Jeremiah Tolbert

This morn­ing, I’ve real­ized that I don’t have any­thing else  to share via this blog at the moment except old pho­tos.    The truth is, I’m strug­gling a lot with feel­ings of depres­sion related to being unable to find a job.  Yes, I know I’m not the only one who can’t find work, yes I know it’s osten­si­bly not my fault, but as it prob­a­bly comes as no sur­prise to you, I have high expec­ta­tions for myself and think that if I were truly good at what I do, find­ing a job/​money would not be hard.  As a very kind and gra­cious some­one pointed out to me in an email this morn­ing, I’m not really strug­gling.  Struggling  isn’t depress­ing. I am tread­ing water, unable to move for­ward or back.  I can’t move from the place that I am in, in my life, until I have some path to a future.  There are a lot of paths but I am con­strained on which ones I can accept.  Right now, the only path I can accept is one that gives me enough income to sup­port Sarah and I while she returns to school full time for 1–2 years.  After that, she can get a teach­ing job and quite pos­si­bly I can actu­ally ded­i­cate myself to the pur­suits that I love.

With the eco­nomic cri­sis going on in the back­ground, and with me won­der­ing if any­one will have a job a year from now, if we’ll even have a valid cur­rency, it makes our sit­u­a­tion feel even more des­per­ate at times.

So I’m basi­cally spend­ing all my time flail­ing about for short term plans.  What can I do to make it more likely I will get a job?  And at the same time, I have these dri­ving pas­sions of pho­tog­ra­phy and echos of my pas­sion for writ­ing swirling around and because I have no rea­son to focus on any one thing, my atten­tion keeps shift­ing wildly from thing to thing.  I can’t tell if any­thing will work, so I am try­ing to go in 4 direc­tions at one.  I can’t keep that up.  Even unem­ployed, I only have so much time, and I’m com­ing to the con­clu­sion that my ten­dency to split my atten­tion among a vari­ety of pur­suits does noth­ing but harm my chances of ever get­ting to the level I want to be at any of them.

They told me as a child I could be any­thing I wanted to be.  That my IQ test demon­strated that, or what­ever.  And I always took that to heart.  Perhaps too well.  I’m great at open­ing doors, but I’m ter­ri­ble about clos­ing them.  Yesterday, I thought I could close the door on pho­tog­ra­phy and move for­ward.  Instead what hap­pened was, I closed the door on pho­tog­ra­phy and feel into the deep­est funk yet in this phase of my life.

Does that mean I should be giv­ing up one of the other pur­suits and stick­ing with pho­tog­ra­phy? I don’t know.  Perhaps my cen­tral the­sis that I need to focus on one thing is flawed.  Or maybe I’m just sad for giv­ing up some­thing I gen­uinely love (for the time being) and I’ll come to terms with that shortly.

I don’t really have it that bad.  I don’t work back-​​breaking labor all day.  I’ve been there. I worked in a lum­ber yard as a yard hand for a sum­mer, and ulti­mately, I didn’t much care for that as a job.  I like work­ing with my mind. I like chal­leng­ing my brain to solve things and to come up with things that wow me and oth­ers.  That’s what I like doing.  I don’t care if I do it with words or pic­tures or web­sites.  I just want to make amaz­ing things.    And I really have to be paid to do it,  because I can­not live the life of the starv­ing artist.

Not with the debt I have left over from my time as your typ­i­cal amer­i­can con­sumer.  Not with stu­dent loans.

I don’t care about money except for the sense of secu­rity it pro­vides.  If I could have a safe warm place to live with space for a bed, books, and a com­puter, if I could eat at least once a day, and if there were beau­ti­ful things around me to look at, I could be con­tent.  Give me the inter­net and the land­scape around me and I don’t need much else.   Or am I kid­ding myself about that too?

Do most peo­ple know who they are and what they want at my age?  I’m 31.  I feel as old as the earth some­times.  I expected in my youth that at 31, I would know what I was doing for the rest of my life.  Instead, I don’t even know what I will be doing next week, not for sure, although at this point it involves going to see my fam­ily in Kansas and look­ing for a job in Kansas City.

My life has been a series of rein­ven­tions.  First I was a stu­pid kid with bad grades.  Then I was tested and they decided I was too intel­li­gent for my classes and that’s why I did badly.  So they tested me to be in gifted pro­grams, and it turned out that my hand-​​eye coor­di­na­tion was so bad that I might as well have been men­tally hand­i­capped.  So I became the kinda bright kid who liked sci­ence.  I did great, grades-​​wise in junior high but then I got to high school.  My par­ents made me get my license and a job so that I could drive the younger sib­lings to school.  The only job that would have me worked me until 2 in the morn­ing on school nights and sud­denly my grades slipped.  I was no longer a straight-​​A stu­dent.  Chances for a good schol­ar­ship dis­ap­peared instantly into the grease traps behind the Sonic.  I fell asleep in class. Turned in papers late.  Now I was the kid who used to be pretty good at school but was hav­ing a hard time get­ting his work done because of the long, late hours he worked.   I gave up any hope of doing much in col­lege beyond state school which I prob­a­bly wouldn’t finish.

Then I met Tama, one of the smartest peo­ple I’ve ever known.  Our rela­tion­ship changed me again, and I dis­cov­ered again my pas­sion for sci­ence.  I joined a pro­gram doing research at the wet­lands and I started to dream about col­lege again.  Tama, a National Merit Scholar, was tour­ing schools all over, and she vis­ited Grinnell.  I tagged along.  What I saw there con­vinced me that I wanted some­thing more. With the help and guid­ance of her and her fam­ily, I got in to Grinnell.  And things were good.

But I got it by mort­gag­ing my future.  What no one told me was that the price I was pay­ing could not be paid back with my plans.  Biologists do not make enough money to pay back these kinds of loans and pay the rent.   At this time, I met the love of my life, Sarah, and I became an engaged and then mar­ried man.  So I shifted my inter­ests again, to pro­vide for us.  I became an artist, a web designer.  I co-​​founded a com­pany which failed pri­mar­ily because of my fear of learn­ing any­thing programming-​​like.   I wasn’t will­ing to rein­vent myself again so quickly, I sup­pose.  But it was enough expe­ri­ence to get started down that road.

Then I became a mar­ried IT guy with too much time and no social life.  So I became an aspir­ing writer, some­thing I had toyed with in my youth. Slowly, I trans­formed into a sort-​​of pub­lished writer who couldn’t crack any of the truly big mar­kets.  I was happy to be big in Europe for the time being.  I started a novel.  Then my father got sick.  I fal­tered.  He died.  My hopes for writ­ing as a future died with him. The two things became so inter­linked that I couldn’t move past it.  I’m still angry that he’s gone some­times.  Shortly after, I lost a friend who, in ret­ro­spect, was a huge part of the rea­son that I wrote.  I wrote in part  to impress, and with­out that friend, I had no one to try and impress.  The peo­ple I had, whom I love, loved me too much to really be crit­i­cal enough. To be a chal­lenge to impress.  I lost my dri­ving force in writ­ing then.

Another rein­ven­tion then. We moved to Colorado.   If I couldn’t write, per­haps I could take pic­tures to feed my cre­ative need.  Slowly, I poured money into it. And time, oh by god, I poured time into it.  And I got a lit­tle bet­ter, but then I hit a road­block.  I didn’t have the vision that truly great pho­tog­ra­pher did. I didn’t have the patience to wait for the light, day in, day out, until the clouds looked just right on the moun­tain­scape.   I couldn’t afford the lenses to get close enough to wildlife with­out scar­ing it off.

And then I lost my job again in a lay­off.  I had been prepar­ing to rein­vent myself as a Portland res­i­dent, but now I had to return to the pre­vi­ous self-​​version of “resource­ful unem­ployed nerd.”  I didn’t mind at first.  It gave me time to try and break down that road­block in pho­tog­ra­phy.  I started to enter­tain the idea that maybe I could get through my writ­ing blocks and get back to who I was then, because it had given me so much plea­sure at the time.  And thanks to Steve Eley, I was able to restore my iden­tity as an editor.

I don’t mind being unem­ployed most of the time, unless I try to pic­ture the future.  That’s when things spi­ral out of con­trol.  Because there’s no pre­dict­ing my future right now.

My iden­tity is as shift­ing as the sands of the Mojave.  The only thing I’ve truly mas­tered is an abil­ity to adapt to less-​​than-​​ideal cir­cum­stances.  To find some plea­sure in life even if things are not per­fect.   To put up with it all.  Sometimes I don’t want to though.  Sometimes, I just want suc­cess.   I want all that energy and effort and rein­ven­tion to amount to some­thing.  I want some­one with power and respon­si­b­lity to see what I have done and say “I can put this per­son to work at a great goal” and I want to feel like I can adopt that goal as my own.

Because under­neath it all is a search for per­sonal great­ness. I don’t want to be good, or ade­quate.  I have that drive that some ath­letes have to keep push­ing, keep search­ing myself until I find what it is that I am meant to be doing.

That’s why being unem­ployed hurts so much.  It focuses me on those things at which I am not great.  It makes inescapable my fail­ures to achieve that.

But I can no more eas­ily give up my drive for great­ness than I can give up my need to breathe.  It’s rooted deep and I wouldn’t even know how to stop want­ing it.  If I give up, or set­tle, that part of me will stran­gle me with dis­con­tent.  The drive is lit­er­ally dri­ving me with men­tal whips and curses.  Do bet­ter you dumb, fat piece of shit, it says.  “Accomplish some­thing that mat­ters.  Put the fuck­ing video game down and make some­thing of yourself. ”

And I do my best to lis­ten, because I don’t have a choice not to.  All I can do is hope that the drive will do more good for me one day than harm.  Right now, I’m not mov­ing fast enough or in the right direc­tions and it’s giv­ing me a beat­ing like you wouldn’t believe.  And by it, of course I mean me.  I know that it’s me hold­ing the whip, it’s me that insults myself and calls me names try­ing to moti­vate me like you would a stub­born mule.  I know that.  Doesn’t make it any eas­ier though.

Well…

So there’s a deeply per­sonal look inside my psy­chol­ogy.  I wish I could say this has been cathar­tic to write, but I sus­pect it will drive away friends and poten­tial employ­ers just to read all this.  It’s prob­a­bly been a bad idea to write it.  But it’s the longest thing I have writ­ten in six months, so screw it.  Being  hon­est is more impor­tant than get­ting a job.  If you dis­agree with that, then I don’t want to work for you anyway.