By REDRUM

DISCUSSED: puberty part 2, that thing called a “career,” learning by doing, periods

Whenever I look at myself in the mirror before I head off to work, I see a young woman with a promising future ahead –carefully combed hair, crisp blouse, ironed-out slacks, hardly-used leather bag, pearl earrings, optimism. Giving my full corporate battle regalia a last look before heading out, I take a deep breath and tell myself,

“What the fuck.”

It’s almost like an inside joke that never gets old, only I’m doing both the joking and the laughing. About two dozen job interviews and four half-assed jobs later — all within 2 years upon graduating — I still feel like an alien in my own best-foot-forward skin. I always told myself never to settle for less or take on a job that required slacks or a too-sanitized environment of politeness. But here I am, secretly snacking on humble pie while I work an honest 8 to 5 marketing/copywriting job in an industry I know absolutely nothing about. I have nothing against jobs like these, but always felt like jobs like these had something against me, and that the corporate world would spit me out the moment I walk into a job interview.

If career paths had life spans, I’ll probably be right at the onset of puberty, alternately basking in the chaotic glory of identity-searching and screaming “fuck you!” at things I’m supposed to understand at 23 but don’t quite get yet. Career-wise, however, my lack of extreme go-getterness can be owed to the fact that as a kid, I never aimed for anything more realistically ambitious than joining the Tibetan monastery.

When I grow up, all I want to be is…

“A nun.”

I’ve never had a clearer, simpler picture of what I wanted to grow up to be than when I was five and I declared to the whole household that I wanted to become a nun. “Why?” my mom would ask, half-amused and half-terrified. Without hesitating, I answered, “Because nuns don’t get periods.”

This is my earliest memory of ambition.

I was five, and I hadn’t gotten around to knowing much about periods yet, except that they were bloody and gross. The premature knowledge that I had about nuns, particularly the ones running my school (i.e., that they’re different from you and me, that they ALWAYS wear veils, that they don’t look like they have a lot of fun, etc.), was enough for me to believe my sister’s story (story instead of myth, because at that time she didn’t know it was a myth, tama?) about nuns not getting periods because they were holy and special and that was that. Amen.

From a five-year-old’s standpoint, that was all I wanted to be when I grew up… holy, special and menstruation-free.

Realizing that my first inkling of a career path was built on a sham, I moved on to other dream titles such as “Archaeologist” (thanks to Discovery Channel), which was soon replaced by “Veterinarian”(no thanks to unprecedented pet deaths). I was a stark contrast to my sister who always answered “Doctor” whenever she was asked about her dream job, and she did become one.

The last thing I crossed off my list was “Tibetan Monk,” and I had nothing to replace it with, even as I started filling out college application forms.




Writer’s Bollocks

I fumbled my way through college, having eenie-meenie-minie-moed my way through the least math-related courses and graduated with a degree on indecisiveness, majoring in directionless. I just crossed my fingers during job interviews, hoping that my diploma was as convincing as people said it would be. It worked at first, until my charm ran out and my lack of any particular technical skill surfaced. I felt like half-baked beans left to rot with nothing, but my love for sarcasm and word-spewing.

So here I am, word-spewing for a living, but trading in sarcasm for improved grammar and marketing jargon. I knew I could write, but never really considered it as a valid career path. It just seemed like a necessary skill that everyone had, not in the same levels of proficiency but it wasn’t as clear-cut a career path as I would have liked it to be. So I plunged headfirst into the rat race, armed with nothing but a minor case of grammar obsessive-compulsiveness, a wide range of hallucinatory ideas and the willingness to get over the term “selling out” and chew on the idea of “compromise” instead.

By “compromise,” it meant having to tidy up my foul language and run-ons. Reading business journals and attending marketing webinars. Spit shining my vocabulary. Creating inventive titles out of the driest corporate jargon. It went against everything that I liked about writing — the liberating feeling of playing with language, the surge of adrenaline you get from creatively penning wonderful and disastrous things (that you’re probably never going to do), and so on. It took a lot more energy than I was prepared to shell out, and my fears of turning into the very things used to laugh at and detest came back to haunt me.





Puberty peaks: Resistance is fertile

While some people adapt and flow into the natural course of adulthood upon getting their first stable job or relationship, I sank into the undertow. With a huge grin on my face. Getting a regular job where I thought I had to compromise my principles and ideals was probably the best thing that happened to my occasional search for self-realization. And it’s not because I’ve grown to be synonymous to my job title, my salary range or my work; in fact, it’s quite the opposite. Resistance grew fertile where I dreaded I would lose myself in the rat race – fatigue, waking up and sleeping early, working too hard, partying less. I can’t say there weren’t times when I wasn’t immune to these, but I resisted settling just for whatever was thrown my way. When the new burdens that come with age beckon and life throws me lemons, I manically go up front and center and yell “MORE! MORE! MORE!” like a crazed fangirl in a Justin Bieber concert. My monotonous routine and growing pile of menial tasks continue to manifest signs of adverse reaction, such as extreme bouts of energy and excitement about life, with no particular preference for all-good, peachy keen experiences. Like a tween at the onset of puberty, I’m filled with fickle hormones that could go from euphoric to destructive at the flick of an invisible switch. I still laugh at the sight of myself in proper work clothes, but recently took a liking to cosmetics counters, bank savings account options, furniture… and how all of these are part of my integral plans for social deconstruction and the return to the comforts of my childhood.

I’m not a big proponent of the quarter-life-crisis phenomenon, but if it does exist, I don’t think I’m going through it. There is no crisis, no self-righteous conclusions about life, no smart-ass tips on how to succeed in your first job, first relationship, first job interview and other messy, frightening firsts. I’m too busy trying to get a grasp of everything, learning how to act acceptably in public, putting on the right kind of makeup for formal occasions, bashfully rekindling friendships with ex-friends and ex-lovers, exploring higher states of consciousness, being socially responsible, reading books about extraterrestrials and finding new places and states of mind that would make good playgrounds.

Initially, I searched for a job to make ends meet and to steer my life somewhere –ANYWHERE. While I do take pride in the fact that I’m now responsible for all my necessary and unnecessary expenses, I refuse to believe that all these responsibilities mark my leap into adulthood. I think I made a bigger leap of faith into the unknown, occasionally getting scratches and bruises from bigger, unidentifiable objects floating alongside. There’s no resolve, no sense of finality – only the thrill that I have no concrete idea of everything that’s going on, yet that I’m completely enamored by all of it.