“Taking Stock – More on Work”

So it’s like this for me: work hurts. No, I’m not some namby-pamby white boy complaining about his decaf latte being too hot. And no, I’m not saying my boss boxes my ears or my coworkers talk shit to my face that hurts my feelings. I’m trying to describe something that is hard to describe. Like, because I feel right out the gate that there’s no point in explaining it because no one could possibly understand.

Work hurts. Here, I wonder if I can find some metaphor. It hurts the way I imagine a fresh water fish would feel if it suddenly found itself in the ocean. Maybe? It’s a kind of pressure, coupled with this fight or flight response that I have to keep clamped down on. As though some small part of me is constantly screaming and crying in horror and disbelief at how this really is what my life is. It’s absurd, says the real me when I give him permission to speak—but only quickly and be polite about it, now.

But that still doesn’t get at the heart of it. I guess I don’t know how to describe it. Except to call it pressure. A squeezing. Maybe like being trapped, except my body is the cage? Or the space around my body? Free association is failing today.

I remember being young and in school and dreading facing each day, crying to my mom how I didn’t want to go. That feeling, of dread and of pain and of hurt and helplessness. I remember mom’s reply well, that sometimes we do things we don’t want to do because we have to do them. That was her help. I’m a scared, hurting little kid, terrified of going to school to be tormented by bullies and where I had no friends, and all the hell that daily school like entailed for me, and all mom had to say was that?!?! Inadequate, at best. And it’s not that she wasn’t sympathetic, she just didn’t know what to say. She didn’t know anything that could help.

And so of course I have instilled in me this idea that I have to be miserable. If I wake up feeling like I don’t want to go do this thing that’s making me miserable, well then I’d best get on with it! Because that’s what we do in this bizarro world I live in, we go do the things that make us unhappy, Because!

I’m like a pot kept on permanent simmer, which occasionally feels it’s about to boil. And very rarely actually does boil over. It didn’t use to be like that. It used to boil over all the time.

This is just so insane. So ridiculous. I cannot believe this is my life. And yet it is. It’s gotten me some good things. But when I step back and look around, I’m left thinking What The Fuck. Strange, isn’t it? I can handle growing older, though I wonder if I will continue to. I can handle being single, though the loneliness has its own brand of hurt, too. But to look objectively at my work situation, what I do day in day out, is just . . . practically incomprehensible to me.

I wonder too if that doesn’t play into my achievement in school. Maybe I work extra hard at it because I am so desperate to do what I really want to do with my life. Maybe a big portion of my drive and determination to Become comes from this revulsion to where I’m at.