The world can be so full of surprises. It can also be full of the mundane. Wake up, go to work, take lunch, go back to work, go home, make dinner, do dishes (for those that do that right after dinner, I don’t), maybe watch a show, go to bed, wake up do it all over again. And if you’re lucky, you have someone by your side who loves you through all of it, a kid, a lover, a friend, a dog….someone. I’ve been lucky to have always been surrounded by people who love me and people who accept me for who I am, good and bad. Sometimes I’m more good than bad. Sometimes vice versa. I’ve never fit into a box. I’ve never been content. I’ve always been looking for ……something……something else. I’ve been a job hopper for as long as I can remember. I get depressed in the winter and eat myself sick then complain in the Spring about how fat I got while I was depressed. I love my kids dearly and think they are truly the only important things in life, but contentment has never come easy to me. Most people, from a young age, know exactly what they want to be when they grow up. I never really did. I wanted to be a dancer. I wanted to be a video girl. I wanted to be a Rockette. I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be a teacher. I never wanted to be a mom. It was never something I ever imagined. I wouldn’t even babysit when I was younger. My mom would have to force me to go with my sister on her babysitting gigs and I bitched the whole time. I hated kids. Until I had kids. Then, when I had kids, what I wanted to do and be, became less important. I didn’t have any dreams anymore besides giving my kids everything they needed to be successful human beings. When I say successful, I don’t mean riches. I mean successful in being happy, decent human beings. So I raised kids. And I worked for people. And I was always happy at first but then quickly bored. I’ve never had a job for more than a couple years. I’ve never had a relationship for more than a couple years. I’ve never lived in the same house for more than a couple years.(Geez, I think this is going to take way more than one blog to explore)
I think I mentioned this before…. I had a therapist once tell me that the common denominator in all my failed relationships (personal and professional) was me. I was offended at first, but he’s the professional. He went to school to give this kind of $200 per hour advice. So I listened and I tried to figure out what it was about me that made me such a failure in these areas. I’ve yet to figure it out, but I have stopped calling myself a failure in these things. It’s not fair to me or at least I don’t think it is. The work (failure) thing seems to be my strong willed beliefs and principles most of the time. I would say that’s the conflict 75% of the time. I start working for a place that I believe is doing good work and then after working there for a while, it turns out it was all smoke and mirrors to the general public and things are never what they seem. The other 25% of my business failings is working for people that either have no business sense (like my most recent endeavor) and ask for my help but then refuse to do what needs to be done to be successful or I just have a tendency to see things differently and in a way that apparently makes people feel stupid or intimidated by me (also what happened during my most recent endeavor). It’s not that I do any of it intentionally. I just do what needs to be done and I do it effectively without regard to people’s sensitivities. So I guess it is 100% my fault that I am not content working for people. The problem is that I don’t see this ever changing. I don’t think I will ever be happy or content working for someone else. Kymani Marley said in his book, Dear Dad, “What would you look like living the life that Jah Almighty gave you and you alone, but living that life on someone else’s terms and vision? If you do that, God just wasted a lifetime, giving it to you when you’re just going to give it away to another man’s vision. What’s the use of two of you if the two of you can only think and do one way? That makes one of you unnecessary.” And as I worked my last “job” helping this man try to get his business straight while getting fired once a month for hurting his feelings by being brutally honest about the way he handles business, this quote kept popping up over and over and over and over again in my mind. What was I doing with my life. The pay was good. I was semi-content. I hated the 40 minute commute, but the job kept me busy and never bored. There was a time in my life when I said, if you are going to pay me shit wages, then please at least be nice to me. If you want to pay me extra to treat me like shit, that’s cool. And I thought I meant it when I said it, but when my last “boss” so unprofessionally told me to “eat shit” and that I didn’t need to come in on Monday all because I told him that he underbid a job and it was 2pm on a Saturday afternoon and I clocked out at noon and we could talk Monday, I realized that maybe all the money in the world was not worth being verbally abused on a regular basis at work. And even though he knew he was wrong after he calmed down and realized he needed me there, he still would not apologize. And I couldn’t bring myself to stay. Maybe I’m a little sensitive too and not so forgiving no matter what the payscale is. So here I am, without a “job” trying to figure out my next move. Until Tomorrow…..
RouletteWeekend 