Giving Up So Easily
Some two and a half weeks into my new job, I feel like I’ve aged a decade.
I’ve had one day away from the office in the past 22 days, and it’s starting to really drain me. I’ve had lunch less than five times since I started because there’s just not enough time. I don’t even get to see the sun anymore, except through the tiny ventilation window in the toilet cubicle. Sometimes, I feel like doing a Mas Selamat and running off to Malaysia. Except it’s unlikely I could squeeze my mammoth behind through that tiny crevice.
As I brought the media around during the big event last Sunday, I suddenly felt sick. I was a fish out of water, on the wrong side of the fence between public relations and journalism, and I knew it.
“Why do you give up so easily?”
The short answer is: I’m not, and I’m a little disappointed you think that.
I’m not giving up – I’m chasing my passion, my dream. It’s what I’m best at, so why should I be content to continue wrestling with a role I have a talent for, but feel out of sorts in?
It’s not the long hours or the hard work. I worked from 8.30am to 11.00pm – when the security guards came around to chase us out of the media centre – when I was Barcelona. I endured difficult conditions in Karachi, where even a simple trip to the loo was a quarter-mile hike to find a hole in the ground already overflowing with bodily crap. And yet, I was almost always first to arrive in the morning for the editor’s briefing, and one of the last to leave the site. That’s probably only because I write so damn ‘meticulously’ (read: painfully slow), but that’s a different story altogether. The point is: I woke up early every morning – even without morning calls from the dear girlfriend – and was excited to be leaving for work. Isn’t that how a proper job should feel?
So, no, I’m not “giving up”. That connotes laziness and distaste for hardship. And that’s not what this is about. It’s about me pining to do something I love.
It’s what I’m meant to do. Now I just need to find a way to do it without starving.
Why didn’t Jesus choose a different career path? Surely a man who can turn water into wine could very well have been more than just a poor carpenter. Why do seemingly sane men choose to become priests, swearing by sexual abstinence and poverty? And why do some, after swearing this sacred oath, then break it?
Well, you know what you were called to do. But sometimes, it’s just too difficult to heed the voices and stay on the path in this world driven by capitalism and consumerism.
