Photo by Bethany Legg on Unsplash
It’s been a long time since I’ve sat down to write. And as I write this… I feel so many emotions. I could nearly shed tears.
It’s been a really, really, really rough time for me for the past year and even more so the past 4 months and then really hitting a wall for the past month. I haven’t felt an ounce of inspiration and care to write for a few months now.
I lost my job earlier last month and I kinda thought it would happen, but I kept hoping and believing it wouldn’t so I didn’t put in the work to prepare myself a plan. With this huge fork in the road, my life stopped for a while. I didn’t know what to do with myself besides obsess over jobs and text and call people in my life excessively over my overthinking and worrying. It definitely made me focused though… focused to find a job. That’s about all though. My care for anything else slipped. I know what it’s like again to feel in a poverty state (even though yes, I have money and I’m not in poverty; it’s still a similar experience to the state of emergency and urgency that people in poverty often feel). At first, it was sorta like vacation… then the 3rd week of unemployment hit and I’d had enough. I’ve found out through this that will officially NEVER retire. I’ll always work.
Work for me adds structure, purpose, ability to help others, it’s also a piece of my social life that I never knew held such a huge piece to me feeling at home, and it’s also a source of connection. It makes my life a whole lot more meaningful.
I had been used to working at an already established place of work, and I do think this allowed me to be in a baby blanket if you will. Because there are people around, a structure created already, rules, and it was just easy for me to take those things for granted and I’ve even rebelled against them in my past at times. However, I realize now that those things helped me to feel secure, safe, and connected. Unfortunately, I hadn’t built the skills and platform that an organized, established workplace gives me for my own life absent of this workplace. I lacked the proper structure in my life. I’ve done stuff so freely, unbound, and so wrapped around my work that without work, I didn’t know how to be full and feel in place and put together. It’s sad, really. I never knew.
I can’t say I’m a mess; I’m not. I am being overly harsh (as that’s just how I am…. and well, that makes me a better human in the process too I think even though I need to learn where to stop and balance my self-criticism). I have learned through my dark times recently my belief in the purpose of work for my life. I want to serve, I want to work, I want to feel connected, and have structure. I’ve learned that I must create these things for myself though and that I shouldn’t just rely on my work to hold me together like glue. I’ve got to do a better job of building my own foundation absent of work. Work will always be in my life though, until the day I die.
I believe the purpose of work in my life is to help and serve others, create and find meaning and connection, and have something to get completely lost in doing that sets me into a flow state giving me the much-needed reprieve from the world and into my greatest efficiency and craft.
Without work, whether in an organized, established workplace or not, my life isn’t entirely complete. Work can be many things… it can be things we don’t normally think of as work too. It’s simply whatever I'm doing that allows me to 1) help and serve others 2) create and find meaning and connection and 3) gets me into a flow state to produce my greatest efficiency and craft. As you can see… these are very general beliefs of my purpose of work in life, but they’re meaningful to me and that’s what matters. It makes even when I can’t formally work one day when I get old still meaningful work. Helping to care for my future grandkids when/if I get the privilege, for example, this could be my work. My work is what I make it and think of it in my mindset and through how I do and be.
I’m back, everyone! Back to work! 🙂
P.S. — I have found a full-time job again recently. My darkness is starting to disappear. I’m happy and can think of various things (like normal) again. 🙂
