Indoctrinated
I've Often written in the past and published in Shut Up Draw and What's Your Tomato, stories of how my childhood and early adulthood was overly influenced by the opinions and expectations of those closest to me and societal norms in general.
"Drawing is nice but you have to have a real career."
"You can't make any money with that."
"You got to work to make your boss happy."
The mantras and opinions are still ringing in my ears and in fact, those bits of "helpful" advice perpetually, even today, find their way back around to me.
As a young person I accepted this indoctrination as the truth and I told myself,
"All these people can't be wrong"
It's true that when it came to my family members, they did want the best for me. Well, in many ways, but as far as the clamor of the rest, little did I know, they did not want the best for me. All they wanted was the best for themselves.
As far as my family was concerned, all they've known is working to earn a living and that's all that is important. No one said I had to like my job because the important thing was to just do it and please the boss. I respect that philosophy as long people decide they have little else to contribute, but as a kid, all I heard from my father was how he hated his job, and he complained about it often.
Being raised by a single mom, I was alone a great deal of the time, left very much on my own for hours each day without supervision, guidance or the discipline a growing boy needs because Mom was working so much just trying to keep us fed and housed.
Was that a great way to demonstrate to a child that having a job was the best way to go?
The ones with whom I've crossed paths who saw the way, who either purposely or incidentally verbalized it, are the ones I would have benefited from listening to. People like my closest friends, my writing instructor from college or my coworkers in the meager jobs with which we all suffered.
Why are you doing this?
My answer had the mediocre stamp of approval on it. "Because I have bills to pay". So, I continued doing the "same old same old" and my dissatisfaction slid into destructive thoughts like anger, sorrow, self-loathing which then manifested into behaviors like putting the needs of others before my own even at my own detriment, depression and melancholies. My sincere unhappiness and perpetual lack of sufficient income did not support the notion put forward by others that my purpose in life was to get a job and make my boss happy.
They told me it would
be better than this
Things are changing and it took long enough. Even though I've come to the conclusion that the popular narrative is in error, I've still not realized the income but it's no worse than before. I still have my doubts. The echoes of my early days still resound, and they have never really gone away. "What if I've made a huge mistake?" I often ask myself. "What if I'm wrong and all those others were right?"
I've proven to myself that it isn't necessary to earn a living by "pleasing the boss". Isn't it ironic that the very suggestion I was given as a young person was actually the worst I could have possibly been given because my record of "pleasing the boss" has been dismal, to put it nicely.
