how to be redundant
So, for about the last 20 years, I've been aware of the societal, maternal and peer expectation that we work for a living, live for working - whatever way you look at it, we are not expected to roam free through our thoughts, lives, gardens, talents and failings with aimless or purposeful abandon. In short, as Billy Bragg might put it "all they taught you at school was how to be a good worker / the system fails, you don't fail yourself"
All my life I have struggled to know what I am in a professional or working sense - I've been thinking about what I'll do "when I'm a grown up" since I was about 10, and still at 36 I couldn't say for certain what it is that I would actually write, were my passport still to demand it... My marriage certificate tells me I was a "project manager" when I got spliced in 2005, but I manage more projects now than I did then without ever leaving the house.
Today, I sat in a doctors office, and admitted that I no longer think I can work. He will write a report, other doctors will write reports, a doctor unknown to us all will write a report, my boss will read the report and have meetings. Pieces of paper will move between offices. Brows will be furrowed. Options considered. Costs calculated. Stamps and time and effort will be spent. At the end of this, at the end of this process which involves people I am not allowed to know of and who will determine my future without ever meeting me, I may well become the youngest person I know with a pension. But I may not.
I know now what I want to do when I grow up - I want to be free of the label, status, role, process, hierarchy and competition that comes with the working world. It has been an interesting career, but from here on, my life will be delineated by me - not by an organisational chart, pay spine, anonymous expert, pension plan or advert in the press..
It might be worth saying that I didn't chose this - my body and it's cannibalistic tendency to eat my own spine chose this. But I wouldn't have it any other way. This just might be the true defining of me - a life without a label...
Frank x
All my life I have struggled to know what I am in a professional or working sense - I've been thinking about what I'll do "when I'm a grown up" since I was about 10, and still at 36 I couldn't say for certain what it is that I would actually write, were my passport still to demand it... My marriage certificate tells me I was a "project manager" when I got spliced in 2005, but I manage more projects now than I did then without ever leaving the house.
Today, I sat in a doctors office, and admitted that I no longer think I can work. He will write a report, other doctors will write reports, a doctor unknown to us all will write a report, my boss will read the report and have meetings. Pieces of paper will move between offices. Brows will be furrowed. Options considered. Costs calculated. Stamps and time and effort will be spent. At the end of this, at the end of this process which involves people I am not allowed to know of and who will determine my future without ever meeting me, I may well become the youngest person I know with a pension. But I may not.
I know now what I want to do when I grow up - I want to be free of the label, status, role, process, hierarchy and competition that comes with the working world. It has been an interesting career, but from here on, my life will be delineated by me - not by an organisational chart, pay spine, anonymous expert, pension plan or advert in the press..
It might be worth saying that I didn't chose this - my body and it's cannibalistic tendency to eat my own spine chose this. But I wouldn't have it any other way. This just might be the true defining of me - a life without a label...
Frank x