An Introspection Leading to Semi-Trucks
Just when I think I have a handle on my life, just when I feel like I'm really going to be alright, and just when I think that I'm capable of making mature and rational decisions, something has to happen to turn my carefully balanced life upside down. I feel sometimes like a turtle trying to cross the interstate. I'll start making progress and then a semi-truck will zoom over me and I'll be stuck on my back until I can get it together enough to turn back over and plod along again. The process is reoccurring and humiliating. Humiliating only because I work with some of the brightest people in the country. Those people, people I might be able to call my friends, are the semi-trucks.
They don't mean to be. In fact, I would be willing to say that they don't even do it on purpose. I'm sure they don't. These are not mean people we are talking about and these people would not intentionally send me skidding across asphalt on my shell. The thing is, I'm not in their league. I'm a smart woman, but let's face it: I'm surrounded by people who graduated college with Bachelors and then Masters and some of them with countless other degrees that make my head spin when I even attempt to fathom what it must have taken to get them. One day I will manage to finish college, but who has time to work in the White House and go to school. Okay, who but Charlie who is an amazing young man and a totally different story.
And it's not as if my minor lack of formal education is the only thing working against me. I have to constantly prove to outsiders that I didn't get my job because I'm a tall, willowy, attractive blond. Those are hard things to be when you're me. I mean, if I was just another person and I saw that someone like me had gotten a job in the White House working for a very important person without having so much as an associates degree in passing time, I'd wonder how she got her job too…and I'm absolutely not sexist. I firmly believe that women can get jobs based on their merits and not their bodies. But looking around me I can see how people might question my position…all the other assistants are at least college graduates.
It's taken me some time, most of it spent pretending to work, to discover why it is that I let myself me trod on time and again. It really has nothing to do with my lack of education or even the fact that my friends seem to run me over without thought. It has everything to do with my past and how it affects my present. What it is has everything to do with who I am and what I'm working for. Now I realize the honest truth that took some introspection to discover. The truth of it all? I am my semi-truck.
Just when I think I have a handle on my life, just when I feel like I'm really going to be alright, and just when I think that I'm capable of making mature and rational decisions, something has to happen to turn my carefully balanced life upside down. I feel sometimes like a turtle trying to cross the interstate. I'll start making progress and then a semi-truck will zoom over me and I'll be stuck on my back until I can get it together enough to turn back over and plod along again. The process is reoccurring and humiliating. Humiliating only because I work with some of the brightest people in the country. Those people, people I might be able to call my friends, are the semi-trucks.
They don't mean to be. In fact, I would be willing to say that they don't even do it on purpose. I'm sure they don't. These are not mean people we are talking about and these people would not intentionally send me skidding across asphalt on my shell. The thing is, I'm not in their league. I'm a smart woman, but let's face it: I'm surrounded by people who graduated college with Bachelors and then Masters and some of them with countless other degrees that make my head spin when I even attempt to fathom what it must have taken to get them. One day I will manage to finish college, but who has time to work in the White House and go to school. Okay, who but Charlie who is an amazing young man and a totally different story.
And it's not as if my minor lack of formal education is the only thing working against me. I have to constantly prove to outsiders that I didn't get my job because I'm a tall, willowy, attractive blond. Those are hard things to be when you're me. I mean, if I was just another person and I saw that someone like me had gotten a job in the White House working for a very important person without having so much as an associates degree in passing time, I'd wonder how she got her job too…and I'm absolutely not sexist. I firmly believe that women can get jobs based on their merits and not their bodies. But looking around me I can see how people might question my position…all the other assistants are at least college graduates.
It's taken me some time, most of it spent pretending to work, to discover why it is that I let myself me trod on time and again. It really has nothing to do with my lack of education or even the fact that my friends seem to run me over without thought. It has everything to do with my past and how it affects my present. What it is has everything to do with who I am and what I'm working for. Now I realize the honest truth that took some introspection to discover. The truth of it all? I am my semi-truck.