this story originally appeared in the philippine daily inquirer on July 29, 2000.
In 1996, I was one of thousands of bright-eyed graduates marching out of academia. With my college degree as my weapon and my skills as my ammunition, I was ready to do battle with other new graduates fighting for a place in the real world. Never mind that in the few months prior to graduation I felt more like a victim than a victor, with my professors (well, most of them anyway) behaving like vampires who drank my blood, sweat and tears. I had, after all, graduated on time (much to my mother’s relief). I had walked the plank and was ready to face the world.
Later that year, I earned my professional license. Now, I said to myself, my life can begin.
Today I can only smile and shake my head at my ignorance. I spent the rest of 1996 applying at every company that had even just the remotest connection to my profession. Heck, I even applied at companies that had nothing to do at all with the course I took. I would smile while groaning inwardly as I watched my college friends go out of my life as they found jobs and started to build their own careers.
Out of desperation, I accepted the first job offer that was made to me. Actually, there were two. But the other one was from a computer school, and during my final interview, the human resources manager and I ended up talking about shoes, of all things. I couldn’t bring myself to imagine what bizarre things I might end up doing in that company, so I opted for the “saner” offer coming from a multinational company.
I would be lying if I said that I didn’t enjoy my first job. I did. After all, I was working with bright scientist types with a puerile sense of humor. Where else can you possibly find a laboratory where the analysts performed tests while playing small-scale war games and hatching and carrying out elaborate practical jokes on one another? However, after a while, I got tired of the work that I had to do, which was basically to serve huge corporations. I felt that my knowledge and skills would go to waste if all I did for my entire working life was serve people who could very well afford to buy the services of every starving scientist in the country. So I quit.
At first, I was filled with an overwhelming sense of liberation. Later, though, I just felt depressed. It seemed I had gotten nowhere after my first job.
Then something came up which made me ecstatic. I received an offer to work in the editorial department of a local publishing house. Not just any publishing house, mind you, but one that publishes textbooks. My mind was immediately filled with ideas of how I would be contributing to the improvement of our educational system: I would help make better books! I would help save schoolchildren from the drudgery of reading uninteresting textbooks! I would be doing something good for the country! And best of all, I would no longer go around carrying the burden of guilt brought on by slaving for a multinational company!
How in the world could I have known that I would still end up a slave of sorts? A slave to the whims of teachers who think that having a doctorate entitles them to become textbook authors even if their writing skills are practically zero. (Sometimes I would feel so bad that I was tempted to do my impression of Marlon Brando in “Apocalypse Now”-you know, “the horror, the horror”-after perusing a manuscript.) A slave to the company management which has a policy of pampering authors and neglecting editors. A slave to the pressure of meeting the monthly production and sales targets in the company’s relentless pursuit of big bucks that never trickles down to its employees.
As days went by, I began to feel more like a mistreated factory worker than a book editor. Why didn’t anyone tell me that the principles of mass production applied to the making of a textbook?
I soon realized that four years of being out there in the real world gave me a life that I didn’t want-a professional life, and not much else. I would work eight hours a day, six days a week. I would spend almost four hours each day on the road, watching my life go by while I was stuck in traffic. Sundays I would spend either nursing a headache or staring at the TV while slowly sinking into catatonia.
That’s why I quit my job again, despite one of my best friends, screams of protest: “Did you secretly take a vow of poverty? Because I cannot understand why you keep running away from all those good jobs when you know there are all those jobless college graduates practically starving out there!” Believe me, those were his very words.
Crazy as this may sound, I find a certain poetic beauty (too bad, though, I’m no poet) in the risk I’m taking: plunge into the unknown, a leap of faith. For the first time in years, I’m flying again.
No, I refuse to be called a lost soul (in spite of the evidence). I prefer to be called a wanderer because, as a bumper sticker a friend of mine saw said, “Not all who wander are lost.” I know where I want to go and what I want to do. It’s just the tiny, annoying, albeit necessary details-you know how to get there and how to do it-which I haven’t figured out yet. A lost soul I definitely am not. I am more what Elvis Costello describes as “a lost dog pondering a sign post.”
Okay, here’s what I know: I know I don’t want to make a career of selling anything, buying anything or processing anything. I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed or buy anything sold or processed or process anything sold, bought or processed-no, wait, that’s what John Cusack said in “Say anything.”
Seriously now, I don’t want to be stuck in a job that will push me inside my own comfortable shell where it’s easy to forget that there’s a world out there bigger than my own. I don’t want to build a tower from which it is impossible to see the little things below, the things that really matter. I don’t want to be one of those people whose mantra is “fame, fortune and power” and who constantly recite a litany of wants and I must haves, like I want to bag that promotion; I must have that salary raise; I want the latest cellular phone model; Oh did you hear there’s a war in Mindanao? Tsk tsk, by the way, I’m going to Tokyo this weekend, I must have that Playstation II!
I do not wish to be labeled as a nonconformist. I’m not aiming for any label at all. I know there are a lot of people out there who are doing exactly what I’ve just done: quitting their jobs to do the things they really want to do. In fact, I’ve met some of them: a shaman/writer who yearns to live a life as simple as a hobo’s; a scientist who writes beautiful poems; a journalist who dreams of building homes for the poor; and a beautiful hippie who writes stories that make your head spin. All of us have had a taste of the real world and yet we continue to adhere to the idea that if we who care about the world join forces, we might achieve a critical mass and set off a chain reaction that will create changes in this world.
Who knows what I might end up after this? I might become a hobo, a bag lady, a nutcase roaming the streets. Or maybe I’ll end up doing something really positive, something that will change the world for the better. Who knows, right?
Now I’m just clinging to the belief that the rat race is not for me because, well, I am not a rat. What was it that Jesus said about the lilies of the field? I think I’m just going to keep on thinking and doing good, sit back and will myself to become one happy lily.
