Wasted Again

Today I got fired from the job I didn’t want. As far as I can tell, it’s because I said fuck and someone more important than me heard it and got upset.

All I really know is that I got a good review, everybody seemed pleased, nobody said anything, and then on my way home the man from the staffing company called and said they felt I want professional enough.

Tell me something I don’t know.

It’s hard to feel bad about it. Don’t get me wrong, I feel bad, but not about the job. I feel bad about myself.

I did the same thing I did more than a year ago with my last corporate job. Not the cussing. I did that too, but at least there it was only one in a long line of reasons I wasn’t their kind of girl. Here too, I suspect. I have this habit of deciding how something is going to be (successful, awesome) and then I will contort myself to make that true no matter what other facts present themselves. It’s a good habit when the deck’s stacked against you and you’re just trying to survive. It’s a terrible habit when you’re dealing with everyday life issues.

For example, I know I’m good at recruiting and pitching for myself. I also know that I actually enjoy pitching for myself. So, I take a gig doing it for someone else because why the hell not, I like doing this, right? And I have some doubts about their process, and their angle is the opposite of mine, but I tell myself that it’ll be good to learn some range. Like a lot of things I try, it turns out I have some skill, so at least I look normal, but something’s grating on me on the inside. My principals and their principals are not lining up, but they’re close enough I think I can fudge it. So I try, but it’s obvious I’m not fitting in. And instead of accepting that, and then either keeping my head down, doing my time and going home, I push harder to be good, to get it right, and that never ever works.

I can push myself to overcome a lot. Poverty, ignorance, even physical and emotional boundaries have fallen to this idea that I can do anything if I only work hard enough. But the one place this is never effective is with myself. By which I mean my core self. I used to think that one day I’d grow up and stop being this loud, naive thing. But that’s not really how it works

I only ever seem to become more myself, whatever I do. And honestly, I’m at a point where I’m just glad that the trend seems to be towards the positive end of my character traits rather than the negative.

Because this same inability to admit defeat, to the point of a full on rejection of any and all adversity can be a very good thing. It’s only when the unstoppable force of my will meets the immovable object of reality that we seem to have problems. As long as they’re parallel, we’re fine.

But the prospect of trying to fit in where I don’t fit, and the inability to calmly carry on when I can’t have what I want, or even what I think I should have turns me into an idiot. Or maybe a genius. It did get me fired from a job I didn’t like or want in the first place.

This is an excellent opportunity to feel very sorry for myself, and the fact that my dream of being universally loved and adored isn’t as on track as I want it to be. But that sounds kind of exhausting, and I have a lot of other stuff to do. Now that I lost this time consuming, underpaying, and altogether way too shitty contract, Ill be needing something to replace it. Which means that I’m about to up my own pitching to superhuman levels trying to get that work back.

If anything good came out of this, it’s that I am more committed to my own pitch than I’ve ever been, and I’m unafraid of giving a bad pitch, or even for being yelled at or treated rudely for it. This was good training and practice.