Work - challenges

This week has been, uh, interesting.  Work is always a place of intrigue and mystery.  I get my job done,  mostly accurate and on-time but there is always something that can go wrong.  Always some challenge to overcome.

Those challenges this week left me depressed.  That depression might have roots in my personal life but it manifested itself at work.  I just found it hard to get into the swing of things this week.  Maybe it was my first full week back after vacation.  Maybe it was all the changes from the merger; new organizations, new bosses, new rules and processes.  I don’t know.  Maybe all of those things. 

I have two vocations actually. I am a technical writer by day and a poet and other writer by ni…., by whenever I feel like it.  Which, truthfully, hasn’t been that often.  But I did manage to send some poems out to a magazine.  I was hoping to be published.  Hoping?  Yeah, this is the time for hope, and like that great hope of four years ago, my hope for publication went sour too.  I received a rejection letter, actually an e-mail.  Very curt, short and not so sweet, considering the outcome I had hoped. 

At any rate, this event and the events at work, caused some reflection on my part.  That reflection led to my depression.  I was going through the motions the last few days trying to cheer myself up.  I looked back at all the things I had set out to do and that I had accomplished.  I have gotten every job I wanted.  I wanted to be a writer, I became a writer.  I have a good career. 

I have also wanted to be a poet.  I really don’t understand what I do or how I do it.  I just write, my poetry, I mean.  It just comes from a spiritual place.  I try to work at it but I really don’t know much about the inner workings.  Or the technical terms of poetry.  I just write. 

So, I was talking to my wife the other day about my funk.  I mentioned that I tried to snap out of it by looking at my accomplishments.  I said I hadn’t accomplished anything that I really wanted.  (I wanted to be a famous poet and writer).  Then it occurred to me.  “I wanted to be a writer.”  I have made about $7.00 at poetry.  But as a writer (Ok, a technical writer), I have made a career.  For the last 25 years that is what I have been doing. 

I realize now, when I wished for this life, when I asked God for this, to be called a writer.  I guess I should have been more specific.  I should have asked for the ability to write a novel or stories or plays.  I guess He just found the closest place for me.  Well, then.  Thank you, God.  It seems to have worked out. 

D.