My system for mess, or my mess of a system
I don’t have what people would call a normal career trajectory. To be honest, I am not too sure what to actually call my career. I’ve never moved according to a grand plan, never made choices with much of a future in sight. Often I’ve just sort of moved where my fancy took me, where my interest lay and crucially, to where people would want me. My life has not been a chess game so much as a game of Mikado, everything helter-skelter and in complete disarray.
It has brought two opposing forces or feelings into my life: Firstly, the sorrow of never having a proper drive, an all-encompassing passion that absorbed and led me. Although I had dreams, I never learned the discipline to pursue them. Straying and procrastinating became the default option – I just didn’t have the tools to approach it differently. Secondly, in spite of all this, I’ve still had some measure of success, first with a career in the service industry, from bartending to ending up managing Michelin-starred restaurants, to later becoming a graphic designer, being self-employed and sustaining that for almost a decade now. Not counting the obvious abuse problems the first path led me to, for some reason, everything has almost always worked out for me in the end. I don’t carry this lightly, but it has brought a recognition that life has had a way of sorting itself out no matter how bleak I thought things were looking.
This chaos state feels like my natural habitat, but a stressful one, and has led me to adopt a more system-oriented life. Luck favors the prepared, they say, and the older I get, the more I lean into that. I rarely just wait for the universe to grant me all my wishes, although it might look like that from the outside. On the contrary, I reach out, network with as many people as I can, sharpen my skills and knowledge within my field, and generally try not to be a dick towards other people. I try to stay out of controversy or negative discourse as much as possible. I’d rather skip out on a pay-day than let money come between me and good people, whether that be friends or clients. I try to engage with everyone equally, no matter what position or level they are at.
While this is obviously a continuous balancing act as I grow older – a measured approach, a weighing of all my options and then a plan of action – I carefully guard the person I want to be. My values are too important for me to constantly be up for negotiation. I can definitely come off as rigid to some (you could probably say that about anyone standing their ground on values), but it works well for me. I treasure peace over leverage and find that if you make choices led by your values on a macro scale and adhere to them, things tend to solve themselves on a micro scale as well.
My sobriety is a great example of this. In making the choice to abstain from drinking in general, I took away the exhausting negotiation I had with myself several times a week (and usually lost) about if or how much to drink. I don’t spend Fridays debating whether to have a cold beer or a glass of wine in the afternoon – the choice has already been made on a higher level, and I just have to carry out the action (“just” – as if the willpower involved in that is not exhausting as well at times).