My girlfriend was talking the other day about how stressed she was at work. Her husband told her she really needed to quit because nothing ever changed for her at this job. (side note: I think she is lucky to have someone in her life who can tell her this and supports her finding something else) It is always the same pressure, the same environmental stresses, and new and different types of shitty management. The cruel irony is she's not even putting up with all that for a job she loves. I'm not either. So why? Why do I care what anyone thinks of me in a job I don't even like or think is as important as it is often built up to be? I don't know but I offered an analogy during our conversation that just because I didn't like to play volleyball didn't mean I wanted to be picked last for the team. But still, why even show up to play, feel shitty about myself because I'm not great at something I don't even like, and feel like an alsoran among my peers to boot? What is a person running from or towards that constructs a situation like that to work in?
Kind of like me and tennis. I'm not good at tennis. No one in my family plays tennis. I'm never going to be good at tennis. But I played for 4 years in high school. I didn't letter until my junior year and that was probably just to be nice since I just kept showing up. I was Rudy but no amount of practice and determination was going to make me an even adequate player. The first year I rarely saw the outside of the gym. The team would dress out and go to the court, I would stay inside with the other ungifted girl and practice trying to hit the ball the same way twice. Mostly we just chased our ball around the gym for an hour or so. She wrote in my yearbook that we were losers but losers with dignity. I don't even think I was allowed to purchase a tennis sweatshirt until my junior year and I quit at some point during my sophomore year after it was clear it was going to be another humiliating season and this time I would be alone in the gym as my loser partner had graduated.
I have no idea why I decided tennis would be the sport for me or why I had to have a sport at all. I am a book girl. I am a write shit in my journal girl. I still take pictures of the sky and close-up pictures of inanimate objects. I'm not naturally athletic and not terribly spatially oriented. I recall being frustrated and jealous and wishing myself everything different than I was at times. Yet I persisted. Why? Perhaps my problem is that I keep trying to fit into places I don't actually want to belong. Or put differently, I don't want the things I should, the things that are best for me. The things that are me. I keep going places and seeking challenges that don't play to my strengths or even interests. It seems as if I want to struggle for my happiness, carve it out of misery. I want to feel inadequate and work to prove myself to people I claim I don't care about and who I know for damn sure don't care about me. If it's not hard, it's not worth it.
It occurred to me my job is a lot like pledging a sorority except that every time I move, I become a freshman all over again, pledging with a whole new house of bitchy girls. I'm a professional pledge. I didn't even pledge in college and had disdain for girls who wanted to and/or did. But here I am seeking validation and belonging within places I wonder how I even got into and wonder even more why I tried to get in. I think I should add to my Philly bucket list an attempt to examine the layers of me that drive me to gravitate towards places or jobs within places where I will not be happy or more importantly, because we're allowed to make mistakes and discover something we thought was great isn't, why I stay when I'm miserable. But that will have to wait as I'm off to NYC again. Twice in a month...not typical me at all. It's nice not being typical sometimes.
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