What am I doing? How did I end up here? I constantly ask myself these questions. How did I waste my life away? Was it after my marriage that things went downhill for me? No...it was long before...
Instead of paying attention in high school, I was scribbling away in my notebooks. Not of the traumatic, cut my eyes out experiences of Oedipus or of the Lewis and Clark expedition. I was busy writing what I was convinced would be the next best selling novel. That still has yet to be finished 10 years later.
So, instead of going off to NYU or Georgetown like I had always wanted, I ended up at the local community college and working at a coffee shop. I was the typical college student. Barely scraping by with my measly minimum wage while using whatever tips I had made that week for gas.
That's when it happened. My knight in shining armor rode in on his white horse and swept me off my feet. Actually, a better metaphor would be that he was wearing Kevlar and combat boots and driving a Stryker. The point is, I fell in Love. Real fast, real hard. Six years later, I fell again. Even faster and twice as hard. The bastard left me and our child for some tramp he worked with.
So, at least one good thing came out of the six most wasted years of my life. Of course, I'd do it all again in a heartbeat just to get the end result. Well, maybe not 6 years. I would've ditched the birth control I started using at the beginning of our relationship just to get pregnant right off the bat and then leave him during the pregnancy. She is my inspiration to get out of this mess.
The day my daughter, Maile, was born, I thought to myself, 'it's just us now, this is the first day of the rest of our lives! we can do anything and everything we want!' That mentality only went so far. The thing was, I didn't have a job during the second half of my pregnancy and now, I was FORCED to find one. I was living with my parents and I wasn't sure as to when I should start looking. I was torn between finding one right away and being at home with Maile for at least a month or two.
I began my search when she was 2 months old. Unfortunately for me, I didn't have a lot of experience. I was a barista for 3 years. I had a love/hate relationship with the place at the time but I still would've gone to work there at the drop of a hat. The only other experience I had was being a bank teller. Of the two, going into the financial industry made more sense. And plus too, the coffee shop I had so many fond memories of was sold to some owners who, according to a former co-worker that stayed for the transition, ran the whole thing into the ground.
In the past, I never had a problem with finding jobs. Usually, I waited for a month from the time I applied for a job to the time I started it. But the economy was beginning to look bleak which made me nervous. I applied to the credit union I bank with at the end of November. And thankfully, I got hired and started mid February of 08. The year I was there went by quick and when mid Feb 10 rolled around, I was proud of myself. I was actually at a real job for a year. Granted, I was at the coffee shop for 3 but there was no real future there.
I HATED being a teller but I saw this milestone as a good thing. I had been turned down for an internal job I applied for a couple months earlier and now I saw that an even better job had opened up. I applied for it and waited and waited. I ended up being withdrawn from consideration because of an incident that happened earlier in the month. The unfortunate incident could've been prevented and I definitely DID try to prevent it, but when all was said and done, there was no way of fixing it once it happened. Sadly, I ended up being fired just a mere 2 weeks after I had hit my one year mark.
Holy cow, what was I going to do now?! Find another job, too easy, not a problem. I thought I wasn't able to put in for anymore banking jobs. So, I began applying for cashier positions, store associate positions, clerical positions. I had hoped my Associates degree I earned 4 years earlier would help just a bit. So much for wishful thinking. At the end of March, I decided to join the military. I was always dead set against joining but this was a last resort. I wanted to be able to use my training to obtain a similar job in the real world. And have the government pay for my Bachelor's degree. I only had one obstacle standing in my way of signing up right then and there!!! Well, really 20 obstacles. I had to lose 20 pounds in order to be qualified. Since joining the military was a last resort, I was pretty nonchalant about losing the weight. I was still trying hard to find a real job.
The first kick in the ass happened in June. Had I been ready to leave for Basic, I would've gone to the nursing school. I qualified as a freaking MEDIC with the NURSING option! My laziness had conquered and I lost a pretty good job. In August, I was able to go to MEPS, the screening portion of going into the military. I still had weight to lose but at the time, they administered what was called the STEP test. That's just pure hell....well, for someone who has never done any sort of exercise, it was a small portion of hell. I passed and I was to come back in October. That day, I vowed to lose all 20 pounds. The second kick in the ass happened that day as well. I had been able to pay for all my bills with no worries up to that point but if I didn't find a job fast, I would've begun to start defaulting on them.
October 14th, I went back to MEPS and weighed in. I had lost 21 pounds since the end of August and I was damn proud of myself. I was scheduled to ship off to Basic in a month and 2 days.
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