Life, Simplified - Part 1: Let It Go

I don't think there is one among us humans who has not benefited from being told of, or who hasn't stumbled across a technique or process or a trick that makes life simpler. Sometimes it's an evolution of steps in an activity that we tend to pare down into a more streamlined way, only to be shocked some time later when reminded of how we used to do it. Other times it's a sudden realization that we could do a task in a totally different way that shaves time or effort from our day. Or sometimes it's much, much bigger than that.

In a series of posts — because I think one post to cover all of them would just be too long ...like that ever stopped me before — I will highlight the things I have discovered on my own which have made life better.

When It's Gone, Let It Go
From the moment I separated from the Air Force, I pursued a career in broadcasting and video production: earned my degree in Radio/TV at Southern Illinois University; two years later accepted my first career job at a very small-market TV station in southern Illinois (a stepping stone to fame and fortune); two years later jumped half a country away to a job at a TV station in Georgia; then to a cable outlet in the same town; then back to Chicago. In all, I spent 16 years in the industry.

It was perhaps two years or so into that career when I discovered I wanted to write. I was writing in my job(s) — a lot. As a matter of fact, the writing I did at work — scripts, mainly, for local advertisers' commercials — sucked up all my creative energy, so when I got home, all desire to write what I wanted to write was gone.

Flash forward to 2003 or so, and I had landed what was, for me at the time, a dream job: video production with extensive travel. While I was interested in the travel aspect mostly for the opportunity to see bits of the world, it was in 2003 that I capitalized on the hours of idle time on airplanes and started writing down the stories for which I had only previously scribbled notes. I felt like I was actually getting somewhere with my ideas! On top of that, I was still dreaming of the big time in video production while pitying the poor nine-to-fivers who went to the same job in the same place every day forever.

It all came crashing to a halt in April, 2009, when, due probably as much to my own pride as to the flattened economy, I was shit-canned from my "dream job."

I spent the next three years or so knocking on that career door which had been so unceremoniously shut. There were a few freelance gigs with the former employer, a few gigs picked up through a small network of similarly skilled folks, but in a glutted market that had gone stagnant, I wasn't making enough to support myself. But I was working, having entered the occupation of taxi driver. It was a new experience, being self-employed and building a client base and covering my responsibilities, but after a while I realized that taxi ownership was eating me alive — financially as well as psychologically. The hours were insane: 14-hour days, six days a week, just to make ends meet ...and I wasn't exactly making those ends meet. My debt was growing. I found myself longing to get out, even being happy with the thought of the daily nine-to-five in the same job in the same place every day forever.

But during this same period, I was writing — more so at the beginning. I had lost the momentum on the older ideas I had started, but was cultivating new ideas. I was creating! And I had made the realization that I could return to acting, my other passion, which had lain dormant for more than a decade. It became my primary creative outlet, and my writing tapered off to a trickle.

Still, in this period is when it hit me: I was doing things I wanted to do! It wasn't the career I had chosen that was fulfilling me, but it was in indulging my passions. My career leaving me opened my eyes to the reality that I had been living to work when it should have been the other way around. All those poor nine-to-five saps had been doing it right all along!

So I stopped letting my career drag me along, digging my heels into the earth, hoping for it to let me back in. I just let it go, stood on my own two feet, and watched it shrink to a dot on the horizon.

It took a couple of years. I had to get out of the taxi, so I took whatever I could get. It had been five years since the layoff; the economy had turned back around and was improving. Jobs were to be had once again. There was a false start with a photography company, then two years in a tenuous existence with a valet company who provided shitty pay and no benefits before I landed the perfect, mindless, benefits-rich, nine-to-five existence that leaves me time to my passions.

It has been a slow, grinding re-start to get my writing rolling, but it's coming along. I recently put about a week's worth into a screenplay idea I had a decade ago. I've joined a Facebook writers' group and have already submitted two-thousand words to participate in their challenges. I feel like the Tin Man in the land of Oz whose creaky joints need a little bit of oil, but then he's soon whooping it up with a scarecrow and a lion.

The new job doesn't pay a great deal more than the old, and doesn't make life much easier, but my new outlook makes living with myself much easier. And that makes life much better.



# # #