Gray Day

I spent my school years as a square peg. Not being bullied or rejected…but just feeling like I never fit in. My way of looking at things was different, even as a teen. I would not do the things that kids do to fit into the crowd, simply because I refused to be manipulated into doing things just to be "cool." In fact, if something was considered "In’ or "cool," it immediately lost its appeal. (I was nothing if not a control freak, even back then.) I would do what I wanted to do, not what teen society of the time dictated. Individuality was my primary objective. I wonder sometimes if I developed that zeal for individuality because I knew that I was a square peg and was never going to BE one of the crowd anyway. Making NOT fitting in my goal, turned the very thing that makes most adolescents the most miserable into a source of pride for me. Which is not to say I was not lonely. People think that loners are the way they are because they prefer it that way. There is a certain amount of truth to that…but, still, there are times when everyone needs a friend. And those of us who have fashioned ourselves into the classic "loner" persona sometimes find ourselves sadly lacking in that commodity.

After high school, I went to work instead of to college. I think I was more in need of what the workplace could offer me at the time… I found a social life outside of the stringent boundaries of high school. I found I could compete against other folks and excel (probably because most kids with my intelligence level had gone on to college…). I had always been high-energy, and a physically demanding job was something that fulfilled a need in me that school never had. I was perfectly happy to be on my feet running around like a crazy person for ten or twelve hours a day. For the first time in my life, I felt like I fit in.

Unfortunately, my chosen profession—restaurant work—turned out to be much like being a professional athlete. It’s definitely for people in their physical prime. By age thirty-five, you are pretty much too old for the game. I was lucky…I latched onto the job of my life when I was 31, and kept it until I was almost forty. But when the team puts you out to pasture, you find that there’s not much available for a forty-something ex-restaurant-manager. The industry is all about young, fresh faces. AND all about starting from the bottom and working your way up through an organization. At the age of forty, after working your butt off for twenty-two years, that doesn’t look too attractive. And you look around you at your slightly-older -than-adolescent co-workers and managers…you are old enough to be their mother. Not much prospect for a social life outside of work with these people.

So, for nearly a decade, I spun my wheels, searching for a position that would restore some of the feeling of confidence and self-esteem I had built at my "dream" job. I could not possibly count the number of jobs I had between 1994 and 2001. My husband and I would joke that wherever we traveled in Eugene or southwest Portland, we would pass people he knew, or places I had worked. But it was no joke. Coming to the realization that you are no longer wanted or needed in the world in which you have spent two decades building a place for yourself…or thinking you had…is no fun. I even tried "changing careers." I wandered briefly into the world of office work. I don’t think I could have chosen a job for which I was less suited. That took its toll as well.

Now I’ve "retired." But only because trying to find my way in the workplace was becoming too painful. It was more painful than giving up the good things that working had once offered me: social contact, a place to compete and sometimes even win, physical labor to satisfy my need to just…be busy. I have my own business now, and from time to time it provides me with what I need. But not all the time. And certainly not during the off-season months, when the specter of depression clings to the dark, wet windowpanes of a Pacific Northwest winter. The days are getting longer, and they haven’t been all that wet this year, thank heaven. But they have been lonely. And the prospects for that changing are not very good. In my mind, I know it’s up to me to "get out there" and live. But my heart is too sad, busted up, and scared to listen to a word my mind has to say.