Angels and ministers of grace defend us

Dawn is writing again.

I sure would appreciate any thoughts or opinions on the following. Just the start of something I began a couple of months ago. I want to develop it further, but want some opinions first. Enjoy:

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I always seem to find myself in the same sorts of places. No matter what I try or what I do, I always end up back in a world of gray boxes. It seems a futile effort to fight against the turning tide of my life. I should just settle back and let the currents carry me out to sea on a raft of memos and reports.

I think sometimes, as someone once told me, that I might be afraid of what happens when you leave these short dull walls. Maybe I have become institutionalized to the point that I couldn't function on the outside. Maybe that’s true. There is a certain type of security that comes from the highly structured world within these cozy confines. I will admit to getting small thrills from things like potlucks, or slice of birthday cake from an aging colleague. I always assumed that this was a coping mechanism, designed to make these chains bearable. Maybe, just maybe, it is all a part of larger series of lies I have been telling myself for years.

There could be something to the theory that I am here because on some baser level, I deserve to be. That no matter how smart or funny I think I am, my psyche, fragile thing that it is, has contrived a way to stay locked inside of the pseudo cell of the cube world. Perhaps, I fight because I don’t want to be completely lost to this place and disappear into the miasma of the work-a-day world. I look around me at my desk, a place I once vowed to keep clear of personal knick-knacks so that I could affect an escape with no more than a moments notice. Now, I am forced to take inventory of a dozen little mementos and realize that I am solidifying my presence here, so that it becomes more and more difficult to extract myself.

But then, there are times when I look around me and I think only: “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.”

There is certainly a separate culture at work here. It took a couple of years, but I have become fully fluent in the secret language of the cube dweller. I understand the gestures, the jokes, and the helpless laughter when a superior tries management rule number fifteen: Tell jokes to lighten the mood. There are customs that must be observed, laws that must be obeyed, and courtesies that must be met. There is a neighborly infrastructure that is at play in these mini-homes away from home. There are covenants and blocks and even neighborhoods in your larger offices. There is leadership, sometimes elected democratically, sometimes installed by a tyrannical despot to terrorize and control the peasant class.

If I am a stranger in a strange land, my little mementos take on a new significance. Perhaps my treasures are anchors to the outside world, small reminders of a place of free thinkers and artists. They remind me of those deep hidden parts of myself that I keep shackled and hidden away during the nine to five rushes. In truth, I have a more intimate relationship with the stained ceiling tile above my seat than I do with my neighbor on the other side of the wall. I spend more time staring into space than practicing the art of small talk. In the world of my mind, I am free. I am happy, and I am in control. Sometimes I win the lottery, and sometimes I win a Pulitzer Prize. Every imagined situation is different, but the result is still the same. I escape from here, as secure in my freedom as I ever was in my cubicle and bi-weekly paycheck.

That I long to break out of this mold is not in doubt. The thing that stalls even my best laid plans is how to engineer that escape. How do I transition from a gray world of certainty to a world swirling as much with color as doubt?

Mondays are the worst for me. Every one of them blends into every other, until they become an entire year of Mondays, each as pointless and hopeless as the last 32 years ago on a Monday my mother was in the hospital laboring to give birth to her first child. I’m sure that in the weeks and months leading up to, what for her was a momentous occasion, she was filled with a million thoughts, not the least of which were the hopes and dreams that she had for her little girl.

Somewhere, along the long and winding road, those hopes and dreams faded with age until I’m sure my mother put them aside entirely. Whatever they were, I am sure that they didn’t include a dead-end existence in a pointless corporate situation. There are those here, as at all companies, who have the desire to move up, gobbling promotions like they were candy. Those who have perfected the art of kissing up so well that it has become purely instinctual. In a weird way, I admire them; or at least their spirit. Then there are also those who will move up through no thought or conscious effort of their own, and who fall ass backward into better pay and situations, and yet believe that they are owed what ever little they are able to scrape together. They go out and buy mediocre houses in cookie-cutter communities, promptly purchase an SUV, and start to have babies to increase the world’s population. They pass along to their children the same sense of entitlement that they inherited from their parents.

Then there are those like me. I work because I have to, period. There is no reward for me greater than my paycheck. I do just enough to keep it and keep from getting fired. It is true that once, when I was fresh from college, I too was bright eyed and bushy tailed, and weirdly optimistic. I believed that hard work and intelligence would open doors for me. I believed that I could do anything, and that I would show my worth and be duly rewarded. I’m not sure if it was foolishness or naivete or a strange mixture of both, but after my first year in the workforce, I was jaded and forever altered. I haven’t been able to get my drive back since, and really, I don’t want it back. I think of places like this as nothing more than the waiting room of death. Maybe my mother is right. Maybe I need more optimism.

My mother is too smart for her own good and too good for the world in which we live. She has worked harder than anyone I have ever known at one of the most thankless jobs on the planet: she is a nurse. My mother spends her days elbow deep in puss and shit, and receives as her reward, less than half of the pay of the doctors who spend as much time on the golf course as she spends on the ward. She has always worked the worst shifts in places I can’t even walk into without feeling the cold grip of death slither up my spine. I don’t know how she goes back day after night after day, and always with a smile on her face. She is either an angel of mercy sent to comfort the dying, or she has long since made peace with her station in life, counting the much shorter days until retirement on pension and social security.

As I sit here, staring at a blank spreadsheet, willing it to complete itself, and trying to look busier than I am, I wonder about the earliest expectations she had of me. I watch her now as she looks at me, and I can see the resignation on her face. I can hear in her voice that I am doing less than was expected. I wonder if she can pinpoint a place in my life where it all went wrong, or if she thinks that I have given up prematurely. I am sure that she is tired of hearing my plans and dreams. Every six months or so, I have a new idea for escaping the doldrums of this life and become that which I have always dreamed: a self-sufficient woman who depends only on herself for her living. Every six months, a new plan, and I excitedly tell my mother all about it. A few months later, when my plans have fallen apart and I start to sink into a depression brought on by my withering enthusiasm, I feel myself getting far more bitter than my still tender years should allow.