What a weirded windy way I find myself in. Every time it feels like I've figured things out, and things are going well, then the oh shit what just happened oh crap my life sucks I understand nothing moments come. Naturally. Graduation was followed by banking was followed by Oz was followed by banking was followed by that those brief months in New York where I felt creative and full and ready for anything – followed by boredom followed by yippee months and months and a year of being on the road (and it had the attendant up down dharma confusion) - followed by homelessness and joblessness followed by holy hell how did I find myself in this place of sun and sea and tech and the wizardry of that job followed by corporate doldrums followed by OMG a move back to NY and the most perfect job with the most perfect position in the world and now I'm here.
I don't really have a position here. I did. It was magnificent. It was like I was part of the clan, the creatives. The guys who built stuff, who dreamed of stuff and made it happen. The road stretched out and it was going to be amazing.
But already now I've noted the patterns - the cracks the spiderwebbed through my carefully constructed sand castles. I'll have so much more time to relate - to regurgitate and circle around and dig a hole with them - but for now, I can say that it was hubris mixed with a willingness to do things for the greater good mixed with a hero complex mixed with the desire to please and the honest reverence for people who I thought was better than me. How utterly foolish am I. And all the other secondary bullshit, the politics, the machinations of grubby hands reaching for the golden pot – all that other stuff is just clatter and noise.
So here I am - in the perfect job but without a position or future. Slowly cast aside into irrelevance. I dread going to work each day - having to find something to kill time and having to deal with the glances, whispers and looks of pity.
My personal life is the same. A month ago I was talking to my parents every week and my dad even started to write his biography for me. It was going to be our project. Now they don't return my phone calls.
A year ago I had my career mapped out and now I don't know what I'll be doing in a year. Actually, I don't know what I'll be doing in a month.
And it's frustrating to read back on old posts from a decade ago and find them true – and also realize that even in fits and starts of rebelling against what I know to be my worse nature, my tendency to conform and to falsify my reality to match my dreams and aspirations – even in spite of actual rebelling, my life keeps plodding along a steady trajectory buttressed by a consistent diet of settling, conformity and the letting go of dreams.
I promised myself that money wouldn't be a goal when I was 25. And here I am, in conversations with my wife about investing in real estate and wondering what to do with our savings to plan for the future. She's killing herself in a job under the idea that in a few years, perhaps we won't be slaves to money any longer. How false is that?
And so I'll just do the only thing that I know centers me: to write. And just let the words spill out and fall where they may and see if they can save me or not.