In search of my next act....

(Note from Opus. Oops, forgot Fiction Friday again. Well, this time, perhaps you can write your own. Start with today's confounding Yogi teabag message: "We can learn from a tree how to exist in ecstasy." You've got ten minutes. Go.)

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I’ve been enjoying reading many of your various blog entries where you bitch about life in your respective workplaces. I could have used an outlet like that a few years ago.

I’d vent about the endless meetings in the airless room with the hard wooden designer chairs where nothing was decided. Deadlines set that everyone but my department ignored. Impossible goals painted in glorious PowerPoint flow charts by our exuberant CEO. Projects piled up so high that literally the backup paperwork reached the hem of my skirt.

I would tell you about the screaming diva who called in “sick” for a week and held a major project and the workflow of two entire departments hostage until she got her promotion and her due. I would tell you about our customers from hell and their ludicrous demands, and how we were expected to deliver the impossible with a smile.

I would tell you about the day of the February bloodletting, when half a dozen or so people were let go, two of which were good friends, and as I was trying to get the hell out of the there and drive away faster than the tears could fall, I noticed the gray, bulging sky and the coven of black crows lined up on the roof of the building waiting for the carrion to cool.

I would tell you about the butterflies on my stomach on the eve of each performance evaluation. But each would net me glowing reviews: for my “no problem” attitude, for my willingness to help anyone who asked at the drop of an e-mail, how I took on extra work cheerfully, without complaint, and on deadline, even when it meant delaying a scheduled vacation so that the yearly trade show, God forbid, would not go forward without their usual whiz-bang sales presentation. This praise earned me my value as the “go-to” girl. Gave me what I thought, for a while, was my worth. I wish I could tell you they earned me more. Wish that each of these twice-yearly evaluations with the high scores and the happy comments in my boss’s loopy purple handwriting would have netted me more than a stack of paperwork in a box I’ve yet to unpack. A promotion, a fat raise, a parking space, an assistant…no. My boss shone a flashlight to the handwriting on the wall once when she took me aside and said basically that if I was content doing what I was doing for the rest of my career, my job was secure. But even the most stellar performance evaluation only meant that the company was growing more and more appreciative…and that’s all.

But I stayed, and kept smiling, and kept saying “no problem,” and kept putting in my 9-5, although in my case it was more like 8:30 to 5:30, 6:00, 6:30…and anyone who has been reading this blog with any regularity knows what happened next.

Even bolstered up by these reviews, I’d never been one to define myself by a job. I’ve been “let go,” “laid off,” “surplused,” or plain old “fired” (depending on the management lexicon of the era) four times in my career. Each time there are people quick to say, “don’t forget that you are not your job.”

And I know I’m not. I’ve done various things for various companies in various capacities, picked up a lot of life experience and some nifty skills and a whole lot of writing material along the way, but what I did never truly defined me as a person. Maybe the “go-to” girl was what I did during the day, but it wasn’t ME.

I am, was, will always be, first and foremost, a writer. Even when I didn’t know I wanted to be one, I would write. (Ask my mother. As a child I wrote on the sheets with crayons.) I collected experiences, personalities, those little human frailties and idiosyncrasies which make us all so endearing and frustrating at the same time. Whether I get published or not, whether I suck or not, this is what I am, and no one, not a cranky agent or a career counselor or my next job or a performance review or an injury or a disease or two can take that away from me. If I lost my eyesight and the use of my hands (which happened once—the hands, not the eyesight), I’ll still find a way. And whatever happens tomorrow, I’ll still find a way.

And hopefully I’ll still be joining you at the cyber water-cooler, complaining about the isolation and characters that won’t comply and the mounting rejection slips, but I’ll be there – with my cup of tea, and a joke, and a wry comment or two on the state of the world.

I’m looking forward to it.

And in my next job – when and if I find it – the “go-to” girl might just become the “go-to-someone-else-I’m-busy-girl.” And I’m REALLY looking forward to that.