I grew up lucky. I was blessed to have several raw talents, including a mind that could handle academics with ease. This kind of luck comes with a curse, though. You see, I never had to try.
School (well, most of it - I still have nightmares about times tables) was always a breeze. I was always an A-B student and graduated fifth in a class of over 600 without ever putting out more than the bare minimum of effort into my work. Sure, I did work...I researched, read, learned on my own...but only when it was fun and only with the things that piqued my interest for only as long as my interest stayed piqued. I never worked hard.
I ended up going to a fairly prestigious school for college. All the students there were people with academically-oriented brains like mine and it was one of the first times in my life I didn't automatically rise to the top of my class. Instead of taking the opportunity to learn how to "work hard, play hard," as our unofficial motto went, however, I simply began switching majors until I found one where my raw talents could let me slack my way to the top again.
I knew my peers were getting jobs and internships to prepare them for their future careers, but, until my last year, my grandparents paid for my ride and I used the excuse of the academic rigour of my school to avoid working while classes were in session. In the end, I graduated from a highly respected school with a good GPA, no practical experience whatsoever, beyond some activist and volunteer work I did (none of which I stuck with for more than a year or two at a time), and very little knowledge of what it actually takes to have a successful career.
Yet...yet I expected to somehow be recruited the way my peers were being sought after. I expected to be wined and dined and offered lucrative and exciting opportunities like I saw my friends receiving. I went to one job fair, was offered a $30,000/yr job managing a retail store and rejected the offer because I was convinced I could do better. At the time, I was enjoying my incredibly easy part-time job in a health food store and thought that I'd find that perfect job quickly enough that I could afford to stay where I was and be choosy.
Instead, my career has been a downward spiral since its inception. With two short-lived exceptions, I have never made a living wage and have never managed to keep anything but dead-end jobs.
At first, when I was still working at the health food store I started at, I was
making at least a minimal attempt to use my spare time to build up a
portfolio and experience in the things I was interested in doing: I
would occasionally make a flyer or write ad copy for a friend who was starting a
business. I volunteered to be a proofreader for the store's
newsletter. I even wrote a regular book-review column for that
same newsletter. It was never as much as I was capable of, but at least
it was something.
Eventually, though, I stopped doing even those simple things. Eventually, I even managed to stop dreaming my old dreams, replacing them with rationalizations for settling for less from myself.
For brief periods during my patchwork of a "career," I managed to convince myself I was trying hard when I would work 80-hour weeks or browse the occasional industry article in my spare time. Other times, I convinced myself I had tried hard enough for long enough and that I wanted the kind of job that I could fully leave behind at the end of the day.
I told myself I wanted the job parodied so often in the media where I could make a living wage by getting lost in the corporate machine, punching a clock, shuffling some papers, and pretending to get work done while wasting away the hours on the internet. Turns out those jobs don't exist.
Turns out I wouldn't be happy at that type of job anyway. Every job I tried that was "easy," I hated. I would think myself too smart for the kind of mind-numbing work that most of these positions entailed. I would look down on my happy co-workers, thinking that I was better than them because of my dissatisfaction. No wonder I didn't last very long in these places.
During the two lone stints of challenging work I managed to find myself in, though, I was crippled by anxiety. You see, not only had I never learned to try hard (leaving me out of my element in a situation where that effort was necessary), but I had let my skills and talents - you know, the ones that let me slide through most of my early life - atrophy in the meantime. To make it worse, I was choosing fields that, while somewhat interesting to me, were chosen more as a way of proving my intelligence than of pursuing something I was passionate enough about to give my all.
So now, I'm in my mid-thirties and I have accomplished a pretty paltry amount for everything I thought I'd be capable of in my youth. Meanwhile, I've watched many of my friends work their butts off and end up in places that I find myself envying. My envy, though, is not the resentful kind - it is the kind of envy that reminds me that I need to make a change if I want those things, too. I need to learn to try hard, just like they did.
I'm not young anymore but neither am I too old to stop coasting on talent and innate IQ, to learn a new way of living my life, to pursue the things that will keep my interest enough to want to spend my spare time working on them no matter how far off the rewards may seem, to learn that trying hard can be its own reward...
Certainly, there will be some avenues no longer available to me as an older woman with a disabled child to raise - for instance, I couldn't join the Peace Core, or simply move anywhere in the world on a whim. Somehow, though, I think those avenues weren't meant to be my path anyway and, for the first time in my life, I'm putting forth the effort to find out what that path is and want to work my hiney off to achieve it.
For the first time, I'm jumping in with both feet...wherever this may take me, it'll be hard but, sure as heck, I'm gonna rock it!
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