This is it

I am no longer a productive member of society.  I’ve always been on the fringes as it was.   Friday was the last day of only the third permanent job I’ve held in 17 years.  A good friend once described me as a drag on the economy, educated (though not overly)  and underemployed.
I’ve lived mainly as a temp most of that time, refusing to take full time positions even when offered out of a stubborn idea of maintaining a sense of freedom.I still went to work every day just like everyone else, but I could leave anytime I wished.   I wasn’t stuck to two weeks of vacation per year.  And for awhile,  it worked.   For several years running,  I never worked more than nine months out of the year.  I lived cheaply,  I traveled,  I moved cities, traveled and moved cities again.  It was the late 90s and it seemed then that if you had a degree and wanted to work,  you could find work.  Companies were happy to have a responsible college educated person come in for short term stuff.  My main job skill may have been that they knew I’d show up every day.  I really thought I could go on doing this indefinitely.  I didn’t think about being a 39-year-old temp someday. Something would work out because it would.   I’d be published and make money that way.  I’d write about travel.   Then the economy changed and I picked the wrong city at the wrong time, and ran through my savings.   I have no special skills so when the market flooded with office drones my value dropped.   I retreated to Chicago,  I met S.  One day my roommate asked me why I temp’d and I gave him my standard answer about it offering freedom to travel, and he asked me then why didn’t I ever seem to travel? I didn’t have an answer. I probably barely used even the two weeks vacation a full-time job would have offered.
S and I moved to San Francisco and I temp’d my way through. I was content. I was where I wanted to live.  I took more time off, trips with S and backpacking in the Sierra Nevada.  I still had no plan for the future,  but at least I was doing something.
But temps don’t get promotions, so to paraphrase a movie, I watched as I kept getting older and my coworkers stayed the same age.
I started to put together a plan,  and was making some progress when S’s company went bankrupt,  and we ended up in Manhattan.
I temp’d at a place that eventually offered me a full-time position, and this time I took it.  I saw the sense in paid vacation and benefits, at least for the time being, until we moved back to San Francisco.  The pay was ok,  I liked my coworkers,  and I could walk there. I could take unpaid vacation and longer trips.  Four and a half years I went in Monday to Friday.  It was unchallenging and it was nice going to the same place, knowing what I was doing, instead of learning a new job and new people every week or even few days. Sometimes I felt uneasy. I used to be comfortable with change; moving around, getting myself from place to place, financial uncertainty.  I worried I was losing or had already lost the ability to adapt on the fly.
I hadn’t done a big trip for a decade, so that kind of travel had long ceased to be my reality and was only an idea of what I imagined I wanted my life to be, what it had been. I was like a high school sports star forever replaying the big game in my head.
I got uncomfortable with being comfortable. That’s the best reason I can come up with for why I’m doing this. I don’t think it’s about finding myself or seeing things even.  It’s about making myself uncomfortable.  I wonder if I’m still a competent person or has unchallenging work and an easeful life left me incompetent, unadaptable. I wonder if I can still do things. I’m afraid to do this and I’m afraid not to.  I’m terrified.
I get that it’s a privilege that not everyone can have,  this choosing to make oneself uncomfortable. I’m lucky.
I’m not leaving myself an out, rapidly ripping myself out of my comfort, getting in a tube that is  dropping me thousands of miles away in a strange place,  then no choice but to make my way back watching those same  thousands of miles pass slowly,  gradually until I’m home again. Travel as an act, a commitment,  something to be done. An adaption.
Jack Kerouac wrote near the beginning of Big Sur “One fast move or I’m gone.”
So I’m moving.