“Where Do You Want To Be In 5 Years?”
"I see myself in a managerial role, hopefully leading a team and taking on more responsibility for managing the Chemicals portfolio," I say to the interviewer for the role of a Chemicals Analyst.
The interviewer nods, as he is supposed to, to an answer that he was expecting to hear. No surprises there.
2 weeks later, I get the job and go on the path of doing what I am told.
2 years later, I'm in an office with my manager for our monthly check-in. These meetings go the same every time. We go over my performance for the past month, he makes some remarks about the good and the bad, and we move on from there. This time, the meeting goes differently. Resignation letter in hand, this is not where I'm supposed to be.
2 years ago, I was fresh out of University, desperate for any job, because "employed" was what I was supposed to be. "Employed" gets you nods of approval instead of uncomfortable, confused silences that follow when there is clear way to label you. The lack of identity is confusing for you, sure, but it's so much worse for anyone trying to make sense of how they would judge you, and how they should treat you.
Anything is better than nothing, you think, as you spill out rehearsed answers to the Top 5 Questions Interviewers Will Surely Ask You.
This might work for a while, but you can't live a good life avoiding your own truth. Eventually, the constraints binding you into the role you've conformed to will give way to the person you were meant to be. It will happen eventually, so don't wait your whole life to figure it out.
Almost Nothing
I regret understanding my parents.
Growing up, it's easy to only understand your guardians by the emotions you feel from them. From my grandmother, it's warmth and nagging, from my dad it's business-like casual conversations disguising interrogations, and from my mother it's sacrificing more of herself than I can ever fathom and then holding it against me as if I knew, as if I could help it, as if it was a deliberate choice I made. By the time I'd explored more of the internet than I was probably supposed to, I'd numbed myself to what I felt was unfair treatment. The slew of good parenting I'd seen, coupled with sensational stories of #parentgoals, and the easy-to-consume mental wellness and psychology resources I'd just gobbled up to pass the miserable time made me indifferent to the people I'd lived with all my life. I'd hear them yelling and nagging, complaining, giving underhanded comments and such, and I would hear it, but I no longer assigned value to it more than if a stranger or a friend or teacher had said it to me. I didn't treat them as more important than other people in my life anymore.
I still listen to them, of course, the way a student might take the advice of a counselor or a therapist, but the choices are ultimately mine. I no longer get emotionally invested in the exciting or dreaful things that happen in my childhood home. I'd learned to lie and hide much of my truest self from my parents and my family, and I've adopted a 'need to know' basis for telling them things. I only initiate conversations when I need something or if it's small talk that I know won't get bigger. I treat them like adults in a workplace, like coworkers who are hard to please.
Sadly, it's because I see them as people. Ever since middle school me decided being mature for my age was a good personality trait, I'd understood my family as individual people with their own unresolved trauma and psychological conplexes that have nothing to do with me. Would therapy have helped them? who knows. All I know is that ever since looking at my parents as kids who used to have friends like me, wants to have fun like me, spend money like me, waste time like me, dream bigger and settle for smaller like me, it makes me a little bit sad.. It makes me pretty sad. Almost miserable.
By understanding people too much I was able to look past and forgive what I thought was harsh and too tough about my parents, but at the same time I had also done the same thing to the good memories and the things I'd enjoyed. While I looked at the tough love as their efforts to set me up for long-term success and building a resume of skills that would help me outside the home, I also looked at our bonding activities as their way of playing with toys they weren't able to have. I saw our little letters and notes exchanges as my mother's way of keeping alive the remnants of what was once an avid reader, I saw my family's joy at my piano recitals as their validation that their way of raising me was worth it, and I saw their celebration of my accomplishments as their way of indulging in foods and gatherings they previously couldn't have had. I saw the restaurants they brought me to as their would-be date places if they could relive high school. The way they choose to dress me and cut my hair was a replication of my mother's childhood cartoons she was allowed to watch sparingly. The exotic fruits my dad would occassionally puchase and cut up were his way of reminding himself that he hadn't lost touch of what it meant to be poor and appreciate simple things like sweeter fruit.
Not that I have any therapy skills or do much more than speculate when I psychoanalyze my family members the way I size up my classmates, coworkers, and friends sometimes, but that's simply what happened when I decided to look for the reasons my parents' love was not warm to me. I regret understanding them because it solidified a distance that began to exist between us; Today, I learn to hide my academics, my social life, and my interests from them. I haven't apologized to told them I love them in six or seven years, and I have a habit of lying to them. These are ways I would treat everyone else, and for parents that I know worked their hardest to do what's best for me, I regret being like this in front of them now.
My mother no longer berates me. She feels it's a waste of time. My dad only chimes in on the rare occassions my mother will confront me about something. My grandma still, to this day, bless her soul, nags me left and right and treats me all the same. I wish it were easier to fix this weird relationship I've created with them, but when I see the way they're taken what they've learned from parenting me and improved while raising my younger siblings, I think I might hold out for another ten years. I see them raising my siblings in the ways I wish did me, and part of me wants to see them grow up before they see their big sister fixing her mistakes with mom and dad. So if there's anything I regret, it's treating my parents and my family like the people they are.