Posts in category "Thoughts"

Trinary Maturity: The Job

The first cat­a­lyst involved in my “trans­for­ma­tion” was my job. It could be said that the only rea­son this job was so sig­nif­i­cant is because I had nev­er had such a job before. Perhaps things would be dif­fer­ent if I start­ed my cur­rent career at a dif­fer­ent time, although the same could be said about the oth­er two fac­tors.

I was hired to work close­ly with one of two own­ers, a man with the dri­ve, mind, wit, and per­son­al­i­ty to run one of the top com­pa­nies in the indus­try. I see myself as a tool, an exten­sion of his per­son, respon­si­ble for things that he does­n’t have time to do. By free­ing his time, the com­pa­ny is able to grow faster, because his resources can then be put to bet­ter use.

My role is as a sort of sub­mis­sive. This works out well, because in (most of) the rest of my life I’m dom­i­nant. Like me, many sub­mis­sives at work are also dom­i­nants at home, and vice-ver­sa. People want change from the every­day life of their career, and in fact, my sub­mis­sion in this role is what makes me a bet­ter dom­i­nant in oth­ers (more on this extreme­ly sig­nif­i­cant point in the forth­com­ing part of this series).

I don’t have the per­son­al­i­ty to run a busi­ness, the way my boss does­n’t have the per­son­al­i­ty to work for some­one else. Our roles are clear­ly defined, and I’m much more pro­duc­tive as a sub­mis­sive in this sit­u­a­tion. It’s this pro­duc­tive­ness that has giv­en me so much con­fi­dence. I know how good a work­er I am, how inte­gral my role is in the com­pa­ny, and how dif­fi­cult I would be to replace.

Relational roles aside, how­ev­er, there are sev­er­al oth­er fac­tors of my job that con­tributed to what I con­sid­er explo­sive growth. The respon­si­bil­i­ty I have was a big thing. As the only IT per­son there, I have to make sure that all our hard­ware and soft­ware is suf­fi­cient for what we’re doing. When the nature of the busi­ness changes, the upper ech­e­lon comes to me for a solu­tion, whether it’s upcom­ing VOIP imple­men­ta­tion to save on long dis­tance, wire­less track­ing of our pick-ups and deliv­er­ies, or some­thing as sim­ple as a serv­er upgrade to han­dle the mar­ket growth.

Even things like mak­ing phone calls have changed me. I was nev­er com­fort­able on the phone. Only a year ago, order­ing piz­za was a dif­fi­cult thing to do, and Trolley can attest to this after get­ting him to call for me sev­er­al times. The only expla­na­tion I could come up with for this behav­iour is that there are peo­ple on the oth­er end, but I still can’t real­ly make sense of this aside from poor self-con­fi­dence. All I knew was that my tele­phone shy­ness was a prob­lem. I got over it by forc­ing myself to make phone calls at work. After all, one does not stop a project at a tele­phone con­ver­sa­tion when one’s boss wants some­thing done. I still have my off-days, of course, when I avoid mak­ing calls alto­geth­er, but those are few and far between.

Not only has my job sparked a change in me, it’s paved a way for oth­er growth as well. Even finan­cial­ly speak­ing, I now have the free­dom to pur­sue my oth­er goals and hob­bies.

Every day I work, I’m thank­ful.

The Trinary Maturity Series

  1. Introduction
  2. The Job
  3. The Girlfriend
  4. The House
  5. (In)Conclusion

Resonance

(This took four months to write)

I was kick­ing back on the couch with ____
with the lights out and the music on.

Wut wut.

Anyway, we were stoned out of our skulls and it was Naked As We Came by Iron And Wine. We sat there, lis­ten­ing to the dul­cet notes of a lone gui­tar lead into Sam Beam’s sug­ary voice, soon to be gen­tly round­ed off by his sis­ter, Sara, as the har­mo­ny. A sum­mer-morn­ing-dur­ing-har­vest song, or danc­ing in the mid­dle of a cool rain­fall.

She says ‘If I leave before you dar­ling
don’t you waste me in the ground’
I lay smil­ing like our sleep­ing chil­dren
one of us will die inside these arms

Eyes wide open
naked as we came
one will spread our
ash­es round the yard

And we sat there, lis­ten­ing, remark­ing to each oth­er about how mor­bid it all was, yet so beau­ti­ful.

How two peo­ple can be so inti­mate with each oth­er as to be com­fort­able enough to casu­al­ly talk about the dis­pos­al of remains. They were plan­ning it like an ado­les­cent cou­ple decid­ing the num­ber of garages or chil­dren they’re going to have.

Even John was moved, but how could he not be? One of them would die but there was solice in the fact that it would be in the embrace of the oth­er, as if nei­ther one would want to die any oth­er way, doing any­thing else.

And it felt like, for the first time in my life, John could under­stand a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent side of me.

Living On Borrowed Time (Bonus)

An old nurs­ery rhyme pro­posed that life is but a dream. If Dr. Leary were alive today, he would add, most like­ly in an LSD induced state, that we’re just an imag­i­na­tion of our­selves. I have a hard time agree­ing with either apho­rism, but even if they were true, it would­n’t mat­ter.

A cer­tain glut­to­nous cat once mused, exact­ly 19 years ago today, that life can be com­pared to some­thing found on the din­ner table. Perhaps the most famous com­par­i­son, how­ev­er, was by a tech­ni­cal­ly bor­der­line defi­cient per­son who said that life is like a box of choco­lates, because you nev­er know what you’re going to get. As things go on, one real­izes that there isn’t one com­par­i­son that’s more valid than anoth­er.

Even an out­spo­ken Queensbridge rap­per has flowed, “You a killer or a hus­tler, deal­er or cus­tomer / Gangsta or buster, young­ster or old nig­ga / A weed head, a coke snif­fer / You rich or a broke nig­ga / Know you all relate to this shit that I wrote nig­gas / Life is what you make it nig­ga”, and I tend not to dis­agree.

For me, it now seems like life is sim­ply a test.

More impor­tant­ly, how­ev­er, from here until the end, no mat­ter what, life is gravy.

Cornus Canadensis

Many things to say, but this is the most rel­e­vant right now. This also hap­pens to touch on almost every aspect of my life, and I find myself con­sid­er­ing things from a gigan­tic range of angles. Unfortunately, I can only briefly touch on each of them, in an effort to stave digres­sion.

The first and most impor­tant goal I’ve ever had was to gain a healthy amount of con­fi­dence by the time I was mid­dle-age. This was so that I could enjoy at least half of my life as a strong indi­vid­ual. I set this goal because I real­ized that I had an unhealthy amount of self-doubt, which con­tributed to a depress­ing life and lifestyle, as well as unre­al­ized poten­tial.

This meant fight­ing off the inse­cu­ri­ties that were bred into me, which amount­ed to most of my child­hood. It has­n’t been easy in the last cou­ple of years, but it’s worked. Every six months, I’d real­ize how much I grew. This time, I real­ize that I’m there.

I final­ly feel like I’m in con­trol of my life. I speak to peo­ple dif­fer­ent­ly. I think dif­fer­ent­ly. Instead of avoid­ing con­flict, I can meet it head on. For me, this was prob­a­bly the most dif­fi­cult thing to do ever imag­ine doing. I would plan my life around such an avoid­ance, from my friends to my rela­tion­ships. I had a con­flict pho­bia, an illog­i­cal fear of a spe­cif­ic sit­u­a­tion, but I fought against it and won. In psy­chol­o­gy, peo­ple over­come their pho­bias by remain­ing relaxed in the face of their fears (because one can­not men­tal­ly be relaxed and scared at the same time). I had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to do this, by plac­ing myself in uncom­fort­able sit­u­a­tions over the last four months, and approach­ing them cere­bral­ly at the same time.

I also have to say that a major con­tribut­ing fac­tor to the suc­cess has been going through the D/s lifestyle with Loo. Having a sub­mis­sive as expe­ri­enced as she was, plac­ing her trust in me, gave me a sig­nif­i­cant boost in con­fi­dence. She once point­ed out to me while watch­ing Secretary, that Edward Grey’s con­fes­sion to Lee Holloway about pre­vi­ous­ly being shy was a very accu­rate detail. In Loo’s expe­ri­ence, many put in a dom­i­nant posi­tion are able to break out of their shells, and I nev­er under­stood or believed her until now.

So now that I’m here, where do I go? I’ve accom­plished the biggest goal in my life, some­thing I’d planned on work­ing on for the next ten years, and it feels like I’ve lost a major part of my rea­son for liv­ing. I feel like an astro­naut who dreamed of land­ing on the moon as a child, only to accom­plish the goal and real­ize that he had nev­er dreamed of any­thing else.

I sup­pose I still have the rest of my life to decide.