On Not Getting the Job (aka On Why I Can't Go Home Again)

For the past 7 months, I've been living with my sister in Kentucky. I got a nice professional position at a local university about two hours from the town where I grew up. I am closer to my family. I should be happy, right?

Wrong. I'm miserable.

Well, maybe that's overstating it. I'm not miserable. I'm uncomfortable. I'm uneasy here. And the reason for this generalized ajada? I feel oppressed. I feel this intense pressure that I haven't felt since I was 17 and bursting at the seams to get the hell out.

I had reservations about accepting this job. Not because of the job itself. It represented a great opportunity for me. It has been a great opportunity for me. I had reservations about moving back to Kentucky. Who are we kidding? For years now, I've had reservations about visiting Kentucky.

Forget for the moment that I moved in with my sister with whom I have an uneasy relationship. Despite our major differences, we have managed fairly well living together.

So what really is the problem? People know me here. People who haven't seen me in 30 years. People who remember me only from how I was in high school. People, most often, who never moved away. People who haven't had the same breadth of life experiences that I have. People who never lived outside the box they were born into. They haven't tried new things. They settled into predictable patterns. They found no need to explore themselves, to examine their beliefs, or to even just try something new for the sheer enjoyment of it. When I look at some of those lives, I think how grossly inappropriate it would have been for me to have settled for that.

If there is a truth in my life it is this: I was not meant for the ordinary.

And because I didn't settle and I braved the world outside Kentucky, I have grown into the adult I am today. And I'm not a damn thing like I was back in high school. I can't even remember who that girl was. The most unfortunate part about it is this. Even if you managed to break free, the vision that your family and friends had of you remains intact. They still have these expectations. They still think they maintain this power to shape me. They think, quite honestly, that by trying to shame me, I'll behave in a manner they find acceptable. It seems harsh to say that, but that is how families work. At least, that is how my family works. My family wasn't there to see me grow and they refuse to acknowledge my growth. They are stuck with this vision of someone who doesn't exist.

I'm not going to argue this point, really, because while some might disagree, what I have just described is a truth in my life. Your's may be different. But my family exerted a lot of pressure to conform to their ideals, and those ideals were involved avoiding risk in any aspect of life. Whether it was socially speaking, financially speaking. Hell, as a family, we didn't even try new recipes. My family taught me strict adherence to community standards. In a word, that environment was oppressive. It was perhaps even more oppressive than high school, where the pressure to conform is intense.


So my family continues to attempt to apply guilt, shame, and overt pressure to force me to be someone I'm not. Do they do it maliciously? Of course not. But they do it. To the rest of the world in my home town, I'm still that high school person. They liked that person. They want that person back. I have lived in distant contact with those friends and my family for 30 years. We talk on the phone. We've seen each other 2-3 times a year. At holidays. On the occasional trip home. But for the most part, my adult life has been lived independent of my early influences and their influence waned long ago.

I think one of the reasons that being young is so hard is that we are awakening to the possibilities that life offers, but living in a situation where other people have more power over what we are, what we do, what ideas we feel comfortable expressing, what things we see, who we are exposed to than we do ourselves. When like to say that the young are discovering themselves, but they are doing so cloaked in the morality of their families. What kid hasn't heard that standard parental phrase, "Not while you're living under my roof"? Who we become is shaped, to a large extent, by the expectations of our families. If we remain in close contact with our families, that vision of who we are becomes ingrained. And that was true for me, right up until the moment that my ex-husband tried to kill me.

All bets were off after that. I decided that every day was a gift, and I was living for me and no one else.

I celebrate the day of my divorce each year. I call it my Independence Day. It was a day that changed my life forever.

I think I am extraordinarily lucky then to have moved away from my family early. I think had I not moved away early, I might have sought my refuge in them. I might have found comfort in becoming that person they expected. Thankfully, I didn't. Instead, I questioned everything that my life had become. I asked myself whether or not it fit my vision of myself. Did it fit the way I wanted to live my life?

Those were questions that were extraordinarily foreign to me at the time, and I became drunk with the possibilities. If I was really free, then the whole world was open to me. Since I was 39 years old, I began to put my own mark on my life.

And I will not look back. I will not allow others to influence who I am and who I want to become.

If Kentucky makes me uneasy, I will not live in Kentucky.

They will not offer me a permanent position here. They may have done me one of the greatest favors of my life.

The world's longest learning curve

This has been an interesting year. Usually when someone tells me they've had an interesting year, it is usually always positive. In many ways my interesting year has been positive.

I got a fellowship that will pay for my research. (FINALLY!!!)
I got a raise with said fellowship.
I got the data I need to make meaningful progress on my research.
I had a couple of dates.
I got to travel again all over the west and I got to take Jake with me.

But on the other hand, much of my interesting year has been..well...I don't want to say negative but something of the "lessons learned the hard way" variety. There was a short period of time in my life....from about the ages 24-27, that I felt I changed significantly. Around that time I felt like my thinking came into clear focus and I began to "consciously" live my life instead of just living from day to day, taking whatever came my way. I was deciding how I felt about the world and my place in it. I figured it for a normal growth pattern--part of the process of growing up.

I don't mean to imply that I thought I had it all figured out (although youth is notorious for that), I just felt like I was self-aware. Today, I realized that at no time since in my adult life have I changed that much. That was, until this year. This year feels like a second growth spurt.

I noticed quite early this year, that I had become increasingly quiet. I didn't talk as much as I used to. I didn't impress my opinions on others like I had done as a young adult. I didn't really enjoy debating EVERY LITTLE THING like I once did. I did get mad and get all "henked up" as Bek says, but usually only when I felt like I was the victim of some injustice. But recently, I haven't felt a need to comment or speak up or lead a discussion where I wanted it to go. I've relinquished leadership positions. It isn't that I don't care. I care a great deal about things and people and the world. In fact, I think I care more now than I did in my youth. I have wondered whether my education has caused me to talk less and listen more. Or maybe I realized that all that energy and hot air I expended never changed a thing. Or maybe it's a trait that comes with age. Or maybe I was just getting tired. Or apathetic. I found it curious, but certainly not so curious that I thought it abnormal.

I'm not sure whether it accentuated or exacerbated the problem, but I traveled extensively this year. I love to travel. I must have been a gypsy in a former incarnation. Most of that time D-dog Jake was my only companion. Jake doesn't say much on a trip. When you spend that kind of time alone, your bad habits begin to come into focus. Or perhaps I should say, more appropriately, your personality defects begin to emerge from that quiet place where they usually hide when you're paying attention. With no on there to distract me, the irritating things I did didn't have a haze of activity and conversation to purge them from my short-term memory. I had no one there to agree with me when I wanted to put my own spin on a situation. Eventually, I just had to deal with the facts and the fallout alone. On one of these trips, I had a conversation with a man I was dating and that conversation went badly, then went from bad to worse, and then from worse to relationship ending. I realized that I drove that conversation to its natural conclusion. It was like I couldn't help myself. It was like watching a train wreck but being impotent to stop it.

At the same time, I experienced a rather abrupt change in my primary professional relationship--and with that one I was strapped in the passenger seat. I am still unclear why this change happened and whether I contributed to the relationship's decline. I don't know what will be the ramifications of this change. All I know is that things were said to me that I found unfair, unfounded, and unforgivable. I felt betrayed. And I never saw it coming. I haven't forgotten those painful words, but neither have I have spent months analyzing what happened. Perhaps it was the severity of the comments that prevented me from taking them seriously. Like the way that deep cuts don't hurt. You just sit there and watch them bleed with some sense of awe. Somehow I managed simply to put the issue aside. To leave it alone. To not deal with it as a way of dealing with it. Yes, my relationship with this person is permanently damaged. Where before we were often friendly and shared life events with one another, now there is nary a word that passes between us that isn't work related. I have simply accepted that this person must honestly believe those hurtful things she said, and move on. I am not going to let someone else's bad opinion of me stand in the way of my goals.

I realized, in quite glaring terms this summer, that I'd do well to shut up most of the time. Not every thought in my head needs an ear. And I learned this as those thoughts piled up in the ears of people that I didn't necessarily want to push away. In the work relationship, I think I've done the right thing. I don't think about what passed between us, I simply don't think about her at all. By ignoring the offense I've managed to maintain at least a workable relationship. In the personal relationships, I did the wrong thing and both were lost.

Which brings me to today and the reason for this post. I went to a meeting today in support of my peers in a fellowship program. My peers wished to express some concerns they had about an assignment. They had questions. They felt abused. They felt the need for solidarity to have their concerns taken seriously. Whether or not I agree with their concerns (which actually, I did), I certainly agree that professional issues need to be addressed in a professional manner. They appeared dedicated to addressing their concerns in a professional manner. This I can and did support with my presence.

The group set up a meeting with "management". As is usually my habit these days, I think it is important that younger people get some experience doing the hard things in life. So when the time came to speak, I allowed them to speak. They fumbled a bit. They were apologetic but determined. They were nervous. They perhaps could have more clearly thought out how to communicate their concerns. Unpolished, yes. But they were never, ever unprofessional. I sat quietly and listened as one professional member of "management" blew a gasket and called our concerns "outrageous" and "unbelievable", and then stomped out of the room never to return to the meeting. I watched all this transpire with a sort of "wow, you don't see that every day" sort of disbelief. I didn't personalize it. I didn't internalize it. I didn't accept responsibility for it. I recognized it for what it was. Bat-shit crazy behavior. I realize that while I witnessed bat-shit crazy behavior, I didn't have to "deal"with bat-shit crazy behavior. I don't have to feel guilty just because someone else hopes I will. I don't have to smooth over ruffled feathers or speak my mind. I don't have to do jack shit. And that is probably the smartest thing I could have done. After the meeting had concluded, I told the remaining manager that our purpose was to ask questions and express concerns and discuss an issue of common concern. Our purpose was not to attack management. I felt that was the most important thing that should be communicated to the manager who stomped off. And then I stopped thinking about it.

Tomorrow is another day and I have bigger fish to fry.

I wish I'd just figured that out before I fubared two personal relationships in one year.