Depresh Mode

I've never been the person with the plan, at least not professionally. I have life ambitions, sure, but most of them have to do with clunking out guitar scales or collecting achievement badges for Baldur's Gate III. Those are just two examples, but there's a gist to be got: you know, limited goals with (let's say it again) limited financial potential.

My therapist would likely tell you this has been a lifelong hedge against disappointment and failure, since you can't fail at something you lacked the courage to admit you were attempting in the first place. And then I'd show her by suddenly putting together an ambitious plan to sue her for breach of trust and professional ethics, because what is she doing telling you my shit? I'm pretty sure that's HIPAA.

There are upsides to not having an agenda, or at least I'll speak for myself: it's allowed me to find my own way, without dragging around the baggage of frustration or disappointment, viewing from below peaks I'd identified as climbable. It's also how you spend seven years at three colleges and emerge with something as monumentally ornamental as a master's degree in history with an emphasis on the Reformation period in Wales. But I loved doing it while I was doing it. Not enough to finish the whole PhD I was tracking toward, but way more than any of my science nerd friends seemed to love sweating blood through their engineering or biology courses en route to their fancy degrees that did stuff like "made them employable." Enjoy your living wages, nerds, I've got peace of mind.

They'd ask you when you were a kid what you wanted to do, but I never had an answer, ever. Part of that is an almost fanatical commitment to the core principle of noncommittal-ism,* but also none of the stock answers ever really seemed like Me. I always felt like I lacked some basic trait or skill that made any of those one-day-I'm-gonna-be child's answers appealing, like fireman (upper body strength), doctor (staying awake during math) or police officer (lying under oath). Anything I was going to do for a living was something I was going to end up doing. This is how you end up with an advanced degree in one of the humanities and/or being a stay-at-home parent. For me, these were "and."

Much longer story short, this is also how I ended up being a civil servant. It's a windy tale of both triumph and woe, both of which the basic circumstantial serendipity are agnostic about, but somehow following your inclinations tactically can work just as well as following some program strategically.

What I've learned in my time in the public sector and public-sector adjacent is that this is my best version of me. It offers balance and focus and service-oriented goals that involve at no stage spending physical or emotional energy making a bunch of money for some goon or goons way over your head on some org chart who have either failed to comprehend or refused to acknowledge the existence of the concept of enough.

But it turns out, those fucking goons aren't entirely escapable. I'll probably be out of this line of work, against my will, perhaps as early as tomorrow, due to goon-directed circumstances, which we'll call the converse side of indifferent serendipity. It won't be the end of me as a person, not by a goodly margin, but it will be (should it happen) the death of a dream I didn't know I'd dreamed until I woke up and I was living it.

Or, to rephrase a little more directly: this shit sucks ass.

As I've said in one form or another to literally every person I'm in contact with over the last 15 days or so: I'll keep you posted.

---

*Want to make an adult man sweat? Ask me what my favorite color is.