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ravenSo I had a bit of a weird realisation about my life today. I have a friend and former colleague whom I like a lot - she's one of those people that make you sorry that "sweet" and "kind" are such anodyne descriptors, and that maybe they ought not to be - and she's... well, "unhappy" is also an anodyne descriptor, but, well. She's been unhappy with her job for basically as long as I've known her - to distill a lot of complicated stuff right down, it's because the job doesn't suit her all that well, and even if it did, it's oddly set up so she's always saying she doesn't know how she can make progress, she doesn't know how to use it to develop her career. All perfectly valid reasons to be unhappy, and now she has to deal with a serious family illness and I know she feels like she should take a lot of the responsibility for supporting her parents, and whether or not that's true it's pretty clear that's taking a lot of toll on her. She called me last night for some practical thing about meeting up soon and once I'd got over being seriously honoured - like me she has phone anxiety - we spoke for twenty minutes just sort of chewing over stuff. It was nice, and I really do miss her.
The thing that occurred to me after we were talking is that, well, she can talk over her work troubles with me, because I don't work with her any more, but obviously she feels constrained talking about it with her friends who are her colleagues, and she doesn't have many other friends close; she's obviously reticent about sharing her problems with her family right now, and she's clearly dealing with anxiety, and she's an only child... and I thought, god, I wish you were really into some stupid TV show about spaceships. You know what I mean? It seems so weird and simplistic to say, but if she were super-into, I don't know, Star Trek or Game of Thrones or Parks & Rec or One Direction, then - well, I guess the ridiculous thing is you don't do it this way round, what you do is realise your friend is super-into whatever-it-is and decide that their life would be enriched by fandom and that fandom would be enriched by them. What you don't do is begin by saying, I wish you were in fandom because I want that sense of community for you. And of course people do find comfort in their interests - and her interests mostly centre on orgasmically good baked goods (and chutney! I am writing this halfway through a cheese sandwich lovingly laced with my friend's ridic good tomato-courgette-apple) - but somehow it's not the same.
In the twenty minutes on the phone of course she asked how I am, and I gave her the honest answer - I'm not sure. I'm not awesome, anyway. Not the best. I'm not so far gone down the rabbit hole that I genuinely believe I will never work again, but what breaks my heart - and, god, it really does - is that I do believe I will never work as a lawyer again. That's not me - it's nothing to do with me, not really, it's a profession catching up with the reality of worldwide recession on property value and litigation risk, it's the fact that a newly-qualified lawyer is absolutely the least-good value, of any lawyer, in terms of usefulness and salary, it's that there are no jobs. I will get another job, maybe someday. Hopefully, it will be something I like doing. I'll do it and hopefully I'll get better at it and maybe progress into another career, and it'll be, not the best, but okay, maybe. The bit that hurts is how arbitrary it all is. My friend was saying, if I'd been in her cohort - two years older - then I would have her job, which would've suited me much better than it does her, and maybe my former workplace would have come up with something much better for her; if I'd been a year younger, then I'd have been in a cohort of two, and been way more likely to get a job simply because two people compete for jobs easier than six. And even in the year I was, doing the job I did, I lost out to one other candidate for a job. A fifty-fifty chance, and I lost. Which happens. It's just mostly about luck, and probably quite a bit about race, too.
I would find all this a lot more painful to deal with if it weren't for Welcome to Night Vale. Glib but true. Community, especially a community that doesn't care about the mess you're making of your life, is something. I can't really explain that to my friend, but I wish it was something I could give her.
She also told me that she's thinking about further study - she ordered prospectuses and discussed part-time working with her famously obstreperous HR department - because even if she never believes me, I know she's tough as anything, and Shim and I have been watching a lot of Parks & Rec recently and I have decided, if I ever do anything worthwhile ever again and maybe write my autobiography when I'm a hundred and five, I will title this chapter in my life "Requiem for a Tuesday".
You're lucky and you're lucky. That's it.
The thing that occurred to me after we were talking is that, well, she can talk over her work troubles with me, because I don't work with her any more, but obviously she feels constrained talking about it with her friends who are her colleagues, and she doesn't have many other friends close; she's obviously reticent about sharing her problems with her family right now, and she's clearly dealing with anxiety, and she's an only child... and I thought, god, I wish you were really into some stupid TV show about spaceships. You know what I mean? It seems so weird and simplistic to say, but if she were super-into, I don't know, Star Trek or Game of Thrones or Parks & Rec or One Direction, then - well, I guess the ridiculous thing is you don't do it this way round, what you do is realise your friend is super-into whatever-it-is and decide that their life would be enriched by fandom and that fandom would be enriched by them. What you don't do is begin by saying, I wish you were in fandom because I want that sense of community for you. And of course people do find comfort in their interests - and her interests mostly centre on orgasmically good baked goods (and chutney! I am writing this halfway through a cheese sandwich lovingly laced with my friend's ridic good tomato-courgette-apple) - but somehow it's not the same.
In the twenty minutes on the phone of course she asked how I am, and I gave her the honest answer - I'm not sure. I'm not awesome, anyway. Not the best. I'm not so far gone down the rabbit hole that I genuinely believe I will never work again, but what breaks my heart - and, god, it really does - is that I do believe I will never work as a lawyer again. That's not me - it's nothing to do with me, not really, it's a profession catching up with the reality of worldwide recession on property value and litigation risk, it's the fact that a newly-qualified lawyer is absolutely the least-good value, of any lawyer, in terms of usefulness and salary, it's that there are no jobs. I will get another job, maybe someday. Hopefully, it will be something I like doing. I'll do it and hopefully I'll get better at it and maybe progress into another career, and it'll be, not the best, but okay, maybe. The bit that hurts is how arbitrary it all is. My friend was saying, if I'd been in her cohort - two years older - then I would have her job, which would've suited me much better than it does her, and maybe my former workplace would have come up with something much better for her; if I'd been a year younger, then I'd have been in a cohort of two, and been way more likely to get a job simply because two people compete for jobs easier than six. And even in the year I was, doing the job I did, I lost out to one other candidate for a job. A fifty-fifty chance, and I lost. Which happens. It's just mostly about luck, and probably quite a bit about race, too.
I would find all this a lot more painful to deal with if it weren't for Welcome to Night Vale. Glib but true. Community, especially a community that doesn't care about the mess you're making of your life, is something. I can't really explain that to my friend, but I wish it was something I could give her.
She also told me that she's thinking about further study - she ordered prospectuses and discussed part-time working with her famously obstreperous HR department - because even if she never believes me, I know she's tough as anything, and Shim and I have been watching a lot of Parks & Rec recently and I have decided, if I ever do anything worthwhile ever again and maybe write my autobiography when I'm a hundred and five, I will title this chapter in my life "Requiem for a Tuesday".
You're lucky and you're lucky. That's it.
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no subject
on 2013-10-22 11:27 am (UTC)no subject
on 2013-10-22 12:53 pm (UTC)(I thought I heard a co-worker talking about Giles yesterday. But I felt completely unable to collar her and ask, because what if she wasn't and I just sounded ridiculous? Anyway, she might not even like Buffy and find my impassioned declaration of love for it offputting.)