Life is like a sharp stick…

One day, you fall off a branch and someone finds you. And they decide you are one of many things, possibly many different useful things at once. Poetically, you only need to be what you are. And that’s life—you are only what you are, aren’t you?

I think I’ve based everything I’ve ever been good at to learning how to be useful. It’s nice to be needed, right? When someone can look at you with value when you are really nothing special at all.

And my desk job is everything because it’s safe. I’ve learned to be a good assistant by learning how to hone my writing, my communication, my team building skills; I’ve googled how to do everything from technical support to networking for solutions to vague problems that my boss starts with “I think…”

He doesn’t really know what he wants, and that’s my job—a mind reader. And I learned to be useful at knowing before they know, acting before they do so they don’t have to. I’m a good assistant, and I’m rewarded with money or a cushy desk job that tires me out beyond belief.

I’m thanked with more paperwork and more problems and more complaints, little reassurance and more pressure, more project, and more expectations. I’m so good at being perfect, as best as I can—so good, I don’t know how to be anything but what they want from me.

But when I go home, my house is a mess. Dishes are piled in the sink. Numbers rack up in my missed calls list or email app. Everything that has to do with me is the only thing I procrastinate on. Why am I so good at taking care of other people, and I can’t even wake up happily in the morning?

I would love to be useful to me too, you know?

So I go to sleep every night, like a small stick in the forest waiting to be picked up again. Maybe sharpened, maybe dried to be firewood, maybe tied to other sticks to become a shelter, or a walking stick. Maybe tomorrow, I’ll be something else entirely. God, I hope so. I hope to wake up and be someone else entirely.