On healing my inner adult
In appropriate millennial fashion, I am writing this between two tasks at my remote jobs, both of which I work simultaneously.
Monday through Friday I work as the program coordinator for a local not-for-profit. I love this job. I get to be creative, build community programming, manage projects. It looks great on my resume. I also work up to 25 hours per week as a counsellor for a crisis intervention program. It's humbling, meaningful work, and when people find out what I do they tend to thank me for my service. I work through my lunch breaks. I have savings. My Google Calendar is a colourful stained glass for the Church of Type A Personalities.
But in one month, I'm quitting my jobs and going back to school. For Art. And maybe a dual degree in Computer Science, if I can pass Calculus 1, Linear Algebra, and Calculus 2. I'm saying goodbye to the savings I've accumulated through years of going without.
It's hard to stop seeing myself as a 'worker' and to start seeing myself as a 'student' again. Especially in this (alleged) pOsT-CoVId landscape where ChatGPT writes term papers and professors' Discord channels occupy a place I'd previously reserved for Gay Goblin Zone. I feel like I've reached the proverbial land of milk and honey, the job market, and now I'm just spinning on my heels and heading backwards, passing millennial, gen Z, and gen A comrades who would give anything to be in my position. To have a stable job they like.
It begs the question -- why go back? For one, because I never really felt free to choose what I wanted to do. I chose my career out of necessity. I fell into the role my family and then-partner expected of me. Something unassertive and docile. The role best suited for a person like me, back before I knew how to stand up for myself and how to set boundaries.
In 2016 (when I was 19) I ran from an abusive relationship of 6 years -- homeless and displaced across the US-Canada border. I was 18 hours from my city and stranded in the cold, unforgiving grey winter of the American Midwest. By the grace of my loving friends, fueled by pizza-flavoured Combos and Diet Pepsi, we packed what little I owned into a U-Haul and drove me home. I slept on couches at the university until I could afford a small, dingy apartment. I worked at Starbucks from 5AM-9AM, went to school from 9AM-4PM, and then worked at a call centre from 4PM-12AM. Rinse and repeat. I was so preoccupied with proving him my highschool bullies my parents myself wrong that I never stopped to ask if I actually wanted this.
It was only after I graduated, after I got a stable job, and after I got married that I realized I'd never known myself. I had lived my entire life as a blank slate for other people to project their expectations and trauma onto. I found myself completely lost when others inquired as to basic details about me. My gender, my favourite band, my hobbies -- these ideas were as mysterious to me as they were to those asking.
What do I even look like? I still can't picture my own face in my mind's eye.
I know I like computers. I like art, and I've recently started making some. I like opportunities to connect with others. I don't like how the Internet feels now but I like how it used to feel when I was younger, an expansive sea of opportunities, delights, traps, and shadows for anyone to explore. I like video games.
I don't know very much about myself, but I know that now is the time for us to become acquainted. Maybe instead of working and saving for my material comfort, I've been working and saving for psychic comfort all these years.
I'm 29 and I have no experience. Wish me luck ~