What To Do When The Plan Doesn’t Work Out
By: Our Lady Of Perpetual Sorrow
Tags: Socialism, Fludity, Depression, Life Lessons, The Plan

Photo by sk from Pexels

Life didn’t look how I thought it would when I was a kid. I was a relatively high achieving student from a middle-class family and naively assumed that I would sail into adulthood, find my one true love, and live happily ever after. It seemed like a given that I would get a “good” job and live comfortably. I didn’t yet understand the concepts of adversity or class struggle because I lived an incredibly sheltered life. The closest I’d come to hardship was developing severe OCD in the summer before junior high, and although I didn’t sleep much in the next few years that followed, I did have a safe home where everything was provided for me.

High school is a defining part of life for most people. You either hated it or you loved it, the latter type sometimes refusing to move on and mature into full-grown adults. My high school experience was not particularly memorable, but it was at the end of that period that I became clinically depressed. I lost all but one friend (I love you, Jane!) and slowly became obsessed with ideas of suicide. It’s not that I wanted to die per se, it was just that I couldn’t imagine continuing to live my life the way it was.

I immediately went into university after high school because, like most of the kids my age, I’d been told that this was the way to secure a good job. However, my mental state was getting worse. I managed to get by with high marks, but I had to withdraw from a number of classes when I was briefly hospitalized. Still, I had this clear-cut vision of what the future would look like. It was THE PLAN. I had always wanted to go away to school and I applied to a small university in Quebec in my second year, despite the fact that my mental state was still as delicate as tissue paper. When I was accepted, I thought, ‘This is it! The beginning of my dream future.’ I imagined myself thriving and not wanting to die anymore.

Of course, things did not go as planned. My remaining bastion of mental health started to crumble away as I realized that my support system was now on the other side of the country. I called my mom almost daily to cry about life and I hate that I put her through that experience just so I could have what I thought would be my ideal experience. In the middle of my fourth year of university I had a mental breakdown and was strongly advised to reconsider my strategy. I left that university quietly after a traumatic experience with the school’s mental health counsellors and reapplied to my hometown’s university to finish the rest of my degree. One of my most vivid memories of the time was driving off campus and watching the buildings disappear behind me. I felt like a failure, my dreams slipping through my fingers as I realized that my life was not following THE PLAN.

In my fifth and sixth years of university (yes, for the same goddamn degree) I worked minimum wage jobs in a variety of industries. I sold wine to sexist pricks who wouldn’t trust my opinion because I was a woman, despite growing up the daughter of a wine monger. I worked in a dollar store and made bougie cupcakes at a trendy bakery. Unfortunately, I also had a severe mismatch between my taste and my available funds. I don’t know about you, but when the siren call of credit cards arrived in my early adulthood, I was more than happy to put myself into ever-surmounting debt to make it from one measly paycheck to another. I also got a dog because that was part of THE PLAN. I’d always wanted a dog, but my parents never allowed it growing up. It didn’t matter that I could barely pay rent and cover my basic expenses, I was going to have a dog. My logic was that I deserved nice things, so why would I let something like a bank balance come between me and what I wanted?

Before I continue, let me be very clear about something: poor people deserve nice things. They deserve comfort and things that make them happy. However, I was steeped in a privileged mindset, buying things I did not need: makeup that I rarely wore, international holidays, dinners out with friends. On top of this, my dog was born with an illness that required multiple vet visits and expensive treatments. Having grown up in a middle-class family with affluent grandparents, I was so sheltered that I thought that everyone got presents at Christmas. I assumed that people worked jobs that paid all their bills, and that going hungry was the exception to the rule. It took being knocked out of that life to open my eyes. I worked my minimum wage jobs with other students, yes, but also with single moms working their ass off just to make ends meet. Generous as they are, my parents wanted me to stand on my own two feet, so although I had the immense privilege of having a safety net if I fucked up too badly, I was expected to figure it out.

I also saw something that seems obvious to me now: people in lower socioeconomic situations tended to be more generous with their time, attention, and money. I didn’t realize it at the time, but my experience was starting to radicalize me. Maybe not everyone had enough money to meet their basic needs, but they should. This lie that rich people work harder than those less economically endowed is laughable to me because I have yet to meet a rich person who has put in more blood, sweat and tears than a single parent working two-plus jobs.

Still, I missed the privilege I grew up with because it was part of THE PLAN. You know what else was a part of the plan? Meeting prince charming, getting married and living in dual-income bliss. My vision was concrete. He had to be perfect. The queer person in me laughs at this gender imperative now, but at the time I was so rigid in this belief that I dismissed many really good men from my life, thinking that the perfect match was just around the corner. Never mind being a real human being — give me perfection or nothing.

So I got nothing. Now would be a good time to mention that my self-esteem was a withered husk from my depression, making me the perfect target for assholes with magical charisma & not much else. There were a handful of good men and one woman during this time. In fact, I would probably still be in a long-term relationship with one of them if I hadn’t screwed it up so badly. However, my vision was absolute and inflexible, so I kept searching for the perfect human. The perfect human who didn’t even exist because we are all fallible in one way or another. I became a serial monogamist perpetually unsatisfied with my options, not realizing that maybe the desirability that I sought was glaringly absent in myself.

As someone who never settled at one job for too long, my career prospects were not enviable. When I was laid off in 2015 from a job as an administrative assistant, I came to the stark realization that I could not find anyone willing to hire me. I sent out dozens of resumes and cover letters, but after a year my employment insurance benefits were going to run out and I was stuck.

What took me a Very. Long. Time. to figure out was this: my inflexibility was my fatal flaw. Everything had to be absolutely perfect or I didn’t want it. I had racked up thousands of dollars of debt, had zero career prospects and couldn’t keep a partner longer than 4 months due to my depression, anxiety, and general negativity.

Then my cousin died of an opioid overdose and my world built of toothpicks fell apart. I hit a rock bottom that I hadn’t experienced since my time in Quebec, and I finally realized that the way I was going about my life desperately needed to change.

My doctor referred me to the public mental health program offered by my provincial government, and I was set up with a psychiatrist to review my medication and provide weekly check-ins. In one of our sessions she asked me if I had ever heard of Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder, or OCPD. Surprise surprise, one of the hallmark traits of the disorder is a rigidity in patterns of thinking. All of my biggest mistakes in life led back to this characteristic, this obsessive need for THE PLAN. But it turned out that the plan did nothing but get me into further trouble. If I was going to recover, my psychiatrist told me that I needed to challenge my black and white thinking patterns.

I was also referred to an in-office psychologist to help me work on my issues, and the second that she decides to go into private practice will the day I say, “Shut up and take my money!” because she is amazing. V helped me uncoil my tightly bound expectations of life and helped me develop fluidity in my thinking. Patterns started popping out of my life and I was in a stable enough place to finally see them.

Of course, it’s easy for me to sit here and talk about surrendering to fluidity, but I doubt that would have been possible if I had remained working in minimum wage jobs with mountains of debt and debilitating depression. I’m not saying that you can’t have fluidity in those circumstances, but when you don’t have enough money and you’re stuck in a loop of suicidal ideation, it gets in the way. I think the flow that comes out of fluidity is directly correlated with financial stability and, ultimately, privilege. I am a white cis woman with an immense amount of the latter. I am currently mentally healthy, make a salary, and do not have to fight for my rights based on the colour of my skin. I guess I’m so adamant about socialism because we should all have good lives; we could all have good lives. If people would just give a damn about each other maybe we wouldn’t be in this mess now. So yes, I worked really hard to recover, but I also had a lot of advantages that are not available to others.

Because of my stability, I started to rebuild my life over the course of a year and decided to integrate fluidity and flexibility into my life in the following ways:

1) Relationships. What if there is no one perfect person out there who can meet all of your needs? No prince charming who’s going to sweep you off your feet? What then? After many toxic relationships I decided to be open to possibility. I had dated a polyamorous woman before, and though the relationship had ended I realized that the possibility of many loves made more sense than monogamy for me. I started prioritizing communication and mutual respect while moving away from goal-based dating. And although that didn’t make me immune to bad experiences, it did open up the possibilities. I’m currently in a poylam relationship with someone who treats me with care and respect, and although Covid has limited both of us in terms of looking for other partners we do have that freedom to explore. Will I be polyam forever? Honestly, I don’t know, but it’s what makes the most sense right now.

2) Money. Nearing the end of my employment insurance benefits, I was getting desperate to find work. I was willing to do anything to make a regular paycheck, and when a friend who was teaching English to students in China online told me all I would need was a bachelor’s degree and a background check I applied right away. I started working six days a week on a ridiculous schedule: 10PM to 2 AM, then 4 to 6 AM. My income depended on parents booking my classes, and it was hard being dependent on work that wasn’t guaranteed. It did allow me to pay rent though.

At the same time, I posted about my difficulty finding a job on Facebook, and someone I’d gone to school with told me that her company was hiring. It was shift work, but also a regular paycheck. I got an interview by her referral and was hired. Eventually I even got put on a small salary and benefits. These days I’m technically still working both jobs and six days a week, but the last of my debt will be paid off by January 1, 2021. Adjusting my expectations allowed me to get out of debt and save for going back to school.

3) The future. At this point I do not have any retirement savings. My retirement plan currently consists of “die on the job,” but I’m working on changing that. I still believe that a government should take care of its people, and I think that things like a universal basic income & affordable health care for all make a lot of sense. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like my socialist utopia is going to be happening any time soon though, so I needed a Plan B. Despite taking 6 years to finish a bachelor’s degree my marks were good enough to get into a master’s program in a field I’m actually interested in. I wanted to get as far away from customer service as possible, and my master’s will hopefully make that happen. Yes, I will be going back into debt to pay for it. But I’ve also learned to live on a budget, finally. If all goes well and I live frugally I hope to be able to pay it off a few years after graduating.

Is it a plan? Yes. Is it THE PLAN, with all its unforgiving expectations? No.

Unexpected things are going to happen, wrenches will inevitably be thrown into the mix. However, these days I’m more interested in seeing what happens. With the assistance of medication and therapy I’ve learned how to not let a setback turn into devastation. I’m open to what life will throw at me and I’m faster at getting up when I’m knocked down. I have a dream for the future, but I also understand that what I want may not come in the ways I expect. That’s the beauty of fluidity. You take a clay-like lump of hope and allow life to help you mold it into something new. It may not look like what you originally intended, but sometimes life will surprise you.

To be honest, I’m not sure the person I am today would have liked myself if I had followed THE PLAN, but having my world smashed apart allowed me to grow into a different person. As of this moment, I’m the happiest I’ve ever been in my adult life. I realize that things could change at any minute, but I feel better prepared to take what life throws at me.