Mom, Dad, I Have Some News...

I haven’t really known how to tell my parents that I’m leaving my job but at least now I can do it face to face. There has been a most unfortunate death in the family this week and I am now at home with them thanks to the never-to-be-found-elsewhere flexibility of my job.

I knew they would not be too surprised because I’ve been talking about this for over a year, but the part of me that will always seek my parent’s approval was nervous about how it would go. I had no idea if they would say I’m crazy, offer advice or suggestions of what I should do instead or if they would say, “It’s about damn time!”

Both of them have been in this same situation, my mother most recently, so I suspected they would understand and wish me well with this. They have always supported me and just want to go to sleep at night knowing their son is well fed and alright. In fact, I remember what my father said to me when I told him I wanted to follow a career in acting even though I was one semester away from finishing my engineering degree. It went a little something like this:

“I want to be an actor.”
(5 to 10 second pause)
“You’re going to finish your degree first, right?”
“Oh, absolutely. I’ve put in too much work to just drop that now.”
“Good. Go for it. We’ll support you in whatever you want to do. As long as it’s not illegal.”

That’s basically the gist of it. That and, “make sure you have health insurance.”

And that’s how it went. My mother took a deep breath of anxiety and cringed a little. My father didn’t react much at all, but they understand what it’s like to wake up to another day of feeling like life is being flat-out wasted. They are unsure how I will pay my bills and sustain myself, and frankly, so am I. But that’s all part of the adventure.

Ultimately, I have to carve my own path. The difficult thing for me is that throughout much of my childhood, adolescence and young adulthood, I have been compared to my father. I have been told I look like him, sound like him, act like him and eat like him. (That last one is especially comforting because for a while there I thought I was just a glutton. Supposedly my metabolism will slow down right about now.) So I have always gauged my life by my dad’s opinion of it. That’s not an entirely bad thing but it definitely feeds the gremlin of fear that dwells deep inside. And now it’s time to break from that, and expose myself to the fear of writing my own script for life.