Threes
If bad things happen in threes, consider the first job I got when I moved to Florida, then the second one, and then the last year spent freelancing. Ergo, my next employment endeavor should be paradise, yes?
I just got the plane ticket cancellation notification for the faraway prince. He’s none too happy. And I don’t blame him.
There was this new freelance gig that surfaced when I was at the nadir of my interviewing spree. And I told him upfront that I was on the job warpath. I also purposely dropped off the earth for long periods of time between e-mails — I didn’t want to say yes to him when I really wanted to say yes to anybody else.
And now he’s furious with me. Which was a bad bridge to burn. Not to mention the guy who put us in touch — I don’t ever want to disappoint him. Which I have. And that bothers me.
I hate that I go from feeling like I can conquer the world to feeling like I can’t make a decision to save my life. I don’t regret, per se, blowing off Freelance Guy. (I didn’t have a good feeling about working with him, and after having friends screw me over in Freelance Land, I don’t have a lot of faith that a perfect stranger would treat me any better.) But I feel like I could have handled it better.
The problem is that my field is so small, and my reputation is my everything, that I don’t want people out there thinking I suck.
I’ve spent the weekend with lots of friends, being stuffed full of good food and pumped up with stories of what makes me awesome to them (and what would make me awesome to the prince I’m about to wed tomorrow morning at 9 a.m.). And yet I still manage to reduce myself to the failure pile over someone I didn’t even feel the need to impress in the first place.
I need to snap out of this funk, and fast. Because life really isn’t all that bad. I was in line behind a guy at CVS who was trying (for like 10 minutes) to buy photos. The cashier was telling him that he only had $9 left in his account and the cost was $12.
I whispered to him that I wanted to pay for it, and he ran out of the store. Again, I don’t know if I did the right thing or, if I did, whether it was in the right way. But I realized that even though I’m “broke,” I’m ridiculously lucky to have more than $9 in my account.
I wish I didn’t feel so icky. I’ve made a lot of choices, good and bad, with the best information available at the time. I try to take into account my larger goals when dealing with the minutiae of the day. I guess I’ve just had so many questionable outcomes that I will never stop, well, questioning how I arrived at them.
But right now should be a time of hope. Tomorrow I’ll figure out whether I made the right move or not. Today I should be sitting on top of the world that nothing but possibilities lay before me.
Everything I’ve done (or haven’t done) has gotten me here. And what I do next remains to be seen. I just hope I can get over the heartache, doubt and exhaustion enough to do it well. …