I have been examining my attitude toward working for pay.

Honestly I like buying things and having money, but I don’t see why we have to work for it! I suppose my attitude is as far from a capitalist as you can get. I don’t like to think about money, I never wanted to dwell on getting more of it, or be preoccupied with that line of thinking at all. I don’t believe I am a particularly lazy or shiftless person (have been working now for about 30 years) but I feel everyone just ought to have, by birth, the right to a roof over their heads and food to eat. That’s it!

When I was in high school I remember one of my friends had a job in a jewelry store. In a way I envied her because she was able to purchase a really cool car. At the same time I had such a low level of self-esteem that I did not think anyone would ever hire me! With my typical catastrophic type thinking I believed I would never have a job of any kind. Where did this idea come from and why has it had such a hold over me?

I came out of junior high school a very damaged person, but with the hindsight of many years I can see that was also a period of tremendous growth. The damage was to my self-image – I believed I was ugly , would never have a normal life like other people, would never amount to anything, and no one liked me.

The growth was in the area of learning about science and a real exploration of religion/spirituality where I began for the first time to see the flaws in the religion I was brought up in. Why wouldn’t God help me when I had to go to school and be teased and mocked everyday? Why didn’t my parents protect me? Why did I have to become physically ill every morning because I knew people were going to attack me, if not physically, then verbally? WHAT GOOD WAS GOD??? I could not figure out what I had done—was being shy a crime worthy of this kind of punishment? Along with my study of the arguments for creation/evolution my faith faltered, and by the time I entered college I had no intention of ever going to church again. That resolve lasted for roughly ten years.

How does this gear into my lack of interest in the career world? The parental influence thing was huge. My mother never had a job other than housewife. Most can imagine the model of woman the Baptist church presented as ideal. My father seldom discussed his job at home. He was in the Air Force and would be gone on trips for long stretches of time and then would come back with gifts for us kids. Wonderful things – statues from China, souvenirs from Egypt, Afghanistan and Morocco, etc… but I did not know what the working world was like. I knew someone had to like you in order to hire you – you had to convince them you could do something. I couldn’t think of a darn thing I could do! I was good at reading and drawing. That was about it. I could hardly talk to people in those days I was so shy. So I went to college majoring in art, one of the things I could do well and knew I would get good grades in. But I hadn’t the faintest idea how to make a living.

To Be Continued…