i do not dream of labor
Apparently at some point in pre-school we were given a standard "what do you want to be when you grow up?" prompt, and my response was something to the end of "I dunno, something to do with kitchens?" This was shared with me, I think, because it's the sort of odd thing children say, but to me, that response reads as someone who found the premise of the question annoying. As if to say, "Motherfucker, I'm four. I don't even know what a job is. Why are you asking me this?" And I was right to reject the premise of the question. No one should "want" a job.
Joey Comeau used to write something called "Overqualified," a series of cover letters that are, perhaps, a little too honest. They talk about ugly breakups and weird obsessions and impossible dreams. These are a commentary on how impossible it is to actually write a cover letter which conveys anything remotely resembling your true self, and though the archives are not available you can still get the book at the book dispensary of your choice and you absolutely should. They're all lovely. One of them helped clarify a perspective I'm not sure I realized I had before.
In it, he applies to work at a bank and tells them he has no interest in a career, that he's only doing this to make his mom happy, that the best day of his life was the day he realized that he could work a shitty part-time job and then just do whatever he wanted in the rest of his time. You don't have to be your job; you can just live your life, and draw a paycheck, and make ends meet. The number does not always have to go up.
I almost died about three months into working as a courier. Some days, when the world seems strange enough, when things don't feel quite right, I'm not convinced that I did survive. It doesn't make sense getting up and walking away from a collision like that, just one old fixed conversion Bridgestone going as fast as it could but not fast enough to escape the Lexus who decided that she did not want me to be occupying that space.
I remember the panic, getting up, feeling that my teeth were broken, wondering if I could find them on the road--I remembered reading that if you lost a tooth you should try to save it, and I didn't know yet that they were just broken. And then, of course, I moved my bike out of the road. It was beyond fucked, but . . . well, you never know. You never know.
Five people stopped because they thought they had just watched someone die, and I chatted and joked with them, because it takes time for the realization to sink in that you almost died so that someone you will never meet and who will never care about you can make money off of your labor.
"So, what do you do for a living?"
The same as anyone else: I exchange precious hours of my life in exchange for tokens that can, in turn, be exchanged for necessities like food and shelter. We have all decided that this system makes sense, for some reason.
When I tried to find a new job, after I almost died, one of the places that interviewed me asked the question "what are you running from?" and I was so staggered at the stupidity of this question I didn't even try to answer it at first. "What does that mean?"
"Well," she explained, "you're either running from something, or you're running toward something." From her tone it was clear that this was a trick question that I had already failed by not having an answer for, but she was willing to humor the possibility that I had a good answer.
"I almost died," I said. "I want a job where that is less likely to happen." That was the last interview I attempted; it was easier to just get back on the bike and keep riding.
I sometimes wonder if there was ever a world where I didn't reject the very notion of wanting to be something when I grew up, of dreaming of a prestigious career path. It always seems so nonsensical: why would I want this? Why would I want to spend even more of my time working, and to take that work home with me and let it subsume my very identity? Why would I want to live a life where I would proudly answer "so what do you do?" with my job and not with "I write, I fence, I dream, I ride bikes, I play games, I read"? What possible version of me exists where I am fine with that, where I let the system guide me where it will?
The question is unanswerable, of course, but in this world, in this version of me, they will never own my dreams. However much it costs me to give them my labor, day in and day out, there are worlds and voices within me that capitalism cannot strangle. And I am glad to live in this world, in this self, where that is something that I am able to fight for.
This post was originally an entry for Noel B's Microblogvember prompts on Cohost. Cohost is gone now, but I am collecting some of my best writing from there on here.