A short note of frustration

 I’ve begun building a master list of jobs that I’ve held over the last several years. The list is intended to aid me as I fill out online and paper applications. It is not short. A friend of mine told me that she’d read that you only need to include the last seven years on applications. That’s nine jobs.

Facing the uncomfortable truth that when put next to a timetable created by societal expectations, if you take out my age, I’m not doing badly for a person who graduated college 6 years ago. It’s like the 11 years that I spent getting married and divorced just shot a huge hole in my life path. (I typed ‘whole’ instead of ‘hole’ there at first, and didn’t notice it right away. (Quick little-Sarah story: When I started taking piano lessons, Mr. Williams, may he rest in well-played peace, taught me about rests by drawing them on a chalkboard. He drew a small rectangle under one of the lines on the staff and said, “When you walk down the street, you have to look out or you’ll walk into a…” meaning for me to finish the sentence with ‘hole’ as homophone to ‘whole’ to teach me the name of the long rest. I looked at the drawing and piped up “Sewer!”) and now I’m happy on the inside.)

Job applications do not lend themselves to creative life paths. By creative I do not mean artistic, I mean self-defined (which, yes, given that I view works of art as defined by their active answering of questions and being evidence of deliberate decisions is not entirely consistent, but you get the idea). The last 15 months saw me taking jobs in order to work, not in order to further a goal. The goal was not firmly in mind until the beginning of 2009 anyway and since then hasn’t altered one whit, nor has my intention to achieve it, nor my continued research and active contemplation. But there isn’t really room for that on a job app.

It’s uncomfortable. I don’t particularly care for it. I feel required to provide spin for my life, not simply to others but to myself as well. And yet, I lived it. I process it daily. I am in no way unaware of the effects of my decisions on the directions my life has followed, frequently more than one at a time. It is not without consequence. And yet, I am in no way certain that some Life Lesson about marrying intelligently or a self-deprecating attitude towards my mistakes or not having anything to show for the living I’ve done is correct or morally acceptable. It is lived. It is done. I am here. There is no judgment anymore.

My skillz set is impressive, I tell you.

This is not unrelated to what showed me it was time to escape the inertial pull of Lincoln. It, this discomfort and getting past it, is part of learning to be in the unfamiliar and not quite known or understood place. I realized that I could have struggled in the same ways with the same set of incrementally lowering standards and been progressively less able to turn potential into kinetic anything – or, ask my parents for help and slow down and take the time to do the crap things like this.

It’s not a fabulous looking list. But it is mine.

Good weekends, folks!