of spelling and starts, of sorts

All of these words are just stuttering starts, attempts at writing things I haven’t figured out how to spell. Nothing perfect.

\I made a comment a couple of weeks ago, that it would be great if I could get paid to read books. I should have been more specific about this wish. Today I realized that I do, essentially, make a living by reading; but it’s by proofreading online training courses for grammatical and formatting errors. Not exactly scintillating material. So now, if I could just get paid to read really good novels…

I have these thoughts swirling around that I’m somehow a lesser person doing a lesser job because I got my job through my family, and didn’t really earn it. That, even though I do work, it’s not real work because I don’t have to go into an office every day and suffer through dealing with annoying customers and shitty bosses ( which has pretty much been every job I’ve ever had before).

I’ve been through so many jobs: Jewellery quality control, book shelver at the library, Starbucks. I once spent three weeks taking every single item off the shelves in a pharmacy, dusting the shelves and then putting all the items back on. I worked at Cobs bread, I quit my PNE job as a bingo girl after 2 hours of training, I worked at a clothing store for 4 hours, Safeway, sorted article at interlibrary loans at sfu(by far the best), cashier/usher at a theatre, framed and sold pictures, and probably more I’m forgetting. The common thread? All of these jobs sucked: they were horrible, boring, and I got treated like crap even though I worked my ass off. I’m really good at being a doormat, apparently.

And what did I learn from all of this? Well, part of my brain says “ Anna, you’re a failure, you can’t even keep a mediocre, minimum wage job, what’s wrong with you, everybody else can do it, so you should be able to, too?”. Then, the other part of my brain says, “ That’s completely ridiculous. No one should have to spend their days doing unimportant and meaningless hard work that they don’t even get paid a living wage to do. It’s the job and all the societal expectations wrapped up around that are the problem”. So, I basically have crazy brain most of the time, arguing with myself, stumbling between failure and defiance.

I recognize the illness of a work world, a daily life where people have to spend their worthy time doing tasks that are unworthy of them. Along the way, I somehow bought into the myth that work has to be hard and unsatisfying. That if nobody’s yelling at me, I’m not working hard enough.

I will never be well adjusted. It’s just not in my nature, and I only barely conceal this through my surface quietness. I was always the nice girl ( which is better than being the mean girl, really) who was quiet and unassuming. I don’t always feel the need to talk, true, but unassuming means predictable and boring, and I hate being thought of as predictable and boring. Although I often worry that I am. I would rather stay in and have a Saturday night of knitting and listening to music than go out to a noisy and crowded dance club that plays music I’m not that interested in , and where I have to get exceptionally drunk just to deal with all the competition and random groping. I’m not a big fan of using alcohol as a social coping mechanism anymore. The days of me sitting alone in the corner at a party drinking from my bottle of wine are somewhat over.

Although I never quite fit properly, generic rebellion has never been my thing, either.

I just don’t want to walk through life with a pain in my chest, pretending not to care. I don’t want to keep pushing people away and then blaming them for my loneliness. I don’t want to have to keep this rocky shell around my thin skin, so worried about what parts of me will seep out if I don’t keep them contained and stashed away.

How is it that fullness and emptiness can feel the same? When you’re full of the wrong things, I guess…Façade is a beautiful word, and whenever I say it my palms feels as though they are tracing the edges of the outside of the most extraordinary and lovely building.