Sometimes I get incensed as I stare at the tattered remains of my brilliant career, clutching weakly at the frayed fringes of what I like to think I once had or might have been, before I moved far away from home to be with a man simply because I loved him. Would he have done the same? Well, he didn’t, which perhaps says enough.
Anyway.
I like to think I helped him with his destiny, but some days I feel I put my own destiny in a box in a cupboard then moved continents and forget it was there. It’s easy enough to do when you’re a woman in love, when there are children, when your salary is a pittance compared to his, but still, perhaps I left part of myself behind somewhere.
Or did I?
Do any of us have a destiny or do we just get lucky? Or unlucky?
My brilliant career such as it was — half-witted, half-hearted, half-baked, half-arsed, two-thirds fantasy even – seemed to die, but then so had so many careers before. I was a nurse briefly but loathed the polyester uniform and the broad, flat-footed lecturers with their pep-talks about avoiding intern doctors and their advances. 
I was a waitress and a barmaid, a bank clerk and a check-out girl, and I can do the twirly wrist thing that makes a fabulous peak on softserve ice-cream, thanks to my tenure in a dairy parlour called Milky Lane.
I was a journalist for many years, still am, I hope, and I had a great gig on a daily paper in South Africa, but, like I said, love got in the way. Or that’s my excuse. Maybe I got tired. Maybe I got lazy.
I’ve written three books, although I suppose they’re nothing more than manuscripts really, blinking computer files that no publisher wanted, yet still they taunt me every day on my hard drive.
And once, for a moment in time, I was even a poet…
I was 19 and working near Johannesburg at what was then Beecham, the Aquafresh people, and I was the bored receptionist living on a diet of Smarties, magazines and desperate snatched conversations with people who walked through my little prison, where I sat shut away from the company on the wrong side of the glass security doors. In my sunless brick box, passing sales reps felt like serendipity, their cheap Golfs were chariots to a better place. Anyway, no doubt tiring of me yawning at the visitors, the personnel department agreed to give me extra work, and so I was charged with sending the photocopied rejection letters to the countless, faceless people who applied for non-existent jobs in our factory. Remember Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, where poor Charlie’s dad spends his days screwing the lids on toothpaste tubes? It’s bizarre to think how many people were queuing up to take his place. And we had a machine for screwing the lids on anyway.
So I’d address the standard rejection, scrawl a signature, lick the envelope shut, stick a stamp on it and crush someone else’s dreams, hundreds and hundreds of them each day. But one morning a grubby letter arrived with no return address, hand-printed on a torn sheet of paper, with just a plea to meet the writer at the factory gate, to give him work please, to give him a job.
The man was called Marais Qulu, of No Known Address, County Homeless. I showed it to the HR person, begged him to try to find the man.
“Jennie,” he said, “Do you know how many people queue outside the factory gates every day?”
The question was rhetorical.
I wrote a poem about it, or rather a terrible attempt at one, but still 21 years later I remember it by heart and, soaking in my cesspit of self-pity of late, it came back to me like a slap from my younger self.
Thousands queue for 200 jobs offered in Durban, South Africa. (Picture: Reuters)
It’s called “The Aims of a Job”:
Here I sit
fat as shit,
got a job
Grinning a bit.
Mister Marais Qulu
(he’s a Zulu)
has no job,
like you and I do:
“There is nothing food.
I am write this letter to you
with the aims of a job.
The writing is just as terrible as I recall, I don’t know if he was Zulu at all, but in the current world climate (lashing rain, with more expected) it’s just as apt. And as Japan is shaken and washed away, as people lose their homes, offices, possessions, security, children, their very lives just because the world doesn’t play fair, as they scramble for food, for fresh water, for warmth, I know how lucky I am that I can afford to stare out of the window, that I have the full tummy and the spare time to lament my battered dreams. A room of one’s own? My God, I have several.
Marais Qulu: in hope, I googled his name. No results were found.
Beautiful, reminded me of this quote from a book I’m reading at the moment:
Most of us stand poised at the edge of brilliance, haunted by the knowledge of our proximity, yet still demonstrably on the wrong side of the line, our dealings with reality undermined by a range of minor yet critical psychological flaws (a little too much optimism, an unprocessed rebelliousness, a fatal impatience or sentimentality). We are like an exquisite high-speed aircraft which for lack of a tiny part is left stranded beside the runway, rendered slower than a tractor or a bicycle. (Alain de Botton, ‘The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work’ p. 127)
Thank-you so much, Jonathan. I love that: “Most of us stand poised at the edge of brilliance… demonstrably on the wrong side of the line”. Yes! What he said!
I don’t think it is self-pity to be reflective. I’m drifting out the other side of a coulda woulda shoulda period too and while it’s a total pain in the blue arse operating under the funk, it does clear the emotional decks a little.
Nowt wrong with self awareness. Hope you’re out the other side too. X
You’re right, of course, but sometimes I need to smack my head against the desk to catch a much-needed wake-up, to remind myself that I’m one of the top five percent (or whatever) who has water, electricity, a roof and is well-fed. Very well fed. Too well fed.
Sometimes I think the needs of the psyche are deemed so secondary to the business of life and staying alive — and that’s right, I guess — but that doesn’t mean those things higher up on the hierarchy of needs are not worth fighting for too.
I hope you’re okay, lovely you. X
Beautifully written Jennie and expressing sentiments that many of us share. You speak wistfully of lost opportunities but perhaps the box is still there safe, sound and waiting to be revisited. You are a young woman and children don’t stay children forever. Perhaps this is just a stage (albeit a longish one) in a whole life, much of which has yet to be lived.
Also the freedom that arises out of an opportunity to step away from past glories – or what seemed like glories at the time – should not be underestimated. I had a career almost by accident because I was once good at something that I never particularly enjoyed. It made me anxious and too eager to please. It stressed me out and I think I lost sight of what really mattered to me. Yet superficially I was very successful. Having a child made me step away and reassess. Having a loving, supportive husband happy to share the burden removed any earning imperative.
Adjusting to the loss of status and the boredom wasn’t easy but I realise now that I would never go back to where I was. There are still mountains to climb and milestones to be reached but they are different, more personal and they matter more to me. I’m in my mid-forties now and I feel that life lies in front of me and that I will achieve much more before I’m done.
Go and retrieve the box, unpack it and examine its contents and perhaps swap a few things around. You have lots of time and talent on your side.
That’s a wonderful response Eleanor – you are so wise!
You’re so right, Deshocks… Thanks Eleanor, you never fail to delight me. And of course you’re right.
Thanks Dee, I was worried that I sounded a bit pompous!
Wow, I really loved this post. Beautifully written and lovely to read on this lazy Tuesday afternoon.
P.S. It’s never too late. I think you’re a wonderful writer.
Michi, you just made my day! Thank-you.
Really loved this post!
And oh it rings so many bells with me; I’ve pinballed through more careers than I care to mention, frequently despair at where I’m headed next and then have to metaphorically give myself a good boot in the arse for whinging.
That said it is well worth remembering that none of us are ever really a finished product as humans. There’s time for much yet, me dear.
Jennie, you’ve been reading my mind again.
I’ve lost count how many times since 1992 that I’ve moved with the husband and had to start over building up an education, work and friends.
And while I have frequent night terrors about my so-called career, I wouldn’t have traded my 20 years with him for anything. Now that’s pretty scary.
This is fantastically written and thoughtful and sad and witty, all at once. I often think of lost careers, that wanting to write has led me down a pathway of financial, emotional [and perhaps] moral ruin. My only permanent pensionable job was at age 18 in a pet insurance company in London! Where has it all got me!? But regret feels so much like trapped wind and gives me heartpain so I try not to go down that route. I think it’s better to have a fluid life with lamentation than the sit-still and rot type.
Thanks so much to all of you — it’s good to know this sort of brow-clutching and breast-beating has universal resonance and, yes, I wouldn’t change my family.
I guess sometimes it’s just difficult to look back and think about what might have been if the other path had been taken, so we need to remind ourselves that we did what we could with what we knew and what we had available to us at that moment in time.
As Jude says: “There’s time for much yet, me dear…”