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You Have to Learn How to Suffer
Was it good advice? I still don’t know.
“Of course you’re not going to like your job. Who does?”
The words are flippant yet bear the whiff of condescension. It doesn’t matter who said them — I’ve heard iterations of the same thing for years — but something about how this is the unspoken lesson you’re supposed to learn as an adult…well, I guess I missed that memo.
The words are crushing at times. When I can’t sleep at night, I think back to these conversations, and they haunt me in much the same way of how I once went over every stupid thing I’d said in a day spent at school. The worst days left me with an internal reel of every tiny mistake, every slip or error of the moment. The only difference is that the culprit is now work, not school.
The truth is that I haven’t had a full-time job yet. The prospect of spending forty hours a week in a place I could potentially hate — I admit it bothers me. I don’t want to be one of those people married to a job they just want to escape at every whim and chance. Worse, I guess, is that I dread being chained to something just to survive.
But what if you’re on the other end of the spectrum? What if your job is what you live for? I’m not saying this in an inspirational way either: what if you are one of those people who has no…
