I Am Not a Burden, And Neither Are You

A man whose wedding I stood for called me a burden today.

More specifically, he called me a lazy mooch who is the financial ruination of my wife and my family.

By way of explanation for this abhorrent attempt at ‘tough love’, you must be informed that I recently lost my job.  He is essentially correct, too: my wife and I have had to make many, many hasty alterations to the fabric of our lives because of my sudden lack of long-term employment.  In the end, my wife has, and continues to, shoulder the lion’s share of our monetary burden.

You know the person who wasn’t, and hasn’t been, calling me a burden through all of this?

My wife.  The only person on this planet who has the right and justification to stand in judgement over me not only doesn’t believe I’m a ‘financial catastrophe’, she is proud of how hard I’ve stepped up to the plate these last few weeks.

I was unemployed for a whopping two weeks.  A single fortnight, whereupon no dollars were earned. My current job may have some holes in it, but it is a job.  It will provide me time and pay to look for a better, more sustainable solution while still earning money and providing positive references.

You know what it isn’t?  Me sitting on my butt, whining about how lamentable my life has become while I earn nothing and still need a job anyway.

My wife has forbidden me, wholesale, from calling myself a burden.

She has a point, bless her soul.  I have lost 55 pounds this year.  Despite all the chaos that has become my existence, I still write.  Furthermore, while I write and look for work, I keep our house clean.  I mop, I do laundry, I do dishes, I vacuum.

My wife deserves to come home to a clean house while I try to find a way to make ends meet.

So, when my my friend of a decade decided that it was time for him to ‘say something’ or whatever he thought he was accomplishing by kicking me while I’m down, I wanted to scream.  I wanted to shove all the applications I fill out on a daily basis into the phone until they burst through in a flurry of cartoonish proportions.

I decided that I wasn’t quite ready to throw yet another relationship out the window, so I did what I usually do when I become upset:  I went to the gym.

My troubles became trod underfoot as I pounded one angry thought after another into the treadmill.  When the anger and hurt cleared, I came to realize that this was a chance to share my pain and my frustration.  I cannot possibly be the only one to have endured dire straits, nor am I unique in having been gifted a brick to the face ‘for my own good’.

He felt so compelled to say something so vile because I fail to conform to normal societal structures of value.  I cannot possibly be alone in having been branded as worthless.

We are our jobs.  Our worth as a person is intrinsically linked to the size of our paycheck.  It’s gross and wrong and antithetical to everything that actually matters about being a decent human being, but that’s the reality of the situation.

Heck, I can only imagine the number of comments I’ll get which boil down to ‘git gud’ or references to the coffee-is-for-closers scene from Glengarry GlenRoss.

Workout finished, I came home and began writing.  That’s what author’s do, apparently;  We paint our pain across the page and hope that by doing so it will somehow make sense.  For me, forcing my emotions into written form robs them of most of their power over me.  The only damage they ever inflict is limited to whatever they can do on the way out.

The wisdom gleaned from the lines of my discomfort and misery is this:

You. Are. Not. A. Burden.

Ever.

Everyone goes through rough patches.  For some, it’s more frequent than others.  While there are things you can and should be doing to make the best of your situation, so long as you have done those and stay committed to a solution, then you’ve done everything everyone has a right to ask of you.

Don’t ever let anyone tell you that you or your contributions have no intrinsic value.  You are more than your paycheck.  You are more than your job.  And you are most definitely more than the sum of your failures.

Don’t ever let anyone tell you otherwise.  Not even you.

Worthfully,

The Unsheathed Quill