What Have I Done?

I worked the same job for sixteen years. The job was what I did while I was waiting for an opportunity to do what I really wanted to do. The story I told myself about the job was this: I must do this job because I need money and this is the best paying job I can stomach while I wait to do what I really love.

As the years went by and I was still doing the job, I found myself in the same cyclical quandary. I needed the job, I did not like the job, but I did not want to be miserable while I was there. So I made the best of it. And yet, year after year, I identified myself more and more with the job. And then, in fits of depression, I would hate the job, spit at the job, because it was not what I wanted to do. But the bills were due, and I was afraid, and I would go back to the job.

I was trapped, I told myself. What I really wanted wasn't happening and so I was trapped. I told myself I was living a nightmare. I actually said to myself, "This is my nightmare." Stuck in a life I would never have chosen. If that is not a nightmare, what is?

And then one day, I decided to leave. I knew it was not going to be easy, so I gave myself several months. Each day I went into work knowing I was leaving, something changed about it. Perhaps the biggest change of all was this: I realized I had MADE the job. I had created it. Everything about it, everything that kept me there, was my own doing. I had made it so the job meant something to me when in fact it did not. I had made it so I needed the job, even though I did not. I had built the cell, forged the key, locked the door, and then spent year after year rattling the cell bars, crying how I wasn't free. I felt like the man in a movie who comes home one day to find his wife and children killed and then spends the entirety of film searching for justice and answers only to learn, at the grim conclusion, that he had in fact murdered them himself in his sleep.

So it is for all our nightmares, I believe. In our sleeping nightmares, our own imagination conjures our greatest fears for us to live through. In our waking nightmares, we build the dream daily from the belief that we are not free.

This is a little daunting at first, at least for me. I thought, Jesus, if I can create THIS, my worst nightmare, just because I wasn't paying attention, what else could I do? Why, anything, of course. If you want the gift of freedom, you must take it in its entirety.