The Trial of Fledging

The great thing about inviting change into your life is that the possibilities become exciting to look forward to, fascinating to fantasize about. The difficult thing about having change thrust into your life is to try to react to it the same way you would if you had invited it. In a way, through action or inaction, you set yourself up for just about everything that happens, and as I've said before, sometimes all you have to do is pay attention to what's really happening around you to know where you are...or where you should be.

Yesterday, at about 10:00am, I was escorted to a conference room I originally booked, and met up with a handful of fellow co-workers there. There was one manager for every employee there, but I didn't notice that until after the fact. We were told all at once that due to the merger (which was just finalized), they had to eliminate positions due to redundancies, and that we were the unfortunate part of the 11% that was being let go, or just over 600 people. (I found out about the 11% in a press release later.) It was brief and we were escorted to our desks, then escorted out, and this was going on throughout the company, and my immediate reaction wasn't one of shock and betrayal. I was actually kind of relieved and smiled when I got the news. See, this merger was just finalized, but the cuts and job loss will happen over two years. We've had the threat of losing our jobs hanging over our heads for a while now, but that's nothing compared to what the people who are still there will go through.

Enough about them. I fulfilled the instruction from the CEO and now president when he told our department, "Don't quit, let us fire you." That's easy to say for a man whose salary might double as a result of the merger, but that's neither here nor there. My only regrets about the whole thing are that I didn't get the chance to say goodbye to people before I left, and that my boss planned to be out of the office that day. She was the one who asked me to book the conference rooms for the layoffs, essentially asking me to dig my own grave. I thought it was a nice stroke of irony, maybe a planned oversight. My old boss didn't say anything to me, and she was in the meeting. I guess there is a professional distance, and where friendship sits in the balance versus career, career for the above the line people will always win. I don't like it, but it's...well, I have to say that it really determines the difference between mere effectiveness and greatness. Everyone is expendable in the workplace; not everyone is replaceable.

And so begins my awesome journey to begin again. That was one of my favorite parts of my musical, when Helen tells Jack in a posthumous recording to "begin again". I can feel her giving me the same advice now, at the best possible time. In the past two amazing months, just about everything regarding my past and present has been redefined and wiped clean. I no longer have much of the mystery of family history hanging over me, I am no longer defined by past relationships as tainted goods, and now, I'm no longer working the lie for a paycheck. I may have said this before...that without theater the day job just can't be justified. My job was a shameful thing to admit because I've known all along that I was much more capable. The search begins now on borrowed free time from my former company - thanks to severance - for a much better fit in a different world...maybe even in a different city (as my sister suggested).

The bigs in my former company completely have the right to stay in the game and make calculated decisions to make more money. That's business.

I'm a free agent now, able to consider all possibilities and not worried about my usefulness hanging in the balance anywhere. In one week, I turn 40 and I could not have asked for a better gift. It's completely up to me now, to use my time well and keep everything I'm doing in motion. Stay tuned...the trip from here on gets interesting.

Aspirins Into My Cereal Bowl

As I reach another chapter of my life, I'm noticing that some of the fog of war is lifting now that I'm out of theater and real life has been able to catch up. I have had a lot of things completely wrong for a really, really long time. I can't tell you exactly how I feel, and I'm not quite sure that I'm even trying to unravel what's going on in my head. I haven't written in a while because I'm focusing nearly all of my writing on a fiction writing class, and...well, that's what happens when I work on a project. I obsess and narrow my vision to what I'm trying to learn, a habit I've always had but was strengthened by watching my friend Lisa Hayes work on her music. That's why my writing style tends to be simple and straightforward. I work hard to keep it simple rather than trying to fool you with clever, witty phrases and ideas that would never be uttered in conversation. I'm so lucky to find out that that this style follows through anything I write, whether it's blogging, playwriting, poetry, or fiction writing. Wait - emails, too. Texting. What else? Greeting cards? Post-it notes! What? Oh. You get the idea.

I'm also really lucky that I can separate myself enough from this narcissistic society to see the parts and write about them, and at the same time protect myself from the traps of my own personality. I know most of my weaknesses, and I know what my strengths are, but still, I have to watch myself. I trust easily, and sometimes I can see the hurt coming but I tell myself that I'm strong enough to take it on the chin and remain standing. If there's one thing I learned from acting and directing, and then that fed my writing, it's that an artist attempts to "defend the truth", no matter how ugly. It was a part of learning how to prepare as an actor. You can't think about conventional things you should care about, for the only things that work are the things that truly move you. You have to be brutally honest.

You have to be brutally honest. I thought about that as I packed up two friendships and marked them "return to sender". The truth had been thumping me on the forehead for a long while now, and the things those two people were saying the whole time were so blatantly obvious, but of course, I reached shoulder deep into my bag of second chances until I began to wonder why I wasn't really paying attention to what was going on. What were the words? What wasn't being said? Most importantly, what were the denials? Oh, man, it was simple math the whole time and I made it fuzzy with my own prejudices and expectations. When I ended one of the two friendships, there was just a brief moment of surprise, and then the undeniable acceptance flooded the cavity with silence. What am I exercising here again? I'm only doing the things I want to do now. Okay, never mind my job. I'm talking about personal stuff. I'm not settling, I'm not wasting my time, and I'm enjoying people in my life who really seem to reflect me accurately, for all of my flaws and good points. The people I don't hear from...well, I could speculate, but really, what's the point? I could get it completely wrong.

It's really funny how we sometimes make misinformed decisions, and our whole lives become built on our own delusions. You just can't regret them, because you have no choice but to accept who you are. Some people happen to think they are the center of the universe and the others the master of their own domain, but especially now that I'm at this place in my life where I'm looking at the last two decades of change, I know I'm just a stranger in a strange land. I'm not even an important part of this world, but I'm trying to learn as much as I can about it and write about what I see. I know that the history around me moves regardless of me, so I won't presume to walk through any door and feel like every head turns. That arrogance of youth is totally gone. I've been humbled by even getting things about my own family wrong.

Right now it's almost as if I have a freshly erased blackboard in front of me. The huge, complicated equation has been erased because it was based on false numbers. I'm hitting the gym three or four days a week now in addition to cycling in the mornings before work. That's very recent. I'm redefining myself as a fiction writer. I'm only reaching out to meet people halfway, and using the rest of my time to make today count. Today. This day. Whenever you're reading this, I'm reminding myself to be grateful and happy and not let doubt fester in the back of my mind. Yeah, I'm going to try to use Occam's razor until it dulls, or at the very least, until I know better.

One of my closest friends used to sing to just about every song on the radio, but he used his own lyrics. I corrected him a few times, not knowing the brilliance of what he was doing, but I eventually gave up and we laughed every single time one of us could make up a new lyric to a song. No, the Police had it wrong when they printed the lyrics to "Spirits in the Material World". It was "Aspirins Into My Cereal Bowl".

Honestly, what is the truth that matters? Is it the one that belongs to one other person or a group of other people who want you to believe what they believe? Is it the truth that you see, from where you stand in the world? When all is said and done, the only thing that matters is what you hold to be self evident, and how you act based on that. This might sound like an over-simplification, but it is, after all, right there in front of you.