The weirdest feeling I’m coming to terms with right now; is that I feel like I’ve grown more in the last 2 months than I spent the last 3-4 years.
I have found a confidence in me, not arrogance, not punishing myself or being derogatory about myself, but a REAL knowing of who I am. And no one can diminish that feeling now, it’s like I OWN MYSELF for the first time in my life. All my fortune or disfortune is my own doing - I see it so clearly now, like a calibration is finally centering.
The feeling I have had since childhood, was in general invisible to me, a great sense of need, a sense of intrepidation, that those who “love me and take care of me” would let me down. How this has rolled up into my life, is that feeling of need, became a feeling of neglect, a vacuum, of protecting myself from dissappointment, to the point of denying myself love, lying to myself, convincing myself I was worth nothing, at the center of the world was the question of worth.
But now, a major shift has happened, partly a shift because of induction at D!sney, that taught me something. D!sney wants you to grow into the fold, they don’t want employees to churn. They employ people part-time only, one keeps the job if one maintains the rules for 4 months of probation, and at the end of one year, people graduate up to full time - if they are proven and liked by management.
The system ensures that the people working there become D!sney, and do not think to move anywhere else. But, for me this wasn’t enough.
I have a need somewhere inside me, physically years ago I thought it was sex and relationships. And there was a constant turmoil with my traumas that prevented me from ever reconciling that need. Then I thought I just needed a mindless job, that enabled me to be happy outside of work…
But my need is something evolved now. It’s to learn, more and more, continually, and challenge myself to grow and make use of what I learn. Just because I have a degree, doesn’t mean I must use it as an engineer, but instead of spiting the nose on my face and throwing away my degree for a mind-numbing job, where I would be surrounded for many more hours of my life than time at home, by people who are just as mind numbingly boring, I need instead to work along side those I feel productive with. But D!sney isn’t enough. People do not have aspirations outside.
The strange turmoil of need and want, seems to have been quelled. Everything I desire is no longer important. I am instead happy to be productive, and growing, and always doing something with my time. I realise this is something to do with however much my needs were neglected as a child, I created that same desperate vacuum and desire times ten in adult life - I emotionally never grew up. The physical side, matured, but that feeling of being cared for, became a constant vacuum of searching to be cared for to the extent I must have missed out as a child.
The problem of having this perspective in life, is that it sets me up to fail. I eventually forgot that I could take care of myself, that it was even possible, that I could be alone, independent, happy, and taking care of myself.
Now, even clothes have no meaning to me. I would rather make-do and mend comfortable things I have, and be proud that I can repair my clothes. I hate shopping, it’s not that I’m escaping people, it’s the commercialism of “fitting in” to dress according to expectations.
I would rather wear the same white blouses and comfortable slacks daily, and save the costumes I LIKE TO WEAR, for my own video productions.
I do not even need money. If I were to have money, I would merely buy more materials to enjoy making shit with.
I do not need or crave even chocolate. It’s weird. It’s like this very week, I look at what I achieved in the last 6 weeks, and I blew myself away. That for once in my life, I proved to myself I know where my problems are, and am willing to dive in and fix it. But I know now how much more fixing is ahead of me, and that is a continuous journey.
Tomorrow I start my 6 day week at D!sney with ridiculous shifts at all times of night. Some of them finishing at 1:30 am, some starting as early as 5:00 am. And I’m happy to just be working! But yes it isn’t enough. I know in order to be more productive with my own time, I need to make use of my engineering degree to afford me the fluidity of creating more inventions and products.
Sometimes I hate my brain, constantly throwing a new invention at me, I often keep a simple sketch in a book, never written, for some kind of fear that I want to expose this discovery first. Since I have been considering these job opportunities, my dreams are making use of new tools. I am literally dreaming of how to create directional heat transfer in metals, self siphoning pumps, and compact water heaters… this can only be executed by the mind of an engineer, and I feel I must deliver these inventions. Somehow, to just be given the freedom to build them and actually see if my dreams were true.
And at the new Morf company, I have access to new tooling that will enable me to do so. So I feel I must illustrate these inventions and bring them to life with these new sintering methods.
Even if I don’t get the job at Morf, I feel like this is something I can do in my own time and have patented if I outsource to any other metal printing company.
There is a need inside me, but it’s no longer a kind of emotional thing, it is instead, being able to satisfy myself, by myself.
I can even braid my hair now. I was never able to do this. Maybe I was nervous on my first day, or maybe I got car-sick doing my hair in the car, but I threw up on the way into work, melted my paper bag full of resumes in vomit. But I went into work with braided hair and looking neat, when I think that I couldn’t even get dressed a year ago.