The Writer Looks for A Job But Just Ends Up Writing More
Who even knows, you know? An opening line like that portends an existential rambling, or perhaps a commentary on the certitude of this culture, where everyone is yelling over their own insecurities to make sure you know one thing and one thing only: They know.
But the fact that we don't know has some varying impacts. Some people double down on what they think they know, clinging to it like a life raft on a stormy ocean. Others double down on the reality that we can't know, and so why bother searching? And some just don't care about knowing in the altogether.
When it comes to making big life decisions, I often turn to the mystical in hopes to turn my fear and uncertainty into confidence and universal sanction. I may not look to astrology or other tangential means, but I will enthusiastically look for coincidences that feel predetermined, so obscure in their own right that their arrival is meant to tell me something. My friends and I jokingly refer to these moments as ESP (Extrasensory Perception); they are just too weird not to refer to them as something. Do I "believe" in them though?
I don't use these moments to make decisions. Instead, I see them as some kind of scaffolding that is only visible every so often. For a fleeting moment, it feels like you see the bones of the universe; you catch a glimpse of some cosmic blueprint --not telling you to do something, but simply to alert you to its presence; a wink from the world around you that quietly says, "just checking in." It brings a certain comfort, and occasionally a confidence, that you are where you need to be at a given moment. When life's storms are raging, that glimmer in the chaos is grounding.
When you're in transitional moments, you look for these things. You look for them in prayer, in nature, and anywhere you can to find a degree of help to move forward. My current version of this is the job search that I am struggling through.
I'm 39 and quickly realizing the world thinks of me and my Bachelor's degree as mostly an aging afterthought. Is it possible to be both pleased and angry that I went to college? I got the education I wanted, but paid (a lot) for it. And now that I have worked for years and paid off that large sum, the goalposts move: You're now too old for what we want, and by the way, you probably need another level of education to be considered. We didn't tell you that earlier; we just told you that you needed a degree. Gotcha.
I have a job offer --the first one in a year-- that scares the hell out of me, but its timing and specifics have me looking for those ESP moments, the needed nudge to make me feel that this path is for my betterment, that I won't crash and burn if I try.
But what you're "supposed" to do and your betterment are not necessarily mutually exclusive. In our culture there is an emphasis on seeking out what makes you happy, but service isn't meant to protect you; it's meant to serve; you're just kind of in the crosshairs. What happens to you is somewhat immaterial in that transaction. That's a hard truth to settle on, and an even harder truth to move on.
Does that mean I should take a job that I might be terrible at, that I might look stupid at, that I might fail at? Because the job could lead to growth, does that mean it is automatically the thing that I should do? Does it mean that I should instead move with my songs and books --the real passions of my life-- and understand that offering them is the service and what I "get" out of them isn't the point? That maybe my offering of them doesn't come along with any other perks: Not attention, not money, not validation. Just no-strings-attached service?
I don't know. Sudden commitment in one direction can really just be a fear of moving in another. It has been ten years since I last played regular live shows; I've put out six additional albums of music, and written three books in that time. It isn't as if there haven't been opportunities where I could have reawakened the machine. But time and again, I chose not to. It's suspicious that such urges flare right as you're about to make a fearful decision.
If sharing the work was the only requirement for success, I would be formidable, but sharing the product and telling people about the product are two very different things. I am extremely self-centered when I'm in my own yard. I can write about every feeling I've ever had all over this website, happily tell you where a song came from and the circumstances surrounding its composition, and nerd about any question someone might ask me about my work. But as soon as you ask me to go into someone else's yard and talk about those things I do, I wilt.
My desire to share evaporates. My work's rightful place in my yard feels unwelcome, annoying, and arrogant in someone else's. My brain just won't let me beyond that gate because I see a world that has allowed every corner to be filled with advertisement and self-promotion masquerading as ambition. No one needs me telling them about the things I do, which is not the same thing as saying I don't think they have value, or that someone might really enjoy them.
That mindset is why the books and songs never move into the realm of half-careers, and why I am at a loss as to how to wield them, and therefore at a loss for how my 39-year-old self fits into a working world that continuously says "no thanks" even when I dare to venture out of comfort zones. What do you do when you compromise and still aren't accepted? You write a lot evidently.
As that job search carries on, my desire continues to be to build up this website, to populate it with every corner of myself that is reasonably appropriate. Not to suggest that I am singularly important, or that fame or fortune are awaiting me, but to offer anything of mine that might have value to someone else. I don't really know what else to do.
But then I'm not sure I ever really did.