Going From Broke #1

The first installment of the chronicles of entering financial adulthood, and stuff.

I realized something today. My Spiritual Psychology education will make me question this statement later, but I'll just say it anyway: Making a living is hard.

I interject with a moment of Heidi history (feel free to skip ahead, if you're feeling impatient) : I know I haven't reached the stage where I don't struggle with it yet, but I figured that was because up until the last couple months, I've still been sorting out what I want to be "when I grow up". Well, after a year of philiso-psychological unpacking of that question, I finally (like in my last post) just let it go. I gave myself permission to not know, and not be "successful" (whatever that is), and to be a broke kid for a while, if that's the life experience I seem to have been supposed to be having. I also removed the burden of my entire fulfillment from the shoulders of my career, where I'd placed it years ago. In doing so, I freed myself up to be open to what I really want to do know. Which is Integrative Personal Training, or Mind-Body Coaching, in case I haven't already told you. (No, there won't be a shameless self-promotional plug in every post, I promise).

Follow all that? It's the Cliff-notes version of about a year of self-work, so I don't expect it to make sense. It's tangential to the matter at hand anyway. The matter at hand is that life is expensive, and paying for it... (again, my inner life-coach is trying to get me to rephrase as I write, but) paying for it blows.

I've been toying with the idea of working in food-service lately. Never done it, I'm just barely charming enough to be able to handle myself well in a tip-driven job, I bet, and working in a cool hippie-fueling vegan joint could be rad. I notice myself delaying applying though, for fear that working the kitchen at YMCA camp won't be sufficient experience to get the job.

Fuck, I think.. I'm a grad student, with a degree from a top-tier university, who gets paid to jump off buildings and crash through furniture, and helps people change their lives on a daily basis (well, okay, on good days), and I'm afraid of not being good enough to get some crappy waitressing job that I'm sure to use as a good source of complaining down the road? Well, yeah. I don't have much experience.

A buddy of mine is looking at taking a job hanging Christmas lights this holiday season, to fill the gaps between stunt jobs. He has extensive foodservice work history, so I asked him... "you'd make so much more money, why don't you get back into that for a while?" So get this... he tells me it's too competitive. He'd have to spend months pounding the pavement to get a waiting job. Which strikes me as not too different from stunts. Or building my training client base. Or landing yoga classes. Or selling paintings. Or booking singing gigs. Or any of the things I've considered doing with my life. Shit, parents pay thousands of dollars for SAT tutoring for their kids, cause this crazy competitiveness makes the average teenager "not good enough".

I used to think that was frustrating and stupid... why does everything seem to be so much harder to succeed at now than I imagine it for previous generations? Why does the majority of my age group have to go back to live with their parents during at least one point in their supposed "adult" lives? There's some actual statistic I could cite, but you'll just have to take my word for it.

Now, I've changed my mind. I like that everything's so fucking hard... it means you had better damn well love what you do. I think it was tempting for earlier generations to get stuck in jobs they didn't really like, because landing and keeping those jobs was easier than having to put the immense energy required to carve out their own paths. Now, it seems to me that going one's own way hasn't really gotten much harder, but there are fewer and fewer easy default paths. At least with Southern California costs of living, just hoping for "whatever" in terms of work won't pay rent. Anything is going to take ridiculous amounts of energy. So, its like the forces-that-be have sweetened the "be true to ourselves" pot, by removing some of the allure of living by default. We're left to make the choice.

So I'm taking one of my favorite sage's teachings, and above all, having fun. I might go work my ass off to get a waitress job, and stay there as long as its fun. I will most definitely slave away creating my marketing machine for my business, because working with my clients just feels damn good inside. I'll put the energy out... cause damn it, it's becoming clear I'm going to have to. But I'm only going to give it to what makes my life joyful.

Think it'll work?

(next time on Going From Broke... does it really have to be hard?)