Underachiever

This is the flip side of “Loser”. Without ever getting an amazing lucky break or windfall, I am nonetheless having a pretty good life, and that takes a certain amount of intention and follow-through, and it is completely okay not to have the big break. However, is it enough?

This is not so much a matter of whether or not I need more to get by. I would like to have a bigger travel budget, but I can live with it. The question is whether I should have more.

It’s not like I have never asked the question before. I remember when I bought the house thinking that it was my first real milestone since I had graduated from college. Without getting married and having children (which I am not even going to touch in this post, but there is a multi-part series coming up), not a lot necessarily happens. I went on a mission, graduated from college, got a job, and just worked, eventually buying the house.

Sometimes I would catch up with schoolmates and they would be impressed that I worked at Intel, but I would downplay it, because it was not really a prestigious job, or a loved job, just a normal job that I was good at, and that paid okay, and for which my education was completely unnecessary. I never climbed the corporate ladder, with Intel or CDI, and I didn’t really want to. Now I have to think about whether I want to do that at Regence.

To be fair, one thing that helped me stay content at previous jobs is that I got to try a lot of new things, being creative and taking new responsibilities, so it kept me stimulated. This tended not to result in an increase in pay or a change in job title. That possibly could have been different if I had pushed a little more. I turned down some options because I didn’t think I would enjoy them, and I accepted one job change not because I wanted it, but because I knew anyone else doing it would be disastrous. I took the job because it was going to be less annoying than having to deal with someone else in the job.

I know there will be people who find that completely pathetic, and now approaching forty without much to show for it, they may be right, but then I go back to having mostly enjoyed my life, which not everyone can say.

When I went to Italy and met my family there, I wanted to make sure I could communicate, so I decided I would ask everyone about their jobs and how they met their significant others. Those seemed like reasonable questions, where I could listen and get to know them.

No one had much to say about their jobs. They had jobs, and they told me what they did, but it was so utterly unimportant to them. They talked more about their personal lives—their families, trips they had taken, things they enjoyed doing—that was what mattered. I kind of like that.

At the same time, I do have a really good brain, and I don’t want to waste it, and my real strength is language and I am not using it for my career at all. I think you see my quandary. Of course, part of what got me here was that my plan was always to work with language. I was going to write.

Around the time I started college I read a column by William Raspberry advising his niece (who wanted to be a journalist) not to major in English. Instead she should study the world and then she would have something to write about. That sounded very logical. After all, the popular writers then were Michael Crichton (who went to medical school), John Grisham (law school).

Also, it corresponded with my own desires. The classes that interested me were foreign language and history, but those worked. Studying other languages enriches your grasp of English, and studying history is studying everything—science, psychology, sociology—everything that happens for any reason comes into play in history. Also, I had no desire to take English classes, because the first year or two is graduate students trying to make you write like them, and who needs that?

So that was all very logically planned, and enjoyable, and the only real problem is that I am still not a professional writer. I have written one novel, one children’s book, and six screenplays on my own, plus collaborated on another one, and developed a pilot for a television series, and I have made $0. It’s times like this when you need to reevaluate a dream.

I have thought about other ways of doing it. I could try and go in for technical writing more, as I have actually done some as part of my other duties. They usually want certification, but that’s doable. I could set up a freelance writing business, and that is probably something I could do well at after spending some time building up a clientele. The only problem is that those plans generate no enthusiasm for me.

I hate selling myself. It’s bad enough having to pitch screenplays and write query letters—trying to get people to let me write their ad copy is not going to happen. Getting into technical writing would be easier, but it wouldn’t be a real step up from what I am doing now, and any of those efforts would take away from my already scarce time.

It seems like I need to stay as I am. In one sense I am viewing every job as a temporary job, until I can support myself as a writer, but that is only horrible if the jobs are horrible, and none of them really have been. Even as dysfunctional as the last one was, I was so deeply into it that I didn’t see it. (Also, it was a lot more functional while I was there.)

That was one thing, where I was having this slow realization that a lot of my obstacles were disappearing. The job that took so much out of me was gone, the draining writing project was finished, and the ward that took so much out of me was gone (more on that later too). I had a good visiting teaching companion and route, and Mom’s knees were done, and I was thinking, okay, maybe it is time to really make some progress on things I want to do, and then I got really sick.

Now I am healthy again, but moving into the time of year when overtime is encouraged. That doesn’t last long, and who knows, maybe the house will burn down, or—no, I don’t even want to put any of those things out there. In the eleven months that I was unemployed, I had flu, there was severe weather, people died, I was depressed and financial and emotional strain of the unemployment led to family stress, and I wrote four and a half of those screenplays. There’s always going to be something hard, but it doesn’t prevent progress from being made.

Ultimately, I still have to be writing, because I am not right in my head if I don’t. Characters and situations get in, and I keep replaying things over and over until I get them written out, and then they move on. It’s the same with the blog and the journaling—nothing really gets resolved until I have written about it, and I have about 35 blog posts that I know I need to do, plus at least one journal session, not even counting the fiction. Do you know that the soap opera is a dying genre, and yet I still have two going around in my head (one inspired by Jaws 2).

I’m afraid I’m not terribly impressive, but I am me, doing things my way, and I was never going to pull off anything else.