A nightmare

audio transcript – I will begin transcribing what I write

This post will be partly a transcription of a nightmare I had the other day. I awoke from this nightmare feeling disoriented and terrified. In it, I was placed in an alternate reality where I was unable to find a job for a long while it seemed. I am not a part of any dream interpretation societies, and so I must resort to a literal understanding of what I experienced in the dream.

Throughout my life, I had several periods where I felt lost, when I looked around me and didn’t see a clear path forward. I really don’t credit myself much for overcoming those moments, but somehow I did. In the later years of my undergrad, there was a push within the department for engineers to assume leadership roles. Management related courses displaced ones on finite element and continuum mechanics. Concurrently, I saw many within my own cohort to go into other fields that promised more wealth and influence, many of them now sporting titles as esoteric as they are vapid. I am a judgmental and biased individual. Gullible as I was, I was easily convinced that one can practice being a leader with nothing. I lost sight of what I actually enjoyed, which was engineering.

I was sleeping on a mattress on the bare floor at the time. I tried volunteering without much success, mostly because I was unwilling to do the necessary leg work. I went to work at Starbucks as a barista. The coffee shop was inside of a book store on the corner of Bay st. and Bloor st. in Toronto. It was a period of personal satisfaction, to know that I was at least able to caffeinate hundreds of people from all walks of life in preparation for their days ahead. I was good at this job, not that it required a terribly narrow set of skills. One day, I simply stopped showing up, unable to continue. I ignored their calls of concern for months. That was more than 10 years ago. I don’t know if that bookshop still exists, I don’t know if that Starbucks still serves coffee. But maybe I will visit one day.

Experiencing hardships in life does fortify a person against future hardships, yet at the same time, the scars that were made, are real and ever present. I was reminded of Obama’s comment on David Cameron in his biography as someone who possessed “the easy confidence of someone who’d never been pressed too hard by life”. How differently would I feel if I were sailing smoothly the whole way through. I will never know, but one thing I do know, is that while I am grateful for having experienced what I experienced, but I do not wish to repeat it.