Finest Worksong

About six months after I graduated from undergrad, I had quit my job at the racetrack and taken an admin job at the American Heart Association. As someone who had been working in the fast-paced environment of a horse racetrack and as a smoker of almost ten years at that point, this job was an ill fit. I was bored out of my skull and didn't really connect with anyone that I worked with. The pay was alright but the commute sucked.

I quit that job on the spot one day. After another long, boring lunch in a nondescript office park, I came back, put my belongings in a box and, on the way out, told the office manager I was leaving and not coming back. The shocked look on her face barely registered with me as I walked out. I spent the next nine months unemployed.

This period of unemployment would end up being the catalyst to one of my longest running problems in my life, my unhealthy attachment to work.

I have put a lot of emphasis on work before I was even old enough to do so. I could hardly wait to get a work permit in high school and have pretty much worked nonstop since I obtained that permit. I've worked two, sometimes three jobs at a time and that nine-month stint had been my only period of unemployment. I have always been on a career track, never satisfied with just having a job. My family had never been a big advocate for the career track. Most of them had nondescript government jobs or, in my father's case, barely worked and found a way to live off of others as quickly as he could. So where on earth did my drive come from?

One root was fear. Without the safety net of stable and supportive parents, options for borrowing money or moving back in with my parents were nil. I would live on the streets again before I moved back in with either of them. Another root was my need to control something. In many other aspects of my life to date I had had no control over my circumstances-my childhood, my parents, where I lived, who touched my body. Work was similar to school in that there were certain things that were not allowed to happen there without repercussion and, since I was good at creating and engaging in routine, work presented as a mirror to the lifelong security of education.

Another root was pure spite. When I was thirteen, one of the many drunken rants out of the mouth of my stepfather aimed towards me was one where he predicted my future. He said "that bitch is going to be on drugs and pregnant by the time she's sixteen!"

That statement stuck with me and I made a promise to myself that day that I would prove that fucker wrong. It lit a fire under me that has done me a lot of good in many ways, but has also been highly destructive to my self-worth, my unhealthy need to control and my over-indulged ego. I gave that statement-and that man-an obscene and exhausting amount of energy for more than twenty years.

That nine-month period of unemployment smashed my ego. I felt useless and worthless. Even though I was living with a boyfriend at the time and he was being incredibly supportive of me financially and otherwise, I was in a deep depression. I made the impulsive decision to move to Idaho to get a job, made the impulsive decision to move back to California less than three years later, have taken jobs that weren't a fit, didn't pay enough, had bad commutes, bad bosses, bad benefits, you name it. All so I could say that I have been employed.

I'm currently unemployed and have been since January of this year. I lost my job at UW in a tough, "blow to the ego" type way. I had started and run a successful program for three years and had only gotten paid for one of them, only to get laid off at the end of the first and only paid year. The program was my baby and I was cut out of it.

While the last few months have had good and bad days in relation to my feelings of self-worth, they are nowhere near as devastating as they would have been in the past. I have a few job prospects but not many, a small financial safety net, a large student loan and Trump-era anxiety. But I have a strong support network, a professional network that respects me, I don't want for much, and I have this current gift of time to process, heal, grow and get to know myself. I've met amazing people through work that I am proud to call friends. I am able to be defined by so much more than my work these days and now realize that I always have been. 

Oh yeah, and I'm not pregnant or on drugs ;)