When life goes wooosh... 9-5 SUX!

I feel like it's been a year since my last post. I also feel like my life has gone whoosh. There has been so much change and intensity swirling around me, and this shifting of things (internally and externally), this path I’m on, appears to have such a forward force to it, with no letting up in sight anytime soon, that I’m not sure if I’ve got up from down back into my knowing yet or if I even will get a balance on things for a while.

As a side note: You might recall that I disclaimed some time ago that I wasn’t going to be freaky-vigilant when it comes to spelling errors and/or mis-grammared spots in this blog. That still holds true. My continued apologies for that, for what will inevitably be some mis-spelled/mis-grammed doozies to come, and for what will likely cause your head to cock to the side as your ear reaches toward the sky and your brain goes: WHUT?!

My sincerest apologies to those folks who feel like nails are grating against a chalkboard when things are off that way and periods and commas go missing. It’ll probably hurt you more than it does me that my writing is out there, dangling, without propriety to protect and respect it and you. But, you must understand, were I to reserve the kind of diligence and energy required of a perfect blog post, and then, and only then, post, well…my blog posts would start to spread out over weeks then months (much like the efforts on my book have been). Put simply, I am lucky to get this all out right now and to get the next few posts out with what little energy I seem to have left.

Anyway, with everything, in spite of everything, going on, I haven’t stopped laughing. (You gotta laugh.) I can admit, though, that recently some of my laughs have had holes in them. Have you ever seen how the leaf of a plant looks when a caterpillar, or some creature, has been snacking on it and has left it full of holes? The plant still seems healthy enough. It’s still green. It’s still growing. (Growing is good.) Its flowers, the most vibrant representation of the plant’s life force, might even have narrowly escaped being nibbled upon. Nonetheless, something has been eating away at the plant. That’s how I feel. With everything going on it is like the winds of change and circumstance are blowing through my holes. The affect of this has me starting to sway a little differently.

This is not bad. It’s all good. Everything is good in the end, even when things get tough and tiring. But, it’s all a lot. Minus the plant analogy, and to just put it in plain English, I’m getting a bit worn down. And that’s fine. Change can take it out of anyone. Even if I am the one who invited most this change, it’s still change.

With change, things are being made different; they are being altered. And when a metamorphosis of any kind takes place, no matter how profound or seemingly insignificant, the conversion requires energy. Whether something broken is being corrected, something physical is being altered, something spiritual is being transmuted, or something conceptual is being reformulated, all the characteristics and circumstances surrounding each stage (physical, mental, or moral), are either degenerating or regenerating, or, often, they are doing both, in order for the transformation to occur. And that’s what I am feeling, the pull in many directions as some things degenerate and others reformulate.

I am especially feeling this with work. Objectively my mind is saying: Yippee! I’ve just started a new job. This is a great change! Once the exhaustion, brought on by everything that starting a new job entails, dissipates, I’ll be good. Right? All I have to do is get through the learning curve.

Hate learning curves. Hate those 3-4 months (minimum) it takes to feel effective in any new job. No one feels like they are a bad-ass the first few months and they never feel like they are kick’n any ass for at least a year. Plus, it really does take about a year to learn your job well enough and effectively enough so that you can start to figure out how not to do your job for part of the day. You know, until you can start having time to do what’s really important: Personal email checking, bill paying, errand doing, personal anything-doing. (No, not really. I’d never do anything other than work at work. I have way too amazing of a work ethic for any of that. I only mention it because I hear that’s what other people do.)

Perhaps what I love most about a new job is the inevitable stress that comes with having to prove oneself again. Yeah, that love affair, the need to affirm that you’re worth your professional salt, which is really just a variation of the learning curve, where your ego comes out to play and reminds you that it wants to get stroked (mostly, it doesn’t want to get battered or shattered) is a love affair I can do without. Toxic love. Keep it.

Frankly, I am sick of jumping through the kind of hoops you have to jump through in a new job (or at any office job). I don't want to feel like I need to be learning things better and quicker anymore so that people will see why I was hired in the first place. Plus, I just did the proving myself thing less than two years ago for my previous job. That is so not a long enough time ago to have to deal with the unavoidable humanity/ego-reality of trying to be good enough in a job situation again

Yeah, yeah. I wanted this job. I am glad I got it. But, I am still making the point, being new in a job sucks. You cannot deny that.

What should also be a lot of fun for me in the weeks to come is the re-acquiring of all the on-the-job comforts, both creature comforts and the need-this-and-that-to-do-my-job comforts. Sure, it’s just an ergo keyboard and mouse, a chair that won't hurt my back, it’s some highlighters and pens, some tape and a dispenser, a stapler and some staples, a bunch of folders and holders, and a refrigerator location for a home-packed healthy lunch, and, it’s just all the quick tools on one’s various softwares (the short cuts that took months and specific tasks to create and build-in convenience and effectiveness), but...it’s keyboard, a mouse, a chair, some highlighters and pens, some tape and a dispenser, a stapler and some staples, and a bunch of so on, that I have gotta get/find again, or ask for.

For some reason, asking for supplies as a new person in a new job is a weird, uncomfortable position to be in, at least for me it is. It's like asking people to give you stuff when it is not your birthday. Just weird. You always feel like they are going to deny you, like you don’t deserve it because it isn’t your birthday or Christmas, though I’ve rarely been denied for a work supply. So? What’s my problem?

I equate the trying to get one’s environment set up again in a new job (this whole trying to find the place where you aren’t subconsciously holding your breath on every new or same task) to be like trying to do something as simple as going pee, but, because the toilet keeps moving on you every time you try to sit down and relax to release your bladder (a very basic need), you gotta figure out how to bolt the damn toilet down so you don’t pee on your feet and/or no one sees that you had an accident all over your pants and shoes. Except, where’s the bolts? Where’s the wrench? Where’s the friggen toilet in the first place? And, oh, shit…really gotta pee now. But, can’t. Not just yet. Not conveniently. Not easily. Not automatically. Gotta get shit set up first.

New jobs also come with what I call “the exchanging of the assholes.” That’s the abridged description for saying that every place has jerks (fellow co-workers/bosses) that you have to learn to work with, or, or around. You always hope that when you switch jobs, and have to exchange your old assholes for a couple new assholes, that you loose an asshole along the way. But you never know. I’ve said it before; assholes are everywhere. No matter how positive you are or how much you look for the good in others (I’ve had my share of being called Polly sun-shine), it’s always a good thing when less assholes are around.

Unfortunately, assholes flourish where power, prestige, and the need for control exists. The partitioning of people (cubing folks off so they can pay for their life) is a perfect breeding ground. Think about it, every person who shows up for an office job, who isn’t made for it (like me) is essentially trying to make due with an environment that can be likened to the segregation/caging of animals who are waiting to die in a kill shelter.

Too harsh of a comparison? Is it? Really?

One of the good things that I am looking forward to in this new job is that I am going to be going from doing mind-numbing work that makes me want to rip my own eyeballs out (what I did in my previous position) to doing the kind of work I prefer to do, which is training work (my chosen career path). But, did you notice that I said “prefer” rather than “want’? I did.

What’s also nice is that I am not having to go through the whole health/retirement benefits change thing, as my new position is with the same place I work for now (just a different division). That’s also a little tough in some respects as I’ve also been warned about who my potential new assholes are. (Oh, help me, I am mental right now!)

What sucks is that I was told, and shown, what was to be my desk. I was supposed to get an office/window seat but ended up in the cube just outside the office that is no longer mine. I’m not a person who needs prestige. Who cares about an office? For me it was about the need for a window to help my deteriorating eyes—which are getting worse because I’ve not had a distance point to refocus on for some time now. It was also about needing the window so I don’t kill myself.

So, there’s that. Once again, just like the last year and a half, I’ve got cage walls, err, gray cube walls to serve as my view for the next…? Yup. “I got the corner office,” as they say in the movies, turned into, “Shit. I sit right outside of the office that's not mine and the dude who got this office is positioned just so, that if he looked up from his computer, in any direction, by at least a centimeter, he could watch me work all day.”

Perfect. Someone who gets to watch me slowly die. (Okay, that one was supposed to be funny.) Seriously, though, I don’t care how nice this guy is (and he seems to be a gem), I don’t want to be positioned with someone on my back for 8 hours a day. Do you?

Do you want to be in a desk where at least 10 people can watch you come and go for the day, for lunch, to go pee? Just checking. Just driving my point home.

Does it sound like I am complaining? I am. Why? Mixed feelings.

This job is everything I’ve wanted (in the 9-5 way) for the last year and a half, ever since I got the last job and realized I wasn’t actually hired to be a trainer and ever since I figured out that I was in hell because I was doing work that sucked (beyond) and doing this work for a micro-managing power mongrel who is the most insecure, lost person (who makes others miserable to make up for the self doubt and misery that he/she has obviously been plagued with) that I’ve ever worked for.

So, I figured, if I have to work, which is a necessary evil (we’ve established that), I wanted to get back to doing the work I’ve mostly enjoyed doing. If I have to fulfill the work obligations that leading a responsible life requires, and show up somewhere 8 hours a day so I can pay my rent and buy my groceries and get the f’n prescriptions my crappy genetics require me to take daily, than let me do something I am good at and let me do it in the best possible atmosphere.

But that’s not what has appeared to happen. I’m telling you, I’ve never had the experience that I had at the first day of this new job as strongly as I had it, and it had nothing to do with this job. I really did feel like a caged animal. I wanted to throw up. I am not kidding.

But, again, I’ve been feeling this way for the last five years (okay, 20 years, ever since I started working). But, this feeling, that I do not belong in a cube has gotten stronger ever since I started my book, started writing, and realized that’s what I want for me. I don’t want to fulfill the need to sustain my life by working at a 9-5 office job. This signing up, doing what’s necessary, has been slowly choking me. On the first day of this new job, I felt like the noose got so tight I couldn’t breath.

I guess that’s one of the advantages of 40 years. You know the difference between first day jitters and an epiphany. I’ve had first day jitters. I’ve written the book on first days, and first weeks, and new jobs, and… With five layoffs under my belt and just as many crappy bosses that I’ve started new jobs to get away from, I know jitters.

This wasn’t jitters. It’s not just the work or the bad bosses anymore or being in a cube where some dude can stare at me all day. It’s not even an inability to accept the necessary illusions in life, such as working for a living. What’s happened is that the realization that I have accepted this illusion, this necessary evil, so fully and so responsibly that I’ve built a career around this illusion, makes me want to puke. This understanding now makes me so off balance it’s almost knocking me on my ass.

At first, I thought the feeling I was feeling had to do with other things going on in my life, but then I realized that don’t want a career. Not a 9-5 one. I want a life, even if that means being poor.

So now I have to figure out how to do something different (than working in an office) while I am trying to make my dreams come true. Because this hell I’ve learned to accept, where I have to show up to some place where I’m required to wear a bra and wearing flip flops or pajamas isn’t acceptable, at all, is starting to get too hot for me.

Not living authentically is starting to burn and leave blisters. It’s like I am living out the cartoon version of myself and I might really rip my own eyeballs from their sockets because the stress of being so unfulfilled is making it hard to see straight (literally and figuratively).

But this is good, that my first day caused this reaction in me. This means that I will no longer be able to ignore the whispers of the universe. Every bad boss was a whisper. Every job that made me feel like I was getting further and further away from my purpose in life was another whisper.

So Now, when this new job, a job where I will be working with amazing people (which includes the friend who referred me, another great resource and giving professional who only wants to see me succeed, and an apparently great new boss) is offering me the same type of work I’ve been most fulfilled in, yet on my first day I didn’t feel nervous but, instead, felt nauseous, like someone had punched me hard in the gut, it’s time to accept that I am in the wrong place in life. That feeling, that’s not the universe whispering. That’s being yelled at.

The universe is saying, loud and clear, don’t let yourself get comfortable, dear. Don’t get lazy or forget your dreams or let this job slow down your real passion. You’re gonna like this new job, and that might be a problem, more of a problem then the jobs you didn’t like. You might settle for three, gray cube walls again instead of working towards having a window in your own home to look out of while you are getting paid to write. You might get trapped by your fear again, and you might let all those things that you are afraid that you won’t be able to pay for (thyroid medication, rent, food, new shoes) keep you from figuring out a way to do something else, other than 9-5 (which you know leaves you with little energy for your passions).

If only I could figure out something else that would make me feel less drained and that would give me enough dough for health insurance and rent while I am working towards my dreams, doing what I love.

There’s always Mexico, a hut, cheap prescription drugs, the sand, the beach? Why not?

Exactly. I am chicken too shit to do Mexico alone. I’d need a partner (a lover) to lean with to make that big of a leap. Then there’s the freelance thing or the selling my art at craft fairs on the weekend. Still too chicken for that kind of instability. I’m too responsible, damn it!

Damn, the frig IT!

Sigh. I’ve gotten the message, dear universe. Now what?

Shit.