The Better Life Success Enrichment Seminar 3
You developed the habit of believing that everything was known or else unknowable. At least by you, the young and inexperienced. For everything you wanted, there was someone to teach you how to get it or else to tell you that you couldn’t, shouldn’t or wouldn’t have it. Why? You asked. Because that’s the way it is. They said.
I remember, just after my 25th birthday, I was sitting in front of the tv after my boyfriend had gone to bed, kind of watching it and kind of not, entertaining stray thoughts. It suddenly occurred to me that I was late in doing what I was supposed to do. I didn’t have a husband or children or a house. I didn’t want any of those things. I just realized in that moment that I had believed all my life that those events would be automatic. But they weren’t. I would have to do something to make those things happen. And I didn’t even want them to happen. But, if not, my whole life didn’t have a plan! And that was so scary it really freaked me out, as we used to say.
Within the year, I had become a truck driver. I found a truck driving school and learned how to drive an 18-wheeler. A man I knew, the father of a friend, told me about a place where I could get a job and I moved a thousand miles from the place where I had lived all my life to go to work as a truck driver. That was back when there were hardly any women truck drivers except for the few that drove with their husbands or boyfriends.
Sometimes it amazed me that I had done it. You might be proud of me and think that I was daring and independent. But that wasn’t it. I was just more afraid of my life as it was than of the unknown. I saw a way to get out of my rut into a different one, one that looked more interesting. And it certainly was!
I remember, just after my 25th birthday, I was sitting in front of the tv after my boyfriend had gone to bed, kind of watching it and kind of not, entertaining stray thoughts. It suddenly occurred to me that I was late in doing what I was supposed to do. I didn’t have a husband or children or a house. I didn’t want any of those things. I just realized in that moment that I had believed all my life that those events would be automatic. But they weren’t. I would have to do something to make those things happen. And I didn’t even want them to happen. But, if not, my whole life didn’t have a plan! And that was so scary it really freaked me out, as we used to say.
Within the year, I had become a truck driver. I found a truck driving school and learned how to drive an 18-wheeler. A man I knew, the father of a friend, told me about a place where I could get a job and I moved a thousand miles from the place where I had lived all my life to go to work as a truck driver. That was back when there were hardly any women truck drivers except for the few that drove with their husbands or boyfriends.
Sometimes it amazed me that I had done it. You might be proud of me and think that I was daring and independent. But that wasn’t it. I was just more afraid of my life as it was than of the unknown. I saw a way to get out of my rut into a different one, one that looked more interesting. And it certainly was!
posted by Marianne at 9:29 PM
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