I Feel Trapped

After my telephone interview today, I'm feeling trapped. Now before I get into this, I do realize that I may be overreacting and that next week I may feel foolish about writing this, but I gotta be me.

It's not that I didn't do well. In fact, I think that I did very well, certainly well enough to be called in for a face to face interview. Fact is, after finding out more about the job, my suspicions are confirmed. It's a sales job going back into an industry that I don't care for and that I gratefully escaped when Hurricane Katrina gave me the opportunity. The prospect of being forced to take it by my financial circumstance and sheer pragmatism (I mean it's not like I'm getting offers or even calls from anywhere else) fills me with impotence and frustration. My hands feel tied, and the irony of my situation does not escape me. After determining to revamp my resume, my angle, and my career direction in an effort to avoid being unfulfilled, I stumble onto a job just like the ones I couldn't get last fall when I was actually trying!! What does it all mean? What am I supposed to do?

The feeling of being herded in down a chute, like a doomed heifer at a meat packing plant, is achingly familiar. A feeling of doom is rising within me like the tide, and I didn't realize that I was cycling back around. You see, each time I've started over it's been like this. Forced to take a position that I didn't actively decide to take. It's like this: if I had come to the conclusion that this was my best option, then no regrets, but if I fall into this by default, then all my struggling has been for naught, because it has been a struggle for control, for power, for the chance to choose my adventure like one of those damn comic books in middle school. I didn't realize then that the ability to choose would be stripped from me at a later point in life, or I would have read those books more. Whatever happens now is a choice that I must stay committed to; to change positions in any less than three years would be career suicide, and to leave the industry a second time would consign me to being labeled "unfocused", and you can't trust an unfocused person in management. "Unfocused" people don't get promoted. So whatever my new direction, it is a weighty decision of some permanence.

As I stated before, however, these are reflections of my thoughts at this point in time. In another week, the present snow globe may have been jostled by the Divine Hand, and I will be looking at a completely different landscape. That is to say that I have concluded (wisely, if I do say so myself) to put this away, to wait and see, to stand and believe. Every step I take is ordered, and each action takes me closer. Selah.

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