A Special Post – One Year Ago, August 8, 2019

Facebook has a feature “On This Day” that shows memories of previous posts, and reminded me this morning why I began a new chapter in my life. In all the excitement and flying dust of researching, planning, and creating a website, with a goal to use social media as a signpost to my Personal and Professional web page, I forgot about the event that was the “final straw.” Considering what has happened in my life and in the world in general, I don’t think it could have come at a better time. Here is what I posted one year ago.

August 8, 2019.
I have kept this one to myself, thinking it was just a one off comment made out of ignorance. While it is that, at the same time I found it to be a timely prompt, a nudge… a kick in the ass to get on with my life.

I was recently told I “lack focus” and informed that my overall skill set is “limited,” that the “knowledge base I found my philosophy on is antiquated and practically obsolete,” and that I “need to make some cold hard decisions, stop dreaming, and just face facts that my future relies on the ‘practicality’ of doing a job to just pay the bills, and my future actions should reflect that end.”
This has deeply influenced me, but probably not in the way it was intended. Telling a ‘creative’ that his dreams (read as ‘imagination’) is to be abandoned in favor of ‘practicality’ is most decidedly not the best strategy to inspire focus. Or maybe it is.
I’m definitely focused now, more so than I have been in quite some time. One of my favorite quotes is by the sci-fi/fantasy novelist Ross Caligiuri… “If you feel like you don’t fit into the world you inherited it is because you were born to help create a new one.” I’m ready to start.
That is my new focus, a back to basics approach to creativity, my career, and to life itself. My skill set is far from limited, it was just being judged from a limited vantage point. True knowledge, the kind I strive to make the basis of my life philosophy, is always developing, expanding, growing… unless it becomes perceived as absolute fact. Then it becomes dogma. Don’t mistake my knowledge base or life philosophy for the cold hard ‘practicality’ that is dogma.
My practicality lies elsewhere.

That was a year ago. All those soul crushing comments were made by a manager in an “informal” off the record performance review that occurred concurrent to my official performance review. It was delivered as a “set of friendly observations.” Taken in combination with events occurring in the company at the time, and management changes, as well as my own growing personal dissatisfaction with the direction my life was taking, it triggered change. I quit my job and went back to school while I re-figured my life. Little did I know what vast changes were in share for all of us within a year’s time. Since our culture is arguably in varying states of stormy upheaval, and society’s goals change, I’m not even sure my former career will still be viable. It’s liberating, frightening, exciting, and oddly calming to float on that sea of uncertainty, and not feel weighed down by the anchor stones of an old career.