I think I’m gonna write because I wish I had someone to talk to. It’s 7:30 PM. I left my house at 5 AM, which I do now 5 days a week to drive an hour to work in a truck that costs me 7% of my paycheck in gas every 2.5 days. It’s cold as fuck, so when I am home, I’m quick to put my clothes in the dryer and get under a heated blanket. I haven’t played my instruments in a while. I feel like I’m gambling with my indoor/outdoor cat’s life in how often/when I allow him outside.
My current job has me deeply embedded with people in a way that I haven’t been before. Every day I see about the same set of kids, their parents or other family members, staff, and elementary school milieu. There’s the usual pleasantries and predictable smiles or avoidant posture of different people in the halls. My job is to instantiate a proper after-school program for the YMCA. Before I arrived, from no less than a dozen sources, I was informed of the hostile and chaotic history of my site.
I’m a professional assessor, skeptic, and reporter of events. All things being true, there’s also hope and positives and different responses you can elicit from spaces described that way. The harder the gossipy world wants to judge and caricature my staff, for example, the more I look for opportunities to compliment the things they do well and invite them into my designs for the program. I was not always this way. This was something another site director and I were discussing this morning. I didn’t use to be able to see and accept the raging dumpster fire and the rainbow at the same time.
I can’t help myself but to dream big and maintain a default “too much” posture about whatever it is I’m doing. There is no, “just sit here, and do the job, and in 30 years you’ll retire.” I don’t want to “live within my means” employing a cover phrase for humbling my ideals. I don’t simply believe some despondent opinion about “how things are” or “they don’t care.” I know enough about people to accept their baseline “getting by” dispositions and the books of apologetics to justify it. I also know, precisely, how to cut through the noise and get the shit done that I wish to do.
And so now I’m at an ongoing transitional space. It took me my regularly predicted timeline to adopt a new job, find out the broken parts, advocate, pitch, and have now begun stepping in the directions I’ve both been demanding and people are recognizing I should have. I have coworkers happy for me to shoulder the brunt of articulating and pushing back on the dumbest of dumb shit. I’m leaving myself room to otherwise capitalize on my time and create more points of leverage. I’m certainly pretty broke, but I’m making sure to eat gratifying food along the way.
I feel like I’m no-less treading water. I was fairly desperate in my adoption of the job in the first place. I’m not dispositionally, age-wise, or even hobbies or interests remotely close to anyone I work with. So even when I’m surrounded by people, rooting for them, working earnestly to create a space they enjoy and can thrive in, I don’t feel like I belong there. We can chalk this up to my usual condition, but also….I don’t belong there.
The space needed, like all spaces need, accountability. They need to stick to the clock and a schedule. They need a little planning. They needed someone to remind them that it’s disrespectful to be screaming at each other or ignoring reasonable asks and direction. Any reasonable adult can or should occupy my position. 6 failed to do so until I arrived. So either I have no idea what people could or should be capable of, or I’m continually exercising this unique capacity for doing things I struggle to conceive of as more than “idiot proof.”
I can’t trick myself. I can’t make myself believe that even when I do a “good job” or people tell me, “I was going to quit before you got here,” that it means the same thing to me as it might to them. I feel I have to be careful that I don’t end up just doing the “indulging for me” thing channeled through the prism of my role. Taking compliments or encouragement too seriously would be sucking on a certain kind of distasteful teat. While I won’t deny accomplishing something or doing well, if I can’t get at that “deeper” thing that speaks to my actual, I don’t know, purpose? It’s just going to be 1 of the 20-something jobs I’ve had that inform my “can you believe this shit?” stories.
I can’t afford asphalt.
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