Feeling lonely in the ant colony
Tonight I had on of my self-pity episodes titled "I tried so hard my whole life yet I'm still fucking unemployed and lost at 30". I'm not proud of this one but it's a thought I often have. As I tried to climb out of that hole — again, I wondered what this feeling is exactly. It's like feeling lonely in a room full of people. It's like being dumped in a world with the wrong tools, the wrong map and wondering why you can't find your way out. Another metaphor: there is a type of wasp whose larva develop inside ant colonies, among ant juveniles. When the adult (=the imago) wasp finally emerges from its cocoon, they must leave the nest as fast as possible, faced with the risk of being recognized as an intruder and killed by other ants. This is how I feel. A tiny being who turned out to be a wasp in the middle of an ant building. Let's face reality, these are normal human feelings, nobody knows what the fuck they are doing anyway. So... Yeah. The epilogue of this act is I'm a regular human being with regular human feelings and a slight tendency for anxiety.
Moreover, this feeling has nothing to do with my actual state of employment, or any perceived success. To make this point, I need to remember other times when I had this exact same feeling — being lost in an ant world. Here's an non-exhaustive list of times and places I felt this way:
- working in costume design for national theaters, in gigantic studios with wooden floors and ceiling molding, interacting with posh Parisian comedians
- working as a medical secretary in a dentistry clinic
- during a party where everyone wanted to play board games
- smoking weed in loft studios with semi-professional tattoo artists and upper-class unemployed hipsters
- in my one-room apartment in the city, looking for any blue-collar work that could help me pay my rent where the first factory is 1 hour away
- behind a desk at a local city hall, when no one could pinpoint what my job actually was about
- trying to kill time by walking the dog in the forest near my parents' house
Okay, now that I painted the fragments of life when I felt anxious, here's a list of moments and places where I felt like I belonged:
- cleaning shit for free in a cat shelter
- having canned beer in my friend's kitchen
- in our car's passenger seat when my husband is driving
- sewing the same piece of fabric eight hours a day on a production line
- checking car engines on a production line
- packaging car pieces in an overheated hangar
- helping a local group of comedians building their stage
- watching Youtube videos on my phone in the tiny house I rented for a while
I think this reflection on the pieces of my (chaotic) adult life helped me realize that no matter how hard I try, this is not the absence of (perceived) success that makes me anxious, that's quiet the opposite. Prestige makes me anxious. I'm a blue-collar kid who tried hard to fit in an upper-class world where I don't belong. Sadly, this life also broke my body so bad I can't actually go back to a factory. I made a promise to my GP doctor and to my husband, I won't apply to any physical job anymore. This is called transclass limbo, I guess.
P.S.: I used em-dashes twice, I know, but no, I did not use AI to write this post.
P.S.2: I love getting mail!