The Dark and the Light

I’ve always been enthralled by the Light and the Dark of life. I like the emotional moments, the moments that define us, expose us, make us think and truly feel. My life has always been like that. Days where I’m happy, content and days where everything is black and dark. I think depression is part of that, but part of it is just this human experience. It makes me think about a line from a poem I wrote for my novel… I am in love with all this life. Because even though there are the dark days, sometimes those are the days that make the light seem even brighter.

I’ve always thought that life is like waves, with peaks and valleys. It doesn’t always seem to matter what is happening in your life at the moment, as far as where you are on the wave. Good things can abound but there can still be that one thing that is bringing you down into a valley of darkness. You can be loved, have an amazing home, be pursuing your dreams and yet there are still those days when you feel like everything is dark and life is too hard to live.

Just recently I felt this way, in one of the dark valleys of life. I have a pretty amazing life, if I’m completely honest and am forced to look at the good things, but for some reason I am always looking at the negative and I let the dark things overwhelm everything else. My dark place a few weeks ago was my day job. Don’t get me wrong, I like where I work and I like the people I work with, but sometimes the work is just so tedious and it doesn’t take advantage of my full range of talents. And it’s not what I really want to be doing. But I’m sure like so many of you out there, your job is not your life, it is not what defines you, it is a means of simply making enough money to stay afloat, especially in hard economic times like these where competition for jobs is stiff. But the hard part is that your job is a huge aspect of your life as far as the amount of time spent there. For most of us, it’s 8 hours per day for 5 days a week and that adds up to a lot of time spent in the office. Time that you wish you had for other things and yet is necessary to continue to live, eat, play and maintain your life.

Every now and then this frustration between my happiness and the need to survive really gets me down.  I know that it’s impossible for everyone to have a job they love, but for me I feel like I am trapped. Once you have been down a certain career path it’s pretty hard to change lanes and say, I want to do this now even though I only have limited experience at least official experience on paper. So…there I was a few weeks ago, crying my eyes out over how frustrated I am, about how I don’t feel challenged in my job and how I wish I was doing something creative. And I wish I could make a change, now. I am so impatient! But change of course takes time and I haven’t even had this job for a year yet. It’s a pretty bad feeling to think that you might have made a mistake when accepting a job, but things like that do happen and yes, then you are trapped.

I wish I could end this post on a happy note, but there really isn’t a happy note. I guess the happy note is that I can work on changing this by gaining experience in my personal life, which I have been doing slowly over time. But will it be enough to get me my dream job? My creative, fulfilled job? I don’t know. In this economy, it’s pretty hard to say.  Then again, there is always the light of life, the things you do that truly make you happy.  My husband tells me, live for those moments.  And that is excellent advice.  But I’m always impatient to experience those moments all the time.  I’m a glutton for punishment!

Have you ever felt like you were trapped in a job? What did you do to escape? Or if you couldn’t, what did you do to cope?