Living Off Script

Turning Away From Society and Towards Myself

The Collapse

When I stepped away from my career, it wasn’t by choice. I self-destructed. I didn’t bow out gracefully or plan a strategic exit. I collapsed. I wanted nothing to do with the corporate world. I was done, and I was helpless to do anything else.

Friends and family worry, and they wonder: why don’t you look for another job?

But I didn’t want another job. I don’t want to be told when to show up, what to do, when to do it. I don’t want to spend my days making someone else money, paying for someone else’s lunch.

But that’s not really what it’s about.

It’s the rumination pattern I’m afraid of. The feeling of being used, taken for granted. And not just the feeling, but what it grows into. The fluffy mould that blooms from the belief that I must deserve it. That if I were good enough for better, I’d have it. That logic makes sense. It’s compelling. But I keep wrestling with it, with that, and dumb luck.

Unlearning the Script

You try to construct a life you want to live, but it never arrives, because it’s stitched from someone else’s ideas. Your parents’. Your culture’s. Your country’s.

It’s astonishingly difficult to break that expectation.

Looking back, I realise I’ve been doing it to varying degrees without actually auditing the results. Living most of my adult life in a foreign land. Having a foreign partner. Hobbies I don’t share with anyone else. Interests that live outside the bounds of more common curiosities. Keeping bees, for example. Or hiking alone for days without seeing anyone. Cross-pollinating flowers, baking bread, boiling jam, and feeling not of this era. I’ve just followed my nose, despite the eyebrow raises.

So it shouldn’t be a surprise that I’ve gone over a year without looking for a job. That I’m unmarried, childless, without property. I’m exactly where I wanted to be, or I wouldn’t be here.

So how is it? What’s it like? What do I actually do?

Making Space

It took a long time for the tenants of my career to vacate my mind’s premises. I’d evicted them from my life, but they lingered, intruding rent-free. I suspect it was just the painfully slow processing of autism, of resentment, of psychic debris and emotional processing.

They say the best fuck-you is success. But I wasn’t interested in proving anything. I needed to wallow. I needed to let my melted mind find its shape again.

That meant turning my back on the best intentions and advice, and just existing. Doing what came to me. What felt worthwhile. Or more simply, what got me through the day. Because really, the only goal in life is to survive.

You have to fight the shame of not having anywhere to be when Monday comes.

You have to quash the guilt of doing things that, on the face of it, serve no apparent purpose.

You paint a picture, each brushstroke tainted by the thought that you should be doing something else.

You give yourself a hard time for enjoying yourself, and a hard time for having complete freedom and not soaring.

Living By Weather

But something is shifting. I’ve noticed that my hunger for solutions has abated.

In the thick of depression, I consumed self-help like an addict trying to score.

Now the curiosity can linger. My days are mostly spent in silence, in self-reflection, or rather, in reflection of the self in the bigger scheme of things.

Simple improvements to my environment improve my life. Little fixes and touch-ups, here and there. They make tomorrow slightly better than yesterday. Hopefully, over time, that compounds into contentment.

To soothe the auto-aggression, I had to relax into it. To accept that either I’d gone very wrong, or I was right where I needed to be.

My psyche was forcing me to open my eyes and change something.

Maybe the change wasn’t about the doing but the being.

These days, I live like nature intended. My days revolve around the weather.

Society has signed a contract with concrete, refusing to bend with nature’s ebb and flow. The sun shines all week while you’re in your office, and then it rains at the weekend, when freedom comes.

I no longer have weekends. I have weather reports.

Working in one form or another on a rainy Sunday is immensely satisfying when you can go fishing in the sun on a Monday. The fluidity between chores and choices makes the schedule feel alive. Not a scaffold to live around according to someone else’s enterprise, but a life in motion and adaptation.

Off the Clock

Mankind used to move in cohesion with the seasons. Then, in the blink of an eye, we decided we could amputate nature’s pace from purpose.

Now we march to work, rain or shine.

We ignore hunger until an allotted time.

We appease other people’s agendas and sideline our own.

We let those before us dictate the future of ourselves, passing the baton between generations and ranks, between evolving industries. And somewhere in all that rhythm, we forget that the investment small print notes past success doesn’t predict future results, and vice versa.

I guess you have to learn the rules to appreciate breaking them.