Shame is a prevalent part of my life each day, I wake up with shame and I go to sleep with shame, as one of the main themes in my life for years now which is one of the reasons I wrote Runaway, Shame, my memoir out December 1st, yes that is my shameless plug, pun intended.
A Life of Shame
I experience different waves of Shame, one that is with me each and every day is Financial shame, but the other is career. Although happy to be working and working for a good company, what is there to complain about right, most would be so fortunate. My Gripe is not specifically with the job itself, but really my overall shame of where I am in this time in life.
I can not help and never could help having comparison shame as I have attempted to move along to create a career over twenty years now, but feel incredible shame when I look at those who are younger , those who I consider far more successful in life. I get there are those who are very young and have massive success.
But I have realized that I am well past a point in my life that I SHOULD have succeeded, specifically around mid thirties which is the point in ones career one could bear the fruits of working for so many years if one starting working at early twenties that would give a person almost fifteen years of working and growing, but not myself. I also tend to look at the people around me, my peers, especially those around my age or even older content or so it appears they are content with where they are in their life plan, that is not me.
The Compounding Effect
These feelings are often compounded by the fact that I am father and husband and what do I have for my family, my wife and daughter to be proud of me, as I am no one important in this life, I am just a worker bee. Thinking of worker bees they are still important to the overall scope of making honey, without them there would be no sweet, sweet honey, and yes there is the queen bee, like the equivalent of a manager who ultimately directs the other bees as they work tirelessly.
I believed in the lie growing up, go to school, get degree or degrees and the world is your oyster and the gates of success and opportunity will open, just you watch and see. Wrong, those doors did not open despite my best efforts and intentions of working for good companies and in essence I have worked in corporate America most of my career and I was always thought of and seen as a worker bee, often ignored, forgotten why others around me got promoted, thought of more highly. I don’t know if much of society feels this way or are just content to be working, making money, making a living or if they are always looking for more.
I don’t understand why, what I did to deserve such a fate despite a life of self-improvement. I guess different things trigger these thoughts, but its most tied to my over observant nature of looking at others. I am thinking of an old co-worker I worked with around twenty years ago when I was working for DeVry University as a financial aid advisor, remembering the excitement I felt to work in a position of great pride, a position I had yearned for, getting the chance to work with my old boss Albert Prado, still a good friend to this day.
One of the individuals I got the opportunity to work with was a co-worker named Nancy Garcia, who I believe at the time was either a little younger or the same age of myself who was also a financial aid adviser, along with another colleague Jennifer Call and Dominique Greene. Both women I felt a good connection with who felt we worked well with. Only 25 at the time, full of life and vigor as far as I can remember ready to make a difference. My time at DeVry was short lived living in 2006, which I felt was one of my biggest errors in life.
During this time in my life, I lost someone important to me and our family, I dearly departed Aunt Liz, who died at the age of 46 years old. This affected me and triggered my depression and during this time I acted out and couldn’t handle, quitting my job at DeVry, even though the job was a job I could do in my sleep along with me getting free tuition for my graduate studies at Keller graduate school.
Nancy and I were friends, we would often hang out after work, go to lunch and dinner, often going to California Pizza Kitchen. Nancy a single mother at the time I met her had/has a completely different life then I did at that point in my life. Over the years we kept in the contact after I left DeVry still went to dinner, until around around 2007 when I had my suicide attempt and then in 2008 met my future bride Delia. In those short years we spent time together as friends.
When I met my future wife, I strangely didn’t feel to tell Nancy about my relationship and then the eventual marriage, where she wasn’t invited. This certainty fractured our friendship never the same and who can I blame but myself. Over the years she left DeVry spending numerous years there leaving in 2012 and working for UCLA in financial aid and compliance, where she has worked her way up, even today getting to a senior assistant director level. One could say I should be happy for them, and maybe I am and may I am not, as it forces me to self-reflect on my own life. It seems since 2008 I have only struggled to succeed in my career, thinking that I am making good career choices, only to realize that they were not paths to advancement they were just jobs, but know they could have been more, but most employers didn’t see me valuable enough to promote me.
I have never been a real visual person in this life, which is what often leads me to have this belief that If I was no longer here, I would just be forgotten, story of my life. I get the world is big, huge and massive but at the same time its small, because we all make these small ripples in this life within our own universe and we make our differences in our own small world.
Maybe I need to do a better job of limiting my observant nature, as I create this narratives in my life for those I don’t know and know who I just feel they have better careers and even better lives then myself. I will continue to trigger myself until I get to a point in my life and career where I truly feel I am and have made a difference, until then and my last breath will unfortunately feel inferior to those around me, without value.
Ultimately I do understand that we all different paths in life, there are those who choose degrees and professions to lead to more opportunity, more money, better career growth and the person made a good choice and choices, leading me to believe I had made poor choices despite my efforts to better my life, but in the end I have failed myself, but my wife and daughter since I am their provider.
I ask how I got to this point, why can’t I just feel content to where I am in this life. I get that as humans we may not all feel 100 percent content with our lives and career, that’s life. This has certainly affected my ability to smell the roses and appreciate my life and career, but that is hard at this point, living a life with no real peace, feeling the weight of the world on my shoulders.
There is one other person more directly related to my life, my sister Jennifer whom I love and who am I proud of, but find her to the most successful sibling as a AVP and she just earned her bachelor’s degree, a great achievement. She has always told me she is proud because I have a bachelor’s degree and a masters but I truly found those degrees to be worthless to me, as they did not pay off in the way I thought and was told they would, another lie unfortunately that I continue to pay for even today in the form of student loans.
From the outside from any stranger one could say I have no reason to feel shame, I should be proud of where I am and how far I have come, but sadly I don’t see things that way but unsure what it would take to make me feel content, but at the end of the end I know this is a ME problem and that many and even most may not feel this deep seated discontentment. Yes I delve into the past a little too much at times and I need to let go and move on, which is difficult for me to think about the choices I have made that could have had a different life result if I had choose differently.
I guess that’s Life, or at least my Life.
Joe Meyers Adventures 