What a dream that was. There was that beautiful woman, and a robot. The robot had been flashing like a disco ball. And we were discussing some game? I sat up in my bed and was smacked in the face with nausea. The details fought the blooming hangover for my attention, before fading away, lost forever. I rushed to the bathroom to hurl.
A few hours later and I was on my couch recovering, drinking some gatorade, struggling to eat a few saltine crackers. This was the first moment since I had quit that I’d gotten a moment to think. I still felt the heat like I had yesterday. Like a piece of me had opened its eyes and now was here to stay. I looked at my phone and saw I had a missed call from Sara, my oldest sister. I thought of the last conversation I had with her. I had been telling her about my frustrations with work. She had heard it all before and was not having it.
"Jesus Tommy, then just quit. But you are naive if you think that whatever comes next isn’t going to have it’s own issues. The grass is always greener on the other side, right? Hop off this train of self-pity. Despite what you clearly think, life isn’t always supposed to be easy. Easy doesn’t mean good, and hard doesn’t mean bad "
‘Well. That’s stupid. Whose coffee mug did you read that on?"
"Nurse Wells. And just because it is on a coffee mug doesn’t make it untrue. Theres a reason cliches are cliche."
By all account I had a nice childhood. Things came easy to me. I was a big kid who hit puberty early and never had to deal with any bullying. I was naturally athletic and girls were always interested in me without having to put much of an effort forward. We had plenty of money. Dad had been a stock broker whose career had lined up nicely with a period of economic growth. Thankfully he had retired young, right before a large market crash that had bankrupted some of his friends. I had two high achieving older sisters and was the benefactor of parenting fatigue, my folks pretty much let me do whatever I wanted. They were more than happy to defer some of their responsibility to the internet. I could come home drunk or stoned without hearing a word about it. This double standard sometimes would get under my sister’s skin. Soak it in now, Tommy, they would say. These are your glory days. It’ll be all downhill from here. I’d brush it aside as jealousy. After college, I thought I was destined for greatness. I would only apply to jobs with prestigious titles that I did not have the on paper qualification for, assuming that these companies would jump at the opportunity to hire someone like me. They didn’t. And eventually, reality caught up and I took some entry level gigs. None of them stuck for more than a year. Lake Shore is just as bad as the rest of them, but now I am too tired to look for a new one that I will probably hate just as much and will likely have another Jen there to take advantage of me.
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Now, here we were. A decade later. Sara was a surgeon, My other sister Maya had already worked her way up to an executive role at United Airlines. And me? I was exactly where they said I would be. Working a job I couldn’t care less about for a woman with a stick so far up her ass you could see it when she opened her mouth, spending my downtime playing video games, doomscrolling the lives of peers on social media, and drinking with my other underachieving buddies, reliving the glory days. No opportunity in sight, and no motivation to create those opportunities. My friends and I created an echo chamber where we encouraged each other’s lack of drive and supported our vices. You got ridiculed for working hard and praise for eating an afternoon away on the couch. I knew I was sitting at the edge of a fork in the road. In one world, a year from now, I would be 30 pounds heavier, depressed and embittered, living off of my dads dime. In another? I wasn’t sure. But I was ready to find out. So I took a baby step towards that path.
As I struggled through a regimen with no rhyme or reason to it, still fighting the hangover and waking up long dormant muscles at the discount gym down the street, I found myself asking a question that I often try to avoid because of the discomfort it brings with it. What do I really want? A scary question that I had never truly been able to find a satisfying answer for.
I looked around at the ‘roided out beefcakes and meatheads ogling themselves in the mirrors. If you ask me, these guys look pretty absurd. Arms and chests so big it was a miracle they managed to put shirts on over their heads. But say what you will, they were driven. They were disciplined, because they knew what they wanted. They wanted gains, and they worked hard to get those gains. I slide back in to revery.
