Freelance Failure

Doing the same thing you always do. Pretending everything is alright, so no one around you suspects anything.

Maybe do some of the things you enjoy. Go for a walk. Close your eyes and feel the breeze. Raise you nostrils to the air and take it all in. The grass. And the trees. And the blossoms that have just come into bloom for the start of Spring.

And realise the same thing you realised when you stood on that bridge a few months back. That you don't want to be here. And that perhaps you're only here out of habit. And because you're too scared of heights to get on the ledge.

There's no ledge now. Your cowardice is no longer an excuse.

I'm sorry you had to read this. It will make sense. Or it won't. I won't be around to explain it either way.

And it's not that doing this is "nothing". Not that that would be a huge problem, really. See, I always want to be doing something, but whenever I make the mistake of looking at myself in the grander scheme of the world I realise that in the time I have been on this planet it would be rather accurate and fair to say I have done nothing.

Having done nothing is fine at 18 when you go straight into a law degree and everyone else at university is like "Wow, you're so young."

Having done nothing is fine at 22 when you're going through your Practical Legal Training course and everyone else is like "Wow, you're so young."

But that sense that you're ahead of the curve disappears when the 25 year old starts regaling you with stories of when they took ecstasy at Glastonbury and you realise that the years they weren't putting into becoming a lawyer were spent doing far more interesting things. I'm not saying I want to take ecstasy at Glastonbury but it would certainly be a change of pace and as proven by the conversation its quite an interesting story to be able to share with people.

People admire you for getting through the regimented and rigid processes of post-secondary school study but immediately follow it with stories of travelling through Europe and the middle east on a bicycle or stories about the screwy but dramatic relationships they formed with people as they took the long path. I took the short path. The only rest stop along the way was the six months I spent between courses that was mostly used up on applying for jobs I barely wanted and writing fictional stories about characters just as vapid as me  but with the built-in advantage that interesting things actually happened in their lives. And it was constructive because it was putting words on a page and it was a project. So it wasn't a waste of time.

I took the short path because it seemed easy (it didn't require genuine thought - I just had to settle in and see it through) but also because it was what I had come to believe was right. High school hammers in the belief that you get ahead of people by working harder than them. I assumed that if I worked non-stop, I would get the things I wanted. I got grades higher than I expected. I got into the university course I needed to get into and got good marks there and outperformed almost everyone at PLT (because I HAD to - academic results were the only way I ever had to define myself as a person) and then I ran out into the real world where no one knew me and no one cared and there were literally thousands of people like me and with so few opportunities for us.

You follow the advice of everyone willing to give it and try to prove to people that you're as good as you think you are and you're worth taking a chance on but you end up stuck in a job you hate with no chance of advancement that locks you in for 40 hours a week and drives you insane at least 3 separate times a day while people younger, less experienced and frankly less capable than you push past because that's just the way the real world works.

And you have nothing to point to by way of a "life". Because life was what was going to happen once you got everything you worked for. You were going to go the places you wanted to go with the people you wanted to be with. But other people knew they could live while doing that same work. And their path was longer. But it was a more enjoyable path. It wound itself through some pretty exciting crooks. And whether that path ended the way they expected it to end didn't really matter because of what they could look back on.

And the people who had lives, and took longer to get their degrees, meaning that once they had their degrees they had more life experience and more work experience and could sit in a job interview and present themselves better because they had many more years of communicating with people, they got all the jobs that you thought you would be getting because you were such a boy wonder in getting the same degree they got in such a shorter amount of time.

Professionally, my path has led me nowhere. And personally, I think it bypassed everything it should have gone through. University was sitting in the library from 9am to 1pm every day and then going home to walk the dog and sit at my computer. Because that's what was comfortable. And easy. And as long as I could point to the fact I was studying I wouldn't have to face the fact that I wasn't living and had pretty much just disappeared into my shell. Because doing nothing but working was the 'right' thing to be doing. I had to believe that. It was all I had.

And so now I'm the 25 year old and I find myself continuing to justify everything with empty assurances to myself that somehow by doing the things I did it made me better. Better as a lawyer, better as a worker, and someone deserving of better. Someone smarter than everyone else. It's a shallow thought, but it's all I have. It drives me, but it also holds me back. Because it's hard to be jealous of those you believe are deserving of what they get, but very easy to get jealous of people getting things that you deserve more than them. Easy to get paranoid that there is some sort of glitch in the system when they get something that you didn't. That some small thing went wrong, either with you or with them.

So work from 9-5 every day, and be too tired when you get home to do anything, and not have the inspiration to do anything on weekends because everything has slowed down, and hey, weekends are for rest anyway, right? So what then? I've been telling myself (and been told by everyone else, because my misery hasn't exactly been well hidden) that I need to get the hell out of this job, which is true, but then what? I need another job. I can't leave this prison. I need money, and more importantly, I can't go into a job interview unemployed without good justification for it. And I've been trying to get a new job. For months and months. So do I quit and then be unemployed for months and months? I need this job to get the next job. But I'm nowhere near the next job. I just have to sit at a desk for as long as I can mentally handle it before realising I'm going nowhere and just getting in my car and driving away from the failure of a life that I've put together and knowing that I've left nothing behind of worth because I never had anything of worth.