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Is it better to change your life yourself, or to have your life changed for you? I’ve never been good at change, unless it was something forced upon me. I always think back to Christmas 1985, when I’d just lost the best job I ever had and the last one I ever wanted.
A few months before, when the man who was my boss took me to lunch and told me he was replacing me with someone else, I asked him, almost begged him, to let me stay on in a lesser role, just so I wouldn’t have to move, or look for a new job, or lose the friends I’d made at that place. I was so desperate for things not to change that I made myself less than I deserved. Needless to say, it didn’t work out, but even at the end, after a few more miserable months, it still wasn’t my choice to leave.
Hanging on had done me no good. I moved back in with my parents for a time, and took jobs that I hated, and tried to make the best of things until I could get going again. The job I have now grew out of a desperate search, and it was only the best of a poor list of possibilities, not anything I expected to be doing for the rest of my life.
This job has never been as much fun as the other one, the one before, but it’s been safe and steady. It’s led me to a place where I feel secure for the rest of my life. And it’s given me freedom to do other things. I might not have my own web site and all my online friends, and all the time to pursue those kinds of interests, without the latitude I was given in this job, and the time I’ve spent unsupervised. In a way, the job has given me back more than I ever gave to it. It would never have come to this if I’d been left to my own devices and plotted my own path. |
