Disco Inferno

burn, baby, burn

Careers.

What’s it like to have a career? And no, I’m not talking about a job you get and and then linger in for decades, like I did, never originally intending for it to last more than a year or two. No, I’m talking about a genuine CAREER, as in you learn a skill, a marketable ability, through college or experience or whatever, and then you intentionally leverage that into a way to make a living that you can actually be proud of at the end of the day. What’s that like? Because I don’t have a fucking clue.

I’ve been working solid since I was 18, only taking, at most, two week vacations (which were almost exclusively spent at home because I have never been able to afford to go anywhere). After being abruptly laid off from Barnes & Noble after 21 years of service, I took four months off with my severance package. I spent 6 of those weeks recovering from a surgery I’d put off forever, and the rest of it looking for a new job.

The “new job” is where I’m at now, and I fucking hate it. I’m underpaid, at a dead end, and being perpetually being taken advantage of, never getting a worthwhile raise or a promotion, stuck in a demeaning holding pattern where I’m treated like a boss but paid like a pauper.

I spent the better part of a decade trying to get my bachelor’s degree only to burn out and run out of money. I still have ten classes left to graduate, and that’s in a field I’ve grown to hate.

I also earned a lofty certificate from Cambridge University to teach English to adults anywhere on the planet. I hated that class so much that it took months to recover from it. And to make it worse, the work prospects for holders of this prestigious certificate are garbage.

I have made a life of bad professional decisions. And now, pushing 60, constantly tired, I am still lost.

Many of my friends and family have careers. They got degrees, or were really good at something and even better at selling themselves, and they’ve made a life of it.

They drive nice cars, carry gap insurance, live in big houses with paid off mortgages, they successfully stave off property tax increases, they have substantial retirement savings and packages, and investment portfolios, and they vacation several times every year. They smile a lot in social media posts. It’s nauseating.

My mother warned me that being a starving artist was not as fun as it sounded.

It sounded terrible, to be quite frank.

And guess what? It is!

I have 60k in student loans, earn too little to pay them, had to file for bankruptcy several years ago, drive a car with no air conditioning, out of registration, in need of considerable repairs, and just live with it because that’s how it’s always been.

How do you careerists do it? What is your magic? What gods do you toss virgins into volcanoes to in order to get a leg up? Because whatever it is, I don’t have that.

Photo by Soliman Cifuentes on Unsplash

I do, however, have a beautiful and wonderful wife and two amazing adult children, and that is a lot.

I just wish I was able to do more for them, for me, and it eats me up too much of the time.

But hey, at least there’s coffee. Wanna buy me one?