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This actually has two parts, but I'll rush through the first one (it's convoluted, depressing, and basically irrelevant at this point) because it's really all one, long thing. These are the highlights.
One month and 24 days from now will be the 6 year anniversary of the day I planned to kill myself, but a couple months before that, something else got in the way. I just made a decision to try something else, since The Plan hadn't worked out. I was out of college but hadn't managed to scramble the finances or juggle my personal life to allow me to go to graduate school, and my degree is all but worthless without grad school. I had no job, having left the one I had had for the past 8 years because I woke up one afternoon from a drunken haze and decided I didn't want to do it anymore. The gas had been turned off in February, and I'd spent the last part of the winter freezing. I hadn't seen my daughter in months. My house was falling apart, and the city was threatening to condemn it unless I fixed it up, which I couldn't afford to do. On the day the electric company came and cut off the power, I made a decision and took the money I had left, didn't pay the electric bill, put gasoline in my car, packed it with what I thought I needed, and drove to see my mother.
I only went back once to close on the sale of the house.
I got a job I didn't want but that would get me started. It was hard, demeaning work, but it paid the bills. I got an apartment, got a good, used truck. Bought a couch, a television, and a computer. I reestablished my relationship with my daughter, eventually to the point we saw each other most weekends, talked on the phone regularly, and e-mailed even more often after I built her a computer. I was promoted to assistant manager. At the end of three years, I was about to be promoted to manager and given my own store. The salary would be somewhere in the 45 - 60 thousand/year range, which is good money for Oklahoma. I tested for the job, passed with flying colors, then went on vacation. When I came back from vacation, I quit. Why? As mentioned, I didn't want the job originally. I had only stayed with it because it paid the bills. It would *really* pay the bills if I stayed with it, but I feared losing my mind and health. This was a 10 hour/day job, often rotating shifts, standing the entire time, no breaks or lunches. Managers are paid salary and expected to make up any shifts hourly employees don't show up for. I hated upper management and with the promotion would be reporting directly to them rather than just having to tolerate their presence. Most of all, the job was incredibly boring to my mind.
I spent the next few months looking for work and not finding anything. Someone offered me a minimum wage job as a "lawn maintenance engineer," after I had applied at the company for an office position managing their computers. (I'm completely self-taught in computers and networking and have a better understanding of this type of thing that some professionals with gobs of certificates and classroom hours under their belts, but it's hard to sell that in a resume'.) I had about decided I had made a terrible mistake. The savings was gone. I had about $300 to my name, and rent was due in three weeks. I was making plans to move out of the state and live with a friend while I looked for work elsewhere, and I didn't want to do that.
Finally, I got a call from a company with which I had applied a couple months before. They wanted to interview me for a position that would utilize my technical skills as well as draw on my vast experience in retail operations and customer service. With benefits it paid just slightly less than what I had been making at the job I left. The only problem was that I was competing with about 20 other candidates, information I learned after asking since even trying to get this job would force me to hang on to a rope and swing if I didn't get it, rather than use the last of my money to make the move I had been planning. I decided to go for it. I wanted to work for this company; it had been first on my list. It would all turn on the interview, and I was late for that because the main office had suddenly moved between the time I applied and when I got the call, and no one told me that. I thought I had totally screwed it up, and to make matters worse I hadn't gotten a wink of sleep the night before due to nervousness. I left the interview with an oddly good feeling but still certain I was doomed.
To make a long story a bit shorter, I got the job, got my first check in time to make the rent payment without it being so late the landlord was angry. (Helped that I'd always made timely payments before.) I was worried, as are you, that I'd screw it up, that all my self-taught technical skills would turn out to be nothing but an illusion in my own mind, and that was really what made me stand out. I was the only applicant with both technical skills and retail/customer service experience at the same time. Last year my salary was 50% higher than my last year at the previous company. I get a chair and a lunch hour, and I don't stink or have to soak my back and tend to my sore knees when I get home. I get real vacations, which I've used to take my daughter and mother all over the country, this past summer to see Spamalot in New York, something I never could have managed at the old place. My last evaluation put me in the top ten percent of all people in my department, allowing me to choose my schedule and to move into a leadership role. My salary just increased, and now I'm getting substantial commissions as well.
The thoughts of suicide now seem incredibly childish.
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