Just While Jobs

Everyone starts out with a dream of what they want to be. Its pull may be great or wistful, and the obstacles barring its acheivement may be moutainous or nonexistent. But everyone starts out wishing to be something, and the rest of their life is just the background noise for that ultimate plotline.

Or so I thought.

Sometimes the line toward your destiny is not drawn in at all. Sometimes there are interruptions, complications, and the ever-pressing demands that society has deemed necessary for life. And that's when you have to start getting creative. Your goal is still there, it's just that now there's a moat and a castle fortress and maybe even a frothing-mawed monster standing imposingly before you, making your ultimate goal just a little harder to reach.

For me, that monster is my student loans and that castle the money to support myself. I have had to get jobs using only a fraction of my skills, just to be able to pay for those "necessities" that I need to live. The things that are not, apparently as necessary as that gleaming beacon of hope which is my goal of being a published writer. I have had to take a just while job.

I have started to realize that every job I've ever had was something I was doing "just while" I was doing something else. My first job, at McDonald's was something to do just while I was in high school. Then, I did a couple of jobs just while I was getting through college. None of these jobs were anywhere near in line with my ultimate goal of being a writer, because unfortunately, the road to that job is not paved with easily measurable stepping stones.

And now I am at a crossroads. My just while job is so soul-crushing, so incredibly awful that it's actually leaving me with nothing when I go to pick up my pen. I don't want to think, don't want to weave sweetly ironic tales of magic. I just want to go to bed and when I wake up, have all my financial problems disappear in a cloud of magical dust. Maybe if I build up enough magic from not writing, I can make it all disappear in one big poof! Okay, maybe not.

All of this, I am sure seems very whiny. I'm sure any one person could tell me that I could just get another job. And I'm sure that eventually, I could. But I don't want another just while job, and that is exactly what it would be.

I want my job. My job is to wake up and be happy at all the promise in the day ahead. My job is to watch people, to know people, to get inside their heads and figure out why the ticks are ticks instead of tocks. My job is to write something they understand, they relate to, they feel is truth somewhere inside themselves that they forgot existed. My job is to be a writer. And that's what I'm going to do.

I'm going to keep digging and clawing my way up after I get knocked down. I'm going to keep putting pen on paper, keeping clicking away at the keys until something finally takes. Because I see my destiny, even through the stones of that stupid castle, and through the waterlogged matted hair of that moat monster. No one is going to keep me from it. Not even this just while job.