In Pursuit of Gainful Employment

It was Thomas Jefferson who wrote in our Declaration of Independence, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Sometimes, I think he should have written in another inalienable right, "and among these are Life, Liberty, the pursuit of Happiness, and gainful employment." It seems like I've spent my entire life looking for gainful employment, and it is the frustration surrounding this that made me say yesterday that I have no reason to get up in the morning.

I do, actually have a reason to get up in the morning, even if it is only to pursue this employment that seems so elusive, but while I am searching for said employment my life seems rather aimless, and this makes me not want to get up in the morning. I hate feeling like I have no purpose.

I feel like I've always been searching for a job. When I was in high school, I wanted one so badly, but couldn't really have one because I always in the school musicals, which took up at least four nights of my week and last least three hours of my night each time. And it didn't make much sense to not be able to hold down a job with any degree of appreciable consistency until at least mid-November, so I didn't have a job for the first two years of high school. Besides, as my parents so often told me, "School is your job." And for me, it was. I never was the brightest pencil, or the sharpest crayon, or whatever metaphor you want to attach to me in speaking of my abilities as a student. I may have been in the box, and I may have been a pencil, but I wasn't the smartest one there.

School has always been difficult for me. I'm not exactly sure why, but some of it is surely due to the brain damage that I suffered shortly after birth--the same brain damage that gave me cerebral palsy. God created our brains to be amazing organisms, and when one part of it dies (as part of mine essentially did when it hemorrhaged 28  years ago), God enabled a young infant/child's brain to be able to "rewire" itself. These new neural pathways are longer, more more meandering,  and certainly rustier than pathways God gave us originally, but they still work.

What this means for me is that I have always taken longer to process information than everybody else. It takes me longer to take it in, interpret it, assimilate it, and decide what I'm going to do with it. And then there are other parts of my brain that are just plain damaged. I cannot do maps, math, puzzles, or directions for the life of me, because those areas involve capacities of spatial awareness, which I lack almost entirely. Suffice it to say, I had homework and/or tutoring until I was in fourth grade, and I had an hour of homework every night by the time I was in third grade. Show me another third grader who carries that kind of homework load. I bet there aren't very many.

So school was definitely my job, but that didn't stop me from wanting another one. I wanted to be normal like everybody else, and it's no secret that I'm a bit of a glutton for punishment. So, when my beloved musical director decided not to do a musical during my junior year of high school, this opened up the opportunity for me to get a part-time job.

And I found one at the local Piggly Wiggly. Now, you can knock being a cashier as much as you want, but I loved my job. I loved talking with everybody, greeting them with a smile, and yes, seeing what in the world they ate. It satisfied my voyeuristic tendencies. Be honest, you want to know too. Because we lived in such a small town, I joked that I knew 50% of the people who came through the door by name, and the other 50% I'd at least seen before! It's a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much.

I held that cashier's job all the way through the middle of my college career, but even in college it was hard to find something. I started out working at the Academic Enrichment Center, and that was the easiest five hours a week I've ever done in my life. However, at the beginning of second semester, I was informed that my hours would drop to five hours every other week. Well, that just wasn't going to work for me. So I found a job in the college's daily bulletin, News of the Day, as an Archives Processor. It meant that I'd be organizing and working with everything in the college archives. What the heck were the archives? Did anybody even know where they were? "Oh, you mean that place behind the display cases in the library walk-through? You mean there are rooms back there?" Coulda fooled me.

SoI went work in the cold, temperature-controlled, preservative-smelling archives, with only papers, folders, boxes, and books to keep me company. I thought I would hate it. But I loved it. I loved discovering the history of Taylor University--I got to know and learn about things the large majority of the student body had no clue about. And I eventually stumbled on the "Hillis Collection", which was 208 paper ream boxes full of the congressional effects of Rep. Elwood "Bud" Hillis. He'd served in the House from 1970-1986, and when he retired, he entered into a deed of gift with Taylor University to have all of his congressional effects organized and stored for research purposes by the University. 

But no one had done that, which technically, was a breach of contract. Bad news if Bud ever found out. So, stupid, obsessive-compulsive, political science major me volunteered to organize that collection. I spent the next three years of my life happily immersed in our nation's history through the life of one person. I saw pictures of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Lee Ioccoa, and more. Not to mention, I had their autographs. Never have I been so tempted to revert to my second-grade, eight-year-old self, and steal.


This job lasted me to the end of college, which is where we'll pick up tomorrow.