Sometimes a breakthrough looks like a breakdown, part 1: “when I finally get my shit together enough”

I have written in fits and starts for years, never reaching the polish of certain aspirational fashion, yoga, foodie type blogs. I wasn’t seeing my kind of pathos in blog content, so I figured there must not be a market for someone who was living a life that’s more of a warning than an aspiration. Finally, though, I was exercising and meditating daily, affording decent food, and the fog of trauma and anxiety were starting to clear. I felt like I had something to offer, at last.
“Just write, just write every day, just do it.” went the pithy catch-line of a speaker at a bloggers’ workshop I’d attended years before. But these people’s lives, clothes, occupations… they looked nothing like mine. They’d successfully ascended into the Creative Class – in some cases, they inherited it from parents and grandparents who’d already been there. How to find the energy and time to write when you weren’t even getting enough sleep in the hustle to kind of survive? The reason, after all, there are so many bright-eyed, blonde mommybloggers is that their husbands make enough to support a family. Following your bliss, your fun, to make a living, is a given when you have that. But it’s a misty castle on a faraway cloud if you’re working 2 jobs for under $30,000, no partner, no family within hundreds of miles.
College was the last time I’d been able to worry about trivial things like boy troubles, themes in a poem or short story I was working on, which intramural I might go for… instead of how I was going to do things like have enough food to eat, how I was going to muster enough energy to make it to work, how many Red Bulls I’d have to consume to stay awake through both work shifts, how I’d afford said Red Bulls when I wasn’t able to make a student loan payment, again, and I was barely going to make rent.
Up ’til last winter, my ideas of a worry were just… so radically different. I’d be working my call-center shift, haranged over the phone 80 times a day by upper-middle-class ladies, whose biggest problem that day was that the bed in the Tahiti condo they were trying to book for a week-long luxury vacation was a regular king instead of a California king. Or the week I had available in French wine country started on a Sunday instead of a Saturday. Whatever nonsense people with money complain about.
And then in February, I got an on-loan job in a different department at a substantially higher hourly rate, with much less phone time. It was still boring and micromanaged, and lacked any creativity whatsoever. 98 percent of the job was copy and pasting emails. But, as I suspected, the lower-bullshit, lower stress jobs were higher paying.
For a lot of reasons, mostly pertaining to mental health issues and trauma making it exceedingly hard to focus and meet productivity goals, I only lasted 6 months in that position. I was kicking the demons after a few months. I got up to standard, then, in my last month, I was exceeding standard and getting pretty close to what I’m actually capable of. But it took me too long. Too much coping without therapy because I was still catching up on some bills before I could deal with the copayment. Too much not being able to clear out how bored I was and just power through it. My manager’s manager coldly told me I wasn’t good enough to be considered for her team, or even to finish out the on-loan period. Was I not good enough, or was it just another terrible dead-end job fit, taken out of necessity to survive when I’d forgot what actually living even felt like? Is it failure when the thing you failed at wasn’t for you in the first place?
That six-month period was just the calm before a greater storm. I finally “had my shit together” enough to have something more Instagrammable to eat than ramen and fast food. And then the soulless corporate machine jettisoned me back into a life unbloggable.
Or was it?

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