This is the quiet trauma of America today. We live to work. We work to live. And this cycle is broken all the time.
Jobs hold a little something over our heads in cruel way. Purpose. Fulfillment. Security. I feel as though the government is still holding this little something over me, but unlike the (albeit uneven) give-and-take that came with the salary and benefits, they have my little something and I can't get it back. I feel like I made a deal with the devil. No really. My aversion to melodrama wants me to delete that sentence, but the deep dread in me months later only festers and I know it's true. I wanted to change the big bad but the big bad changed me. I need to purge this thing.
This is a piece from a sparse journal which in less than 75 pages, interspersed with (far too many) practical matters, pointless lists, and unexplained empty or nearly empty pages saw me through my last semester at college, my first post-college job, and the initial stages of rejection and job-hunting. The hand-writing varies unsettlingly and often ignores the lines. Cross-outs are scribbling messes, sometimes completely obscuring the first attempt at composition. The spelling is apathetic even for me, and the condensation of letters is rampant despite the sprawling script.
"When You have a routine, it's very easy to regurgitate the status quo. Little repetitions lead You through the larger repetition. 'I am doing A because of B because of C...because of x, y, and z." But when there's a disruption in this pattern, You begin to question why You're doing anything at all.
You wonder what the point is. The end-goal. You wonder about its sustainability. It seems like the world is going to hell in a hand basket...again...except this time we have numbers and charts.
Science has made the end look so sure."
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