Rom-Com

via Pinterest

I was catching up with my hairdresser, telling her about my life lately. I told her I still work in the boutique next door to the salon, and now I’m working in a local candle production studio too, and then I have a column that comes out every other month in a local paper, and it’s not Sex and the City, but it’s basically Sex and the City. I was explaining all these things in my usual self-deprecating way.

“Oh my gosh!” she squealed from behind me, dropping the damp bunch of my hair she was trimming and meeting my eye in the mirror. “Your life is like a rom-com!”

I’ve heard this before, that my life is romantic and cute and movie-worthy, and I get it—a lot of people have fantasies about running away and opening a little store somewhere and selling pretty things. A lot of people long to leave the corporate hustle behind and spend their days making candles or jewelry or something. A lot of people write in their diaries at night and wonder if anyone would ever be interested in reading what they have to say. I get to do all of those things, except I don’t own the store or the candle studio (and thank God I don’t, honestly). So many people dream of a life like mine: quaint, slow, simple.

So why does it all make me so miserable?

I wasn’t one of those kids who knew what they wanted to be when they grew up. I didn’t have a job in mind or even a clear picture of what my life would look like as an adult. Writing was just the thing my teachers consistently told me I was good at, and I come from a family of writers and readers, so that’s the path I ended up on. I wouldn’t even go as far as saying it’s the path I chose; it kind of just happened.

I started working retail in college because I needed a part-time job to make money. I’d sworn off nannying after a rogue diaper gave me a traumatizing bout of norovirus, and I’d tried being a barista but couldn’t get the hang of the latte art and came home after every shift covered in sweat and crumbs and smelling like spoiled milk. Working in small boutiques, it turned out, was great for my OCD, because it was literally my job to keep the stores neat and tidy. I’ve always been both a creative and a very visually driven person, but I never got the hang of any of the visual art mediums—too fiddly and time-consuming—so merchandising scratched that itch.

I stumbled into candle making because we carry the candles I now make at the store I work in, and the company that makes them needed help. It came at the exact right time, because the fun of merchandising and shop-keeping had worn off, and I was starting to feel like a retail automaton, just making the same shallow small talk and having the same transactional interactions day in and day out, with very little variety. It felt to me like I was nothing more than a “warm body,” a term that gets used in retail a lot: no brain or heart or personality, just someone to run the cash register and lock and unlock the door.

The candle factory, as I affectionately refer to it, is nice because I don’t have to interact with customers. I just show up, get my list of things I need to do that day, put my headphones in, and do them. At the end of each shift, I can literally look at the physical evidence of how productive I was that day, and my perfectionist ass loves that. Last week I wicked 400 candles in six hours. I put the wick inside the candle 400 times. I had to lie down when I got home because my neck hurt so badly, but I was so proud of myself.

I used to say that I intentionally crafted my life to look like this; that I’d much rather have two part-time jobs than one full-time, traditional 9-to-5, because then I’d have time to read and write and enjoy my life; that I’d go crazy sitting behind a desk all day, every day. I used to say that I was avoiding the fast-paced hustle culture that everyone else my age seemed so caught up in.

But I’ve worked more this year than I ever have in my life, and I’ve never been more tired. I barely have the energy to read, much less write.

I distinctly remember my senior year of high school for how isolating it felt. It was like I woke up one day and everyone around me had chosen what the rest of their life was going to be, and they felt certain in their choice. One of my friends was going to be a social worker, another one a pharmacist, another one a scientist. I couldn’t even get dressed in the morning without having an identity crisis, worried the wrong shirt or jeans would send a message to the people around me about who I was, and then I’d be stuck as that person forever.

The quote “I have no dream job, I do not dream of labor,” has become an internet meme, and a cursory Google search suggests it’s attributed to James Baldwin, though I can’t be sure. I bring it up here to make a point: what were my dreams for the future as a child, a young adult, a younger, less disillusioned twenty-something than I am now? Certainly not jobs, careers, or financial success. Certainly not titles or climbing of ladders.

The closest I ever got to a dream for the future was the secret wish that I could forever feel the feeling of sitting in the backyard on an early fall evening, listening to the wind in the leaves, reading my book, the dog sniffing in the garden a few feet away, knowing there’s someone who loves me inside the house making us dinner. The yard could change, the dog could change, the house and the identity of the person inside it, as long as it felt the same.

And yet, when I go to work, whatever that work happens to be, I feel strangled by the pressure to achieve. I forget the fantasy I live in. It isn’t a rom-com anymore, it’s a melodrama. And not even a good one.

There will always be more money to make, more time to fill, more goals and expectations to meet. I’m more concerned with how it feels to go home at the end of the day—with making sure I have a home, and a life, that I’m happy to return to. I don’t have a dream job; I have a dream life, and I’m living it. I am working on living it every single day.