Collecting Stories Instead of Promotions

19 years ago, when I was actually 34 I tried to count every job I had even for one day and came up with around 67 (unless I’m confusing it with the time I tried to count all of my roommates.)

However many more jobs later I’ve learned that the liberty and the happiness that I can attain from them lives beyond the job description or the compensation.

What can we do that is mentally stimulating, gratifying, and contributes to society and is a job that people will actually pay us money to do?

How pertaining to the previous question do we also avoid homelessness, and make sure that we also eat and have health insurance?

I can accept accountability for NOT doing what most desperate young Americans do when they want to escape where they are and they don’t have anyone to help: they join the military.

Thirty-four years ago, instead I signed up for indentured servitude when I filled out my first FAFSA application on actual paper. At least up until July 3rd, I have been avoiding student loan payments ever since. I’m currently torn between applying for a masters program and applying for the police department.

One option postpones my student loans.

The other eventually forgives them.

Me, a police officer? LMAO.

I have no particular desire to carry a gun, and I genuinely hate driving. But the socio-anthropological purpose!

But every once in a while I catch myself wondering what it would feel like to throw myself into an entirely different life (again).

Maybe that’s all this thought experiment really is.

The financial equivalent of a cold plunge.

4th of July weekend, after paying every other bill, I begrudgingly made my first student loan payment.

I considered not paying it.

Instead, I treated it as an act of good faith that the universe will provide; the Weekend at Bernie’s presidency will come to a sudden and dazzling end in the near future. What poetry it would be if it happened before or DURING my visit to my father’s in MAGA, Indiana.

It is an invitation for the universe to return that $342 one hundredfold into the empty space in my checking account.

I felt the familiar sense of overwhelm and avoidance, the catastrophic thinking. The poverty mindset. Instead of first defaulting to the fetal position I thought about my credit score, which is currently “very good” and I paid it.

I’m not proud that I paid it, I have no sense of pride about “pulling myself up by the bootstraps” or some such nonsense. I’d happily default again if I weren’t afraid of the consequences.

I consider myself a conscientious objector to student loan repayment. Because, if this was actually a free country instead of a big lie manufactured by pedophile oligarch reptilians, our tax dollars would be used to fully educate its citizens instead of funding genocides and supplying universal healthcare to Israel.

Once upon a time I imagined becoming an internationally famous author writing under a pseudonym. Instead, I forged a path cosplaying through a long succession of hourly occupations outside STEM and the high-income professions.

The story that I told myself is that I wasn't put here to accumulate large amounts of money; I was put here to collect stories and lint in my pocket.

My ancestors explain this lifetime as something resembling detention.

As if I were assigned to copy pages from the dictionary until I accidentally enjoyed it too much…

…went off script…

…and started adding my own material.

Which, naturally, gets me into even more trouble.

What about you? Did you ever take a job for purely exploratory purposes? Because you wanted to get inside of the building, to rummage through the drawers just to see what they kept inside? Was it ever dangerous? Did it ever make you feel better if you told yourself that you were just there working undercover? That it wasn’t your real job and that the uniform is not who you are?

If you are not already accessing your non-dominant hemisphere, I encourage you to get in touch with the other person inside of you by reaching out with your left (or right) hand for a pencil. Encourage that silent observer to help you vocationally rehabilitate yourself and tell me a funny story.