When I left, I didn't think I could stand one more day there, but after three weeks, I'm starting to feel OK about it. Well, thats generally how long it takes for a holiday to end.
The good thing about working in a soul-sucking bureaucracy is... you can't fail. You can stuff something up, but thats not failure. Clearly, you didn't have the knowledge or experience or enough time or whatever to complete the task. We'll work out what went wrong and do better next time. And thats when you stuff up, which is rare, because a bureaucracy has rules to follow. As long as you follow the rules, you'll do well. If you find yourself in a situation without rules, you can do whatever you want - and if it doesn't work out, then there will be some new rules to cover that situation.
In the real world, failure hurts. Even if its just the rejection of a story submission to a magazine, when you put yourself out there its you that gets rejected. That never happens in my job - I can do my job in my sleep.
Which brings us to the bad part. Doing my job - I am asleep. Theres just mindless tedium and endless procedure, and I hate it. Its easy, but you can't live fully when doing it. Part of you has to go away and do something interesting.
Right now, I'm looking at my first piece of pain, my first rejection, and I'm thinking - I'm not good enough. I'm not writing enough, I'm not submitting enough, I'm not getting better fast enough. I'm not going to accomplish anything during this time off and I'm going to go back to work, back to sleep, with nothing having changed. Its fear and I hate it. But at least its real.
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