As I draw ever closer to leaving work, I’ve noticed a shift of power in my life.
I’m 6 more working days away from leaving and in the past couple of weeks I’ve felt the chains that were bounding me loosen more and more each day. It’s a very liberating feeling.
The people who have been holding these chains tightly around me no longer have that control and power over me and they know it. They don’t like it either because I’m now free to be who I am without worrying about consequences like getting a disciplinary or suspension, and other such bollocks.
The scene I keep playing in my head is of an animal that’s just been let out into the wild from a zoo. That very moment when the cage door opens and the animal looks timidly at the big, wide and free world in front of it. It hesitates at first, but then plucks up the courage to sprint out and be the animal it wants to be. But first, it takes a shit in the cage and calls its captor a cunt.
Now, I didn’t call my manager a cunt and I didn’t have a shit on my desk. For a start, my manager isn’t around and there’s a reason for that which I’ll go into in another post. Secondly, I still have 6 more days to work at my desk so I don’t really want to poo on it.
As each day does pass though, I get a bit more confident and I start to give less shits about what I say and to whom. I’m not going around mouthing off to everyone, but I’m not biting my tongue where I have done in the past. I’m telling it how it is to people. If someone lies to me, I call them out on it. If someone is acting like a shithouse, I call them out on it. The reactions I get are actually quite interesting.
I don’t have to bite my tongue anymore to keep things amicable with people. I don’t have to bite my tongue when someone says something to me at work because there aren’t any repercussions any more. I don’t have to keep these people happy anymore in order for my situation to be plain sailing.
What I’ve noticed is that when I talk this way to people, calling out their shit and not taking their excuses for an answer, is that they retreat. They immediately start apologising and doing what I’ve said to them. They put me in a position of power over them and treat me with more respect.
Part of me thinks “why the fuck haven’t I been doing this all along?” but there are certain restraints you’ll have when you’re working in an office or splitting living costs with someone. I need to keep these people happy so that one, I get paid, and two, I can live in a nice apartment without putting myself in a situation or environment I don’t want to be in. For example, living in a shithole or living with people I don’t know…in a shithole.
This power shift has only come about because I’ve taken the necessary steps in my life to rely on one person: myself.
What determines my income will now be my work ethic. If I slack, I don’t get paid. If I work my ass off, I get paid and continue to live a life on my own rules. Working for myself has always been a goal of mine because I don’t respond well to authority. I abhor being told what to do and I’ve found out more than ever this year that I can’t rely on anyone but myself.
Of course, I have a select few very good friends that I trust, but I know that I’m the only one responsible for achieving what I want to achieve. If I slack, I don’t get what I want. If other people slack, but I work hard, I get what I want. If I rely on other people and they slack, neither of us get what we want.
That’s not a sleight on anyone, it’s just the way things are in life.
I was talking to YouSoWould recently over a refreshing diet Coke about how my confidence is growing day by day and how I feel more in control of my life. Sure, I still have a couple of weeks to go, but the world seems to have really opened up to me. I dictate what I want and when I want it. It’s not going to be 100% my way until I finish work because I still have time constraints and am bound by a contract.
YSW and I are in a similar position, and my thoughts and feelings on the matter have been echoed by him. Once you have control over your situation and life, when you don’t have to answer to anybody, you become very empowered. It’s a feeling I’ve thought about having for some time, but once it finally came, I couldn’t believe the effects it was having on me.
I would urge anyone to take their life into their own hands. Why be bound by work when you can pick a location in the world and go out and live there on your own terms? Of course, you need to put the grind in first as I have, but the rewards are worth it.
Who really wants to be waking up to an alarm clock on a cold, dark and rainy morning every weekday for the rest of their lives? Who really wants to drag themselves out of bed and go to a job that sucks the very soul out of them? That’s not living.
“I always wonder why birds choose to stay in the same place when they could fly anywhere on the Earth, then I ask myself the same question” – Harun Yahya
In just over 1 month’s time, I’ll be waking up on a Monday morning in the sunshine, a 15 minute walk through a beautiful, foreign city away from the beach. I can get up when I want; I can work when I want; I can do what I want. Why wouldn’t you try to emulate me?
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