There will be days where you don't want to get out of bed. The sun will drive its nails into your dry eyelids and tell you to shut up and do it anyway. And you do--you do these soul-crushing tasks that try your patience, stamina and comfort zone. Get yelled at by strangers, dogged on by people you hope you'll never see again.
Then that last table comes in at ten til close, and says they're not in a hurry. While they're waiting on their meal, they strike up conversation, asking if you're in school and such, oh you have a degree, well what are you doing here?
What am I doing here?
I'd love to blame them, really. Anything is easier than standing in front of a mirror and taking stock of myself, realizing that I have no courage or belief in my abilities and ambitions, and knowing that I am here just as much for me as I am for them. It's not their fault, but I blame them in haste, convincing myself that they kept me here late, because I have such important things to do after 2pm.
When I got home, all I did was lay on the couch for an hour. Then I got up and went back for round two.
Why did I go back? Why will I go back tomorrow? Why do I bounce back and forth like this? They aren't mood swings. The student loans hover over my dreams and, while college was spectacularly fun, my education is keeping me from them. Money enslaves me. Trying to make my education worth the debt is enslaving me, when the truth is that it just wasn't worth it. It's impossible to put a price on a six-year life experience like that, but the ruling authorities took a guess, and I can't afford it.
I've often said I'm far too empathetic to be an empire-maker. Empathy is my gift. I hold it to my chest like a newborn, and use it to make peoples' lives better. If I don't use it, I shrivel like a corpse. In short, I wait tables, and when I don't like my job, I might as well be dead. I need to use this gift every day of my life, and I don't have those grandiose ideas about it anymore--I don't owe it to the world; I owe it to those people I help and I owe it to myself. The world isn't just people.
I feel the need to step lightly like a ghost, plant trees and make things grow, in more than just a horticultural sense. I can't be happy in a building, even if it's a newsroom or my "dream job". I've often wondered why I don't have a dream job, for years I thought something was wrong with me. I've tried to guess, I've been on interviews for things I should like to do. But I don't like them, and nothing is good enough to settle on.
I don't have a dream job. I have a dream life. And believe you me, my dream life looks like it's on another planet to this society. So much so, that I can't reconcile it with anything I know to be real. Almost like this dream was instilled in me before I was born, something innate, unmovable. It's no longer big and glorious as it was when I was young. No, I don't want to make an impact on the population--I've seen that it gets so generalized in history, like Che Guevara t-shirts. I want to make impacts on one person at a time. One on one.
Soul to soul.
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