Everyone knows the rules. It’s a cultural phenomenon. It shaped me. I noticed a theme there in 1999 when it came out after The Matrix (March) and American Beauty (September). The theme I picked up and latched onto – to my great misfortune, to the despair of my current and future self, and certainly to the near-crushing disappointment of my parents – is that work sucks.
Work really, really sucks. It cannot be overstated how much work absolutely fucking sucks.
All the protagonists of these stories quit their job, or at least had a gloriously defiant altercation with an authority figure that I found thrilling and heroic.
The impact this misguided identification of heroism has had on my career is… comically tragic.
While I was working at FedEx a few years ago, I interviewed for a job that was a step above the bottom rung I was on. It would have been an increase in pay and more importantly, an increase in skill, but as I was interviewing I realized I didn’t want the increase in responsibility.
I’m cringing now as I remember the look on my would-be supervisor’s face: shocked disgust. Who does this idiot think she is? The shift from her relaxed, almost enthusiastic support at the beginning of the interview struck me hard. The experiences listed on my résumé made me look like an easy choice.
It would have been a slam dunk – all I had to do was be humble and willing to try.
Nope. Not this narcissist with fire in her veins. Too cool for it. I left the room keenly aware of having wasted everyone’s time and energy. I fucked up gruesomely. I was candid, though; I had been authentic.
I wanted them all to know who I believed I was: a blue collar genius who was smart enough to do more than push boxes across the conveyor belt but chose not to, out of a warped sense of honor and purpose. I wasn’t aware of the term “leadership from behind” but the idea was an ember glowing somewhere inside of me.
Even if my “leadership” had been worth more than a pile of dogshit I was still a grotesquery of delusional arrogance, playing at solidarity with the underprivileged when in truth I was lazy and cowardly. I could have seen that reality then, as I walked out of the room of irked superiors, but I padded myself with the idea that I’d simply taken a shot and missed.
Long ago I figured out how to delude myself away from anxiety and into a toxic form of self-acceptance. Now I’m in a hole deeper than my teenage self could imagine. I thought things were bad then.
I want to change. I want to overhaul the bad habits and mental/emotional garbage that have brought me to this age a dogged underachiever. My face is starting a counter-rebellion against my intransigent teenage rebelliousness, showing lines and sagging, refusing to let me continue getting away with this ridiculous pretense that I have unlimited time and life to waste.
What I should have taken to heart from Fight Club, instead of the defiance of authority and resistance to financial security, was the incident with Raymond K. Hessel, the human sacrifice. I need to sacrifice myself, and not in the way I have been, by trying to destroy my ego through accepting failure without redress. This fragile, brittle ego is immortal so long as the body lives. My comfort and distractions are what I’m putting on the pyre.
Lazy choices have pushed me to the actual edges. I’m headed for the bottom: In a few months, I will be a half-step above homeless, if not actually living out of my car. And I have always wanted this. I know that sounds crazy. I have been described as crazy by family, by coworkers. That’s usually a strong indicator that one is, in fact, crazy, and not just being gaslit.
Though I still contend that a lot of these motherfuckers really were gaslighting me out of spite.
What if I’m just different? What if I’ve always had a different destiny than the rest of you? Not a better, singular destiny; just a different way of coming around to picking up my slack and pulling my weight like the rest of humanity seems to do with relatively less fuss.
More to come.
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