Being Something

I am a 1986 college graduate and for the past seventeen years I have worked on an assembly line.

A fellow employee asked me years ago, upon learning of my educational background, if I didn't want to "be something". I thought for a moment, and answered, "but I AM something." Obviously, just not the something she thought I could or should be.

I made it out of a small midwestern liberal arts college with a double major in English Literature and English Writing. Since then, I have had three full time jobs, all of them factory jobs. I have worked at my current employer for seventeen years, doing a multitude of menial, repetitive, largely unfulfilling tasks for little pay, for a facility that largely treats its employees like disposable commodities. I still live in the same house I grew up in, with my mother.


The question that I can hear screaming out at me is, "Why?"


I am a writer. That's really about all I can do. I can't fix things, I can't build things, I can't manage large groups of people or sell things or advertise things. In short, I can't do most of the tasks that constitute worthwhile pursuits in the mind of the public at large. Maybe I could do some of these things if I applied myself, but I fear I could not do so and remain whatever it is that comprises "me". I would, by necessity, be someone else in doing so, and while I have no illusions about the state of imperfection I dwell in, I am not quite ready to completely transform myself into another person in order to "succeed" in the eyes of others.

My hometown is quite small, population under 1000. I have no desire to live in a large, bustling metropolis where all human contact is brief, terse and perfunctory, if not outright cold. My parents were older when I was born; my dad was 45 and my mom 37. My dad is gone now, and my mom is struggling with a series of serious health concerns, including emphysema and cancer of the lung. I am now her primary caregiver. I can't drive in a city; I have little practice and less inclination. All that "is" me, all the experiences and emotional touchstones and personal contacts that make up the core of myself, are here. Were I to relocate to a larger area, maybe I could adapt, and maybe not. But whatever benefit I would gain by doing so is outweighed, in my mind, by the loss of something so personal and essential as to make the entire enterprise undesirable.

So I work here, and when the muse strikes me, I write here. I take care of my mom, organizing pills, breathing treatments, radiation treatments, doctor appointments, meals, and household tasks. I work full-time. I volunteer for a local humane society, writing ads for the local paper and generally helping out where I can. I am a good and intensely loyal friend to a select group of people. In the last twelve years, I have been a pallbearer several times, an executor of my uncles's will, a best man twice, and have served on jury duty. I do what I have to do, and hope that it is good enough.

I get by the best I can.

It's unfortunate that so many people automatically equate an education with the necessity to make large sums of money. It's even more unfortunate that they assume the only way to "be something" is to make large sums of money. I realize that my fellow worker didn't mean any offense with her comment. She was just curious as to why someone with my background would choose something that she was doing only out of necessity. I understand her point. This is not exactly the path I envisioned for myself as a boy; "Gee, when I grow up I'll spend $30,000 dollars on college and then work for decades as a widget maker!" Hardly the stuff that dreams are made of.

And the culture we live in inculcates this very short-sighted mindset, this inability to look beyond the surface of material possessions and important sounding but ultimately hollow titles like "supervisor", "CEO", and "manager". We get one life, and to imprison oneself in the didactic ethos that pervades our society today seems very limiting and ultimately, quite unfulfilling. I did not go to college to make a lot of money, no matter how shocking that statement may be. No knowledge is ever wasted and no one should assume that I have wasted mine because I don't wear a suit to work every day or sit behind a mahogany desk or have a dozen people working under me.

But if John Lennon was right, and life truly is "what happens to you while you're busy making other plans", I guess this is the life that's happened to me, for better or worse. For now, anyway. I'm not quite ready to pack it in and give up on other careers; I have a moderately comfortable amount of savings that serves as a nice "rainy day" backup for the day I tire completely of the job I have and feel that it's time to leave. I will always be able to write, to type, to think, to communicate with people and to imagine.

My life may not be everything it could be or even should be, but it is, at the very least, "something".