Fighting For Tomorrow

So… Not sure why I picked that particular title. But I’m on a bus, my phone is dead, and that’s the first thing that popped into my head. So, for now, there you go. I might change the title later. I might not. Who knows. It’s a mystery for now.

Anyway. First things first: I love my job. I genuinely do. Which is the problem. Any time I actually care about where I work, I overthink it. Every time. In fact, any time I actually care about anything in my life I overthink it. This blog, for the record, doesn’t count; because it allows me to vent and get things off my mind. Umm…see what I did right here? My point exactly. Moving on.

Before you reconsider who I am as a person, it’s not that I want to stop caring about this job so I get better. It’s that I want to get better so my job won’t go away. To quote myself, I’m having an “existential occupational crisis.” I care too much, thus I’m too much in my head, thus I’m overcomplicating the process. And, considering I have to wake up at 3AM to ensure that I get to work on time, free time is a premium. Even for blogging. To put it nicely. I hate mornings and I would rather wake up at…way too early than ever consider changing jobs, or even teams. I can honestly attest that I have had a plethora of hard days and not a single “bad day”. Especially even considering how many set-backs I’ve had thus far. I’ve been sworn at (in multiple languages, mind you), hung up on almost daily, had a good majority of disconnected phone calls and people who don’t’ return my calls; and I still wake up hours before dawn and face it Monday through Friday. That. That right there is how much I care and how much this company means to me. And this is why I won’t quit. Period.

Which brings us back to doe. I’m the only one on my team who (at this point and time) has not made a single sale. Considering I have a solid decade and a half of sales experience under my belt, that hurts my pride, to say the least. It smarts. I might not be alone in this (everyone from the CEO down is incredibly supportive of, well, everyone. And even little ‘ol me is feeling like I’m not alone in this) but that doesn’t change where I am mentally and occupationally right now. I honestly do not know how much longer they will keep me on board if this pattern continues. And nothing scares me more. Simply put, I care because they care. I care because what I am doing actually matters. I care, because, even little ‘ol me, has a butterfly effect on the rest of the company. That, right there, is at the forefront of my brain as I attempt sleep at night. In short, I care because this company is worth caring for.

During the first week on the job, they have you fill out your “why”. Why are you here and why do you want to be here? That’s a heavy question. But, honestly, it’s an honest one. Working for a start-up company, there is zero room for mediocrity.  You’re either in a thousand percent in or you’re not in at all. You’re not just a cog in the wheel, you’re one of the main pieces. Regardless of your roll and how long you’ve been there, you’re either in or you’re out. There’s no middle ground. And change happens by the second.

If this sounds like a weird love letter to the company that I work for, it, in a bizarre little way, is. Working here has given me hope for the future; and while that sounds like a normal, mundane thing, I promise you it’s not. This is my biggest "why" that I've given. Allow me to go into detail the most effective, albeit, heart wrenching and most poignant way I can think of:

Since the age of 22, I have lost someone I’ve been completely close to every five years (on the nose). In 2003, I lost my Dad, pretty much right in front of my eyes, to an asthma attack. I still, to this day, am pretty sure I watched him die. Or at least witnessed the immediate moments after the fact. That alone changes someone; and I have the date tattooed on my left calf. It is the one most prominent, defining moment in my life, bar none. Not to be too heavy, but I have never been married and I have no children, so I don’t have a power positive life event to counteract that pain.

Fast forward four years when my grandmother, my dad’s mother, was in the advanced stages of dementia (or actual Alzheimer’s, we’re not sure which) and watching a life time of memories be completely erased from someone’s life. She didn’t know who she was, where she was, or what was going on. She knew her husband, and that was pretty much it. I was living with her and taking care of her and I would be willing to bet that she didn’t know who I was most days.  During that time, my grandfather (her husband) was in the process of losing his leg to diabetes. So I’m taking on this all on my own. While all this is going on, I’m still an assistant manager to the book store I was working at and giving college a stab at. I, not surprisingly, would flunk out not long before her death and I honestly have had no desire to go back. It is what it is.  

Not to add my own pain to the mix, but just over five years after my dad passed, I had a cancer scare of my own. There was (and I guess still is) a lump on my right kidney. I went through six months of the worst physical pain of my entire life; and at the end of it, the most the doctor’s guessed was that it was a “clustered cyst”. No actual tests for cancer have been performed.

Three years after her passing, my grandfather (my dad’s dad) is having some serious troubles swallowing his food, and even water. He goes in to get it checked out and they tell him he’s in the advanced stages of thyroid cancer. Over the next six months, I watch him go from someone who has been severely obese his entire life to withering away and not gaining an ounce. I was also completely unemployed and having no luck finding a job-despite actual months of looking. The grand toll of...everything was hitting me hard and my dear sister offered me a way out: Move to Texas and start over. A fresh re-beginning to life. I took it and not even two months later I was living half way across the country in a state I had only visited twice. While I admittedly felt guilt at the time (and, without a doubt, still do to this day) for “abandoning” my grandfather, I personally was not capable of taking care of him any longer. Remaining there would have destroyed us both. It was already in the process of doing so when I, essentially, fled to Texas. Not quite two years after I moved down there, I got a text from my aunt asking if I had any last words for him. Before I had a chance to respond to her text message, he had passed away.

Death, you could say, is never not on my doorstep. There are few that I know who fully understand the full brutal fragility of life.

This blog post isn’t a pity party for me. I accept the “beautiful storm” that life is. It is in going through all that I have that has made me the fighter that I am. Is the process ugly and hard? Sure. Without a doubt. But all the struggles, even the worst ones, I have a work pale in comparison to the ones that I have had in my personal life. I fight every day that I’m there to ensure that Porch outlasts me. I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that I will not live forever. But if I can leave a legacy while I’m still here; then I will do everything I can to ensure that that happens.