"The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n." -John Milton
Dear Internauts,
This week I surprised myself. Turns out I can handle a job far better than I thought. To go from a place where my job was killing me, and I literally would have killed myself had I stayed, to this place where I'm just as competent as anybody else (or near enough for the task), seems even now like an impossible journey. The way is winding, I've gotten turned around more than once, and the holes I can recall each looked darker than the last. Still, just as I came back to Massachusetts when I did because I knew there would never be a perfect time for a change, plunging right into this full time cycle after so long between day jobs is maybe the only way I could do it. There's no ladder. You're gon' hafta jump!
Okay, so the first two days doing back-breaking physical labor in the warehouse took all the strength I had both to lift hundreds of boxes and buckets but also not to snap at being called Big Guy the whole time by a superior who refused to learn our names. Thankfully, the manager noticed how much of an insurance risk it would be to continue allowing this weakling to keep carrying things and shifted me over to operations. (Being a temp is kinda like being a special worker, so I'm gonna say it's Special Ops.) Basically, filing orders for flowers and answering the phone.
Now, as you may know, my experience with customer service has historically been on the spectrum between bad times and end times level disastrous. Thankfully, most of the calls are from our delivery drivers just wanting to speak to someone in the office. Though I have gotten a few from disgruntled call center employees or customers who couldn't find their own front door.
Work is, of course, like the most boring, mind-numbing parts of school, but instead of getting graded, you're in constant threat of just getting kicked out. Whoever came up with, "if you've got time to lean, you've got time to clean" is a fascist, obviously, but let's be honest here: my manager hasn't yelled at me once and at the end of the day I help make people's days a little brighter. For those points alone, this job beats most if not all others I've had—at least the ones that pay money for my labor.
I'm trying to spend some time when I can to keep working on my novel and play guitar. I can put so much work into a drawing or a page or a song and it does feel like exertion, but it's fulfilling and almost satisfying when I know I'm doing well at it. In a weird sense of kaleidoscopic existentialism, I feel more real to myself when I'm creating. It can be a real challenge to find the mental and emotional energy after spending all day around other people in a stressful environment, but if I don't find it, I'll never make anything. And life is honestly not worth living without art. I know other people have their own ways of juggling through existence, but for me there is zero fulfillment in just laboring for money.
Grown up on lessons that "money isn't everything" or "money can't buy happiness," I only now begin to see what a place of privilege those well-intentioned themes sprang. See, I'm living so much off the generosity of family right now and have for so long, that it is a tumult of a thought to think that some day I won't be such a burden on others, despite their insistence they're happy to help. I've known some independence before, and that's what a more steady job and its wages mean, besides simply the aspects of survival such an independence would require.
I truly miss Nashville, and the person I was, and the people I knew. Like all the friends I used to have around Boston, though, it feels like a world and a life belonging to a complete stranger. I suppose we don't reinvent ourselves as often as we did when we were kids, but in other ways we never really stop, do we? The idea that people don't change is, to me, an utter sham. We must and do change all the time.
Of course, wherever you go, you gotta take yourself along. A change of scenery can't solve and hasn't solved my problems nor made me healthier or more "normal". However, it has forced me to just get up and deal with parts of life that would appear entirely foreign and impossible to the me who hid down in that basement several years ago. I don't think he was a coward, and I wouldn't call him weak.
Anyone who's face trauma and/or mental illness knows it can take a kind of miraculous strength simply to breathe steady or perform the most basic functions of living. It's not a matter of flipping a switch or taking a pill or picking up responsibilities to receive instant clarity. The demons in my head still roll and rumble, but I can at least say now that their snarling is not the only sound I hear.
I'm exhausted and about to start an even busier week with longer hours. However, as I tell myself every morning before I step out of my car—their stress does not have to be my own. All I have to do is what I choose to do. Just because someone else is freaking out, even if it's directed at me, doesn't mean that I have to freak out. It does no good to think I owe others some level of self-hate, whether they be long lost friends whom I miss so much or some a-hole with a power complex at work.
I don't know who I am. I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know much of anything, but I know this–
People change all the time. It's okay to be fluid.
Thanks for reading,
Odist
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