Leon The Professional

I think being called a writer was the worst thing that happened to my writing. Part of me believes it was the worst thing that happened to my life.

Gibran Khalil Gibran said that those who understand us enslave something in us, and perhaps that is one explanation; with every person that saw a piece of writing and thought it was good, and decided not to say “that’s a good piece” but instead said “that’s great, keep at it and you’ll be a great writer one day.” And genuinely believed it. “You have the potential,” they assured with all the love that comes from introspection on a convenient sunny day over a nice cup of coffee and cake, when all is easy with the world and companionship and nothing bad is happening.

That’s the poison; the potential, and how it tosses and turns with every paycheck and every commendation.

Six days ago, I walked out on my first full-time job. I had to check the calendar and surprised myself, but I’ll get to that later. As I’m tempted to turn this into an honest retelling, let’s just leave it at this: It was one that I deeply cared about that challenged me every day, and one that constantly fueled my tendency to define myself by my work with positive re-enforcement and structural workplace abuse. I was part of a broken hierarchy, containing a group of enabled, incompetent toads who thought they were defined by how expensive their lunch is, and how badly they inflected a vowel in a phony, malicious hello. I was overloaded with work under impossible deadlines with such low pay that when I finally left the place, they had to post 4 separate vacancies to replace me. The irony; why not pay your employees well and treat them like human beings in the first place? Isn’t that better ROI?

But that’s not what I’m here to talk about. It isn’t, I decide, because it shouldn’t be. I know the story, there’s no point in retelling it than to blow fire into the embers that I’m trying to kill. It’s counterintuitive.

What I’m here to talk about are the 6 days.

For 6 days, I have been caught into the cycle of crying and working, with no rest assigned to a waking hour. It’s been like I was chained to the desk with a gun to my head, trying to figure out how to work again and when no opportunity presents itself; work on getting work incessantly by applying to a thousand places, revamping my website, posting hourlies, brushing up on sales copies, downloading SEO textbooks, getting into in-depth web analytics at 4 in the morning and taking notes to read about email newsletters the next day. Correction: Feeling bad about not knowing enough about it already.

It’s been a total mess. I haven’t been able to snap out of it, I physically couldn’t. I worked compulsively on virtually nothing, through phone calls and bathroom breaks. I was on a frenzy to learn all that can be learned and find out why it is I’m not working right now, and immediately fix it.

But I already knew why I was not working, it was because I left. Right?

I managed to get an interview at two shitty places, and missed one of them because I just didn’t feel like waking up. I was tempted to not even call to reschedule it, because nothing is more insulting than only getting a bad (Read: worse) job, even not getting a job is better. For 6 days, I doubted myself. I rewrote history and berated myself over wrong decisions and fucking things up, I forgot all the reasons I had for leaving and all the unhappiness that working there caused me. I forgot all the stress, the breakdowns, the sleepless nights, the shameless assholery and the crazy I had to put up with each day. I forgot that I’d started counting hours at the office, and how long they got towards the end. I’d forgotten how much that place broke inside of me, like a goddamn miley cyrus on a wrecking ball, moaning and crashing into walls of sanity and niceness, of space and growth, of creativity and hope.

And that’s when it hit me. For a year, I’ve been waking up in the morning and working on an offensive amount of things and spending my evening thinking about the next morning. And now I’m free. What I’m experiencing is not grief, introspection, regret or an identity crisis…it’s withdrawal.

Corporate life is not built for homo sapiens. It was built around them out of a collateral bad decision, driven by the capitalist obsession with efficiency and profit, and for decades, homo sapiens have been trying to break in their new stubborn cement boots. 

All over the internet, you read stories that go along the same line: “I worked a 60-hour week and had high expectations of myself. The paychecks were a thrill, but I had no life. It wasn’t until I completely burned out that I decided to be a nomad and eat shoes with barbecue sauce off the naked belly of a communist fiddler and only then did I find what I was really missing out on in life. I am happy now.”

It just doesn’t fucking work. That’s what escapes me; millennia of human evolution whose starting point was tribalism, and the BEST thing we could come up with is “Hey, let’s take away human contact and space for creativity and stuff them all in cubicles, put them in uniforms, hold them hostage with an obscene 9-hour work day that they can’t function with or escape so they won’t starve, give them 21 days a year for themselves that they can’t take in bulk, force them to email the next person in an endless, pedantic cycle of uselessness and turn Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs into a giant oxymoron! That’s a sustainable idea! That will surely drive progress and lead humankind forward.”

No, it won’t. It will drive people off glass-buildings every other month, though. You’ve solved the age-old riddle of survival instinct, you’ve unraveled the DNA of the thinking, autonomous being, but you have not created a model where people could thrive.

I remember another quote I read somewhere: We’re all hairless apes with anxieties.

Making the realization that I was experiencing withdrawal gave me the first 3 minutes off I had since I quit. It made me stop in my derailed tracks. What was I doing? I need a break. I needed a break, remember? That’s why I quit, remember? How come I forgot that?

The rules of credible writing say there is a conclusion, or build-up to a conclusion, right about now. You peak, you resolve and you fall. But my gears are stuck on peaking and I’m burning out, and I have no idea if resolution is near, or what this realization could mean for me.

I have decided to take a break…again, and I’m writing this to remind me. This is a reminder to smile, enjoy my time off and the little things, and to regain my sense of time that has been so obviously maimed beyond repair. Regain that sense of time, regain that sense of self, and sense will come in due time.

Here’s to the crossed fingers, the pinky promise and the thumbs up. The pointer has done enough. 

I'll go watch Leon: The Professional, and wake up tomorrow without a checklist.