, sank. Caught in the bubble of air, like the Poseidon survivors, I took a deep breath, broke a window, and found myself too deep in the water to make it back to the surface.
I woke up then to the peaceful, yet somehow ear-grating midi tune, Maple, of my phone’s alarm.
My career path seems to have been a plane crash, followed by a car accident, delayed by a train wreck. Now here I am, 36 years old, still completely lost about what I want to be when I grow up, starting a blog, and hoping that it isn’t a sinking ship.
My mother always instilled in me a sense that I could do anything, and be anything that I wanted when I grew up. The problem is that I agreed, but could never figure out what that anything is. Then, in high school, when I realized that I was gay, I did some research on what my statistical life expectancy was. At the time, with the AIDS epidemic still not far in the past, and homosexuality being the cause of disproportional number of teen suicides, along with the internet being too new to have a great many sources to consult, I found the average life span of uncloseted gay men was 35 years.
Now this information might have been complete bunk. It probably was. But I read it, and as a young impressionable 17 year old it stuck, and it changed me in ways that I am still fighting to get over. Suddenly I thought, “well I have +/-20 more years to do everything I want to do. I best get to it!” The first thing that had to go was plans of being a doctor, or lawyer, or architect, or anything that would take a decade in school. That would be half the time gone! I settled into a mindset that it didn’t matter if I was stuck in retail drudgery forever, because, hey, it was only 20 years anyway!
Whatever job I found, I did, and I did it (like everything else in my life) to the best of my abilities (a.k.a. well). Need a sales clerk? Done! Need a pharmacy technician? Done! Need a Chef? Done! Need a Purchasing and Facilities Manager? Done! Need a Regional Manager? Done! Need an Uber Driver? Done! Need someone to paint your house? Done! Need someone to install a light switch? Done! Need someone to fix your boat? Done! You name it…
Here came THIRTY FIVE rolling in like an Indian train fire! And what was I doing? Laying pennies on the track. When it hit me, I was unemployed, so completely broke that I was preparing to be homeless, with a substance abuse issue, looking around wondering why the Hell had I outlived my time. I was so depressed that even suicide seemed like too much work.
Then I got a job.
I wanted to work. I wanted to work so bad that, despite this retail pharmacy job seeming like punishment for all the bad things I had done in this life and the last one, I was so grateful to have to go to work that I said a prayer of thanksgiving every time a patient went ape shit on us because it took four hours to fill their prescriptions, every time I was called in to work on my day off, every time I was asked to stay late. In short I said the shehecheyanu three times a day, every day.
Then new management came and the job became a normal nightmare retail pharmacy job instead of the abject misery that it had been. I was beyond grateful for the breather, we all were, but just like the self flagellating monks, I had gained some amount of atonement and spiritual self-satisfaction from torture, and now it was gone.
Six months of this normal feeling of not wanting to go to work today had me realize that I really didn’t want being a pharmacy technician suck away any more of my soul than I had allowed it to do over the last 12 years. It is a good job. It pays…well. It has some amount of social esteem even. I even once felt like I was helping people. Being sick is tough. I know. Helping people with the difficult transition, and the difficulties involved with the transition from sick to well, is very satisfying. More and more, however I find myself padding the pockets of big drug companies, and the corporate beast that is my employer, and less helping people. My job has me so occupied trying to upsale, and trying to meet their ridiculous rubrics, that I rarely have time, or am able, to actually help a person even find where the baby aspirin is, let alone help them get well.
Clearly, the time for me to move on has come, but money doesn’t fall from trees, and I’m still as clueless as ever as to what it is that I want to do, so I stay. I’ve always heard the adage that you should do what you enjoy and the money will come to you. :::coughbullshitcough::: The things I love in this world are food, travel, photography, meeting people, experiencing new things, sex, entertaining, learning, and more now than ever before in my life I feel drawn to writing….so here I am…starting a blog.
I don’t know that I thought that this would be easy…but I didn’t expect it to be quite so complicated. And I don’t have a clue how it could ever make me a dime at it but here we go. I’m going to call my dream a “manifestation of my fears” and not “a prescient vision” and hope I enjoy this pleasure cruise.
WELCOME ABOARD!!