CHILDHOOD

As a child in school, making progress in life was easy. Assignments were put before me, I did them effortlessly, got high marks in everything, plus tons of praise from parents and teachers, and promises that my future was bright and I could grow up to be anything I wanted.

Never at any point did anyone mention that being anything I wanted didn't entail getting all the things I naively assumed all adults just came into as a reward for doing their jobs well -- whatever those jobs may be. I knew that some people were wealthier than others, that menial unskilled jobs paid poorly, and that certain exploitative high-power jobs paid too well, and so I expected, as the brilliant genius all the adults made me out to be, to grow up to make a high-end-of-moderate living as a skilled professional doing whatever I wanted to do, and doing it really, really well.

For twelve years the pattern continued, assignments being put before me, completing them easily, high praise, and promises of a bright future. Halfway through senior year, I had finished all of my coursework early, and had only to wait until the next summer to graduate and move on to adulthood -- the details of which had still not beed spelled out to me in the slightest, my naive assumptions above still well-preserved. Years earlier I had been asked in the abstract to think about what I might want to do in college once I graduated (I wanted to be a physicist at UC Berkeley), but that was then, and nobody was mentioning it now as graduation approached.

FIRST JOB

While waiting for graduation to come, my single mother, raising me by herself in a one-bedroom apartment partitioned off of a stranger's house, revealed that she was having trouble making ends meet, and that we would consequently be needing to cut back on food. I then did the obvious thing and went out to look for a job to help carry my weight by buying my own food. The most career-applicable area of knowledge I had at the time was computers, so I applied for a job at the local computer shop.

The starting wage offered to me was the same per hour as my mom was making, and unlike her I would have full-time hours, so right away at my first job I was making more than my parents ever had -- either of them, as my father was no better-off than my mother. I took this as a sign that what I had been told was true, that I would have a successful and fulfilling life because I was brilliant and did everything I was tasked with really well, as right off the bat I was further ahead than my parents had gotten in decades of their careers. Little did I know that, although it was better than minimum wage, I was still not being paid even a living wage, much less anything the least bit impressive.

While working that job, my mom went into rehab for alcoholism, and I moved into the tool shed adjacent to my dad's trailer instead, where I was made to put my hard-earned money I was trying to save for a car toward paying for the heat and electricity to my tool shed. (And where, over the course of the ensuing year, dad "borrowed" a few thousand dollars of those hard-earned savings to pay the mortgage on his trailer, then defaulted to me with the excuse that I would inherit his trailer some day, a promise which now looks both less likely and less valuable every year).

A few months after work began, graduation came and went and still nobody had mentioned anything about college, and I was busy working and thinking I was already started on my glorious career path and probably didn't even need college because I was naturally smart and talented like everyone had always told me. I even had a clear advancement path laid out before me, with raises promised if I acquired the relevant certifications in the sales and repair of the computers we sold and repaired. Dedicated student that I was, I quickly went out and got those certifications and... did not receive the raises I had been promised. Innocent as I was, I assumed that I had misunderstood something, and that some other, higher certifications unknown to me were the ones I really needed to aim for, but I had no idea how to begin doing so since I didn't even know what they were.

Meanwhile I continued churning away at my job, which was to assist customers while they were in the store, selling them things or checking in or out their computers for repair, and then assisting the technicians to get through their repair backlog in my downtime. I got so efficient at this that our backlog soon disappeared, and I then had idle downtime, which I took as the sign of a job well done -- if you don't have a pile of work to do, you must be keeping on top of things well, right? The boss did not see it that way however and instead complained that I was wasting his money sitting idly on the clock waiting for more work to walk in the door. So he began to assign me busywork.

Since I had begun working there, there had been stacks of paperwork on all the desks in the office literally several feet high, and I was tasked with filing and organizing it all in my downtime. With nothing else to do and still getting paid for it, I happily piled headlong into that task and in short order had all the paperwork neatly filed away and organized, and quickly filed every new bit of paperwork generated away so the stacks didn't build up again. And then, once again, I had idle downtime and the boss was mad at me for wasting his money.

When I began that job, there were, in addition to the boss and myself, a manager and salesperson, another salesperson, two other techs, a database admin and purchasing guy, a shipping manager, a secretary, and a driver and janitor. Over the course of the year that I worked there, everyone else either quit or was fired until we were down to the boss and myself plus one new-hire senior tech (above me) and a new-hire senior salesperson (also above me), with all the former employees' responsibilities being pawned off on me on top of the sales and technical duties that were my job description, for no additional money... and I still had idle downtime even after doing everyone else's jobs.

The boss grew harder and harder on me, for what I still don't know. (Though I learned years later that he was literally a crack addict and, by the time I learned this, had lost his business, his house, his fiance, and was sleeping on park benches; so likely that's just what he was like.) I grew more and more anxious and neurotic and constantly worried that despite doing everything that seemed like the right thing to do for my job, for the business, I was doing something somehow not to his liking and he would be mad at me for it and possibly fire me. Eventually, almost exactly a year after I was first hired, he did let me go -- but without cause at least, as in, laid off, downsized, not fired for cause because he had finally had enough of my "incompetence", as I had feared.

BEGINNING COLLEGE

That being one of the only computer shops within bussing distance of my home, and computers being the only skill I really had, I spent most of the next year unemployed, working odd computer-related jobs for friends of friends, or temp jobs for businesses that needed some computer-related help, living mostly off of what little I had managed to save in that year plus the trifle in unemployment insurance I received. I grew more and more hopeless and depressed as it seemed likely that I simply didn't have any other career prospects at all. Moving to find more job opportunities in a bigger city wasn't an option as that would require a deposit and first month's rent for a place to live wherever I went and then an immediate job to keep paying ongoing rent, and that was money I didn't have, so moving would just mean homelessness and even greater hopelessness.

As my year of unemployment passed, I began to yearn for the glory days of school, where everything had been easy. You never had to fight to get an assignment, they were just given to you whether you wanted them or not. Finishing your work early and having no work left to do wasn't something anyone would blame you for, but rather something you'd be praised for. And the work made sense, it had clearly-defined objectives and you just had to figure out how to meet them (or better still, just pay attention when you were clearly told exactly how to meet them) and you would do well and advance.

But the only school left for me was college, and that, I knew somehow, cost money, but money was what I needed, not something I could afford to be spending. Thankfully a disparate handful of adults managed to point me each in their own part in the right direction to find out that grant money was available for gifted students from poor families. Figuring out how to get it, and how to get into a school, was itself a difficult, confusing, at times backward-seeming process. (What do you mean I have to enroll in the school first before you will tell me if I can get money to pay for it? If I can't pay for it then I can't afford to enroll! Who would sign up to buy something without knowing if they can afford it or not?). But eventually I managed to get enrolled in a nearby community college and get grants to not only pay for the school but also give me money to buy food to eat, and gas to get there (in the beater car, as old as I was, that my grandfather had recently handed down to me).

Still nobody in any of this process had suggested that my choice of major would have serious consequences on my future income potential. Still I continued under the naive assumption that skilled careers of any sort would let someone live an ordinary middle-class life, the kind that would let one buy a house and support a family and save for retirement. I was told only to pick what path I wanted, with no hint that I should work backward from where I wanted to end up to determine what path could take me there, much less how I should do that if I knew to do it in the first place. And I didn't care about being "rich" anyways, I just wanted the "ordinary" life that "all adults" got as long as they went to college and weren't fry cooks their entire lives.

So I picked a path that looked nice for its own sake, assuming without correction that they all went places equally nice, just different to suit people with different interests. I figured I'd be happy making computer games for a living, as I already did that for a hobby and was distantly acquainted over the internet with people who did it professionally. And though the creative and technical sides of it both interested me, I had greater skill already in the creative department, so I majored in Multimedia Arts, which turned out to be essentially Graphic Design, without many available courses with strong applications to computer game design as I had hoped for.

Because of the haphazard way I had found my way into college, I began in the middle of a school year, entering in the second semester. As my college career began and I once again effortlessly aced all of my classes, the future again seemed brilliantly bright and hopeful. But halfway through my first term there, my ancient car died beyond repair, and in order to continue getting to school (the busses didn't run between my home and the school in the next town over), I had to spend my stipend for the rest of the term buying the cheapest replacement I could get my hands on. I barely had enough money to live off of literal stale bread for the rest of the term, and when the term ended, I went out and got a summer job to feed myself again.

BACK TO WORK

That job began as a simple web design job, finally paying a living wage, though still just barely -- but what did I expect, I was a student working a summer job, not a professional with a degree working for a big company. In the process of building their websites, I had to use their internal database to get the data to populate the sites. I commented on the poor design of their internal database, and they offered to pay me to make it better if I could, so I did. That project continued even as school began anew in the fall, but I just dropped down to half time (as "full time" school still only took half of a work week's hours, homework being as quick and easy as it was for me) and continued working that job.

As I finished their new database, they kept me on a while longer to teach everyone else there how to use it. But because everyone else was very busy, that quickly became a lot of "can you please do this secretarial task that requires use of the database, because that's faster than showing us how to do it and we're in a hurry". In that manner, what had begun as a technical job evolved gradually into a secretarial, administrative-assistant job, with technical assistance on the side as needed. Still paying the same rate as the the web design gig had bid though, and that still being half again what my first "career" job had paid, half again what either of my parents had ever made, and nearly twice the minimum wage, I thought I had a pretty good gig for a college student.

That income proved extremely useful in short order, as I was catastrophically rear-ended  by a truck travelling 40mph while I was at a stop in my "new" (nearly as old as I was) car, only a month after starting that job. Though the insurance paid to buy yet another "new" (this time five years older than I was) car, that in turn died beyond repair by the time my second term at college was over, and I had to spend the few thousand dollars I had managed to save since the summer (between work income and my school grant stipends) buying yet another new car if I wanted to continue getting to school and my new job.

Still further expenses were incurred when I filed my taxes around that same time and, seeing as how I had been paying all of my own expenses all year and the rent-value on the tool shed I lived in did not nearly equal them, claimed myself as my own dependent per the outcome of the worksheet on the tax forms. When months later my father filed his taxes and claimed me as a dependent, he was denied that claim. He demanded that I amend my taxes and send back many hundreds of dollars in the process so that he could claim even more money back on his taxes. That was still denied him however, and in the end it was a colossal loss all around.

I expected to maybe make up for it when my settlement from the car wreck was finally paid, except it turned out soon thereafter that though I had been paying my dad (what I now know to be grossly inflated prices) to be on his car insurance since I first got a car, at the time of the accident I was somehow uninsured, and thus not entitled to claim anything beyond material damages, which were eaten up entirely by the doctor and lawyer I had been seeing on the assumption that the settlement would pay them and for my pain and suffering for injuries I still suffered from decades later.

MOVING OUT

I say "had been" paying my dad because when I bought the newest car (the replacement to the replacement to the one that was hit by a truck, itself a replacement to my first car from six months earlier), I bought it through my mom's new fiance, who sold cars for a living, and in the process got on their car insurance instead. When I stopped paying my dad for his insurance, he then asked me where my "rent" was, as apparently he had been thinking of the money I paid him for car insurance as a token rent to live in his tool shed instead. This was news to me, and quite appalling, as the only reason I tolerated living in an uninsulated, tin-roofed, concrete-and-cinderblock shack that flooded every time it rained, was that it didn't cost me anything and I desperately needed to save up for the next catastrophe.

I subsequently did the math and realized that what I would save on gas from moving closer to work and school plus the money my dad was demanding to live in his tool shed would be just enough to afford to rent the cheapest bedroom possible in the next town over where work and school were. So I finally moved out, and took on the infinite debt that is renting, where I could no longer afford to occasionally go flat broke and just starve until I had money again, because if that happened I would be homeless and lose all prospects of finishing school and someday securing a decent future for myself.

That decision locked me to my job, even as far from a career-path job as it was then meandering, as I desperately needed to save money quickly to prevent ever risking missing out on rent, and paying rent made it even harder to save than it had been before. I took on as many work hours as I could get and made sure to take only the easier classes required in college (skipping out on some that, in retrospect, would have been more helpful to my future career) so that I would have the time and energy to put in at work.

But even then, life was looking up again. I had a decent car only a decade old then, one that would last me another five years. I was finally completely self-sufficient, paying for everything with my own hard-earned money, and I was finally living in a real house with carpeting and insulation and paint on the walls. I felt that I had finally achieved a normal middle-class life for someone my age.

By the end of that year I finished my associate's degree in Multimedia Arts at the community college. Despite all the stresses of the past few years, I had continued to ace all my classes and graduated with a perfect 4.0 GPA. But over those years I had realized how the computer games industry had changed since I dabbled in it in high school, and that the kind of career I thought I could have had in it was not really possible unless I could somehow fund my own startup, which was completely beyond the realm of feasibility in my financial situation. (In my year of unemployment, some friends and I had already attempted to bootstrap a startup by building a product in our free time, but that failed spectacularly and dashed any hopes I had of that approach working). So after graduating I decided to apply the degree I had to other relevant fields, and looked for any kind of work in graphic design.

CHANGE OF COURSE

As the next year wore on though, and work proved hard to come by, I began to consider other career options. One factor that kept jumping out at me was that everyone I worked with constantly described me as an excellent teacher (of the technical stuff I worked with every day). Having broad and lifelong academic interests, I asked the counselors at my old college what it would take for me to become a teacher of some sort -- still with no one having ever corrected my misconception that any kind of educated career path will pay well enough to live an ordinary middle-class life on, so still with me assuming that an educated career path like that of a teacher could give me a rewarding, comfortable life. I was told that teaching at a university or even community college would require a PhD or at least a masters, respectively, in the subject I wanted to teach; for which the kind of grants I had been getting for college thus far would not pay. But I could teach at a primary or secondary school with only a bachelor's degree of any kind, and there were grants available for those, plus my community college had a guaranteed transfer program to the local University of California.

So my next step, if I wanted to pursue that career, was to get a bachelor's degree in something, anything, it didn't matter, I was told -- any bachelor's degree would qualify me to teach primary school and at least some subjects in secondary school. So I picked the academic topic of greatest interest to me, and the greatest breadth and most applicability to teaching: philosophy. I spent one more term at my community college at the end of that year completing all of the undergraduate and transfer coursework for that program and enrolling at the university, and as the new year opened I started there as a junior with just over one year of coursework needed for my bachelor's degree, after which I would proceed on (while working as a teacher) to get my teaching credential and then eventually a master's in education (which was apparently paid for by many teaching positions).

Meanwhile, I continued working the now-mostly-secretarial job which had started out as a technical summer job over three years earlier. When my rent went up, I asked for a raise, the first one I had asked for since I attempted to claim the one I was promised back at my first job; and I was so raked over the coals and given such a paltry pay bump for the efforts that it discouraged me from ever asking for a raise there again, even as I gradually took on more and more of the responsibilities of running the business, including operating it completely on my own during my boss's yearly month-long vacations. I grew over the years to hate that job almost as much as the first, but I was too broken and timid from years of constant fear of losing my tenuous ward against homelessness and starvation, and most of a year's failure to find a better job in the field I now had a degree in, to think I had any hope of finding anything better. So I stayed there, focused on my new studies, and planned to escape to greener pastures once I had my bachelor's degree.

As I neared finishing my bachelor's degree, however, I began to get preliminary in-class experience as a student teacher, and realized that I had made a grave mistake. The qualities which I thought would make me an excellent teacher -- patience with ignorance, and clarity of explanation -- were not, it seemed, the qualities I needed to teach children. The job involved far less dealing with incessant questioning and students' inability to comprehend answers, and far more dealing with complete disinterest, something I had no aptitude to handle. I could answer "stupid" questions until the end of time without problem, but I had no idea how to make anybody ask me questions in the first place, and no interest in fighting to get them to do so.

So I realized that teaching was not for me, at least not the kind within the realm of financial possibility for me. I was so close to finishing my bachelor's degree that I would see that through anyway no matter what, but once I had it, I had no idea what I would do with it. The only other career options for someone with a philosophy degree seemed to be philosophy professor or lawyer, both of them requiring expensive postgraduate education I simply could not afford, and the latter not especially interesting me in the first place. So I planned to fall back on my first degree and my job experience, and find some kind of real work employing my technical and creative skills, as a graphic or web designer of some sort.

CATASTROPHE

But right as I graduated, the entire U.S. economy tanked, and my own life independently fell apart in a myriad of ways. My car of the past five years finally died beyond repair, and I had to dump another few thousand into replacing it with something that turned out to have many problems of its own. My significant other of the past four years left me, leaving me emotionally devastated. I had a set of housemates who almost literally destroyed the house we lived in and forced me to live in my crappy new car for a month in the middle of winter. I tried to turn headlong into work as a way of coping with all of this, but at the same time my boss began to separate from her spouse (and the co-owner of the business), and work became a very hostile, unpleasant place where I felt constantly under attack for the tiniest error.

I had, by that time, almost a year's worth of expenses saved, so in the stress of it all, I gave in to depression, and began coasting through life on my savings, sleeping long hours into the day, putting in only a token presence at work, searching in futility for new work late into the night and rarely getting so much as an interview, all the while falling deeper and deeper into hopelessness and helplessness. Within a year my "new" car's problems progressed beyond the point of repair, and I again had to buy another with my still-dwindling savings. I bailed out a friend, who had not long before clawed her way up from homelessness, with a "loan" of a month and a half's rent that was never repaid as she lost her home again soon thereafter. A flood at my house was blamed on us tenants, all the other housemates bailed, leaving me with the bill, eliminating the last of my savings. And then, on Christmas Day no less, the car I had had for less than a year died, and I had nothing left to replace it with, leaving me taking the bus everywhere.

Bussing in to work more than tripled my commute time, leaving my entire life nothing but a soul-sucking drudge to work every morning culminating in a two-mile steep uphill walk to get to the job that I hated, a short and anxious day there, another long commute home to a house full of ever-changing strangers I hated as often as not, long hopeless hours at night searching in futility for a way out of it all, the short sweet respite of sleep, and then the whole thing over again the next day. This continued for nearly a year until at last my mother, by now single again and living on disability insurance in a rented room even smaller than mine, gave me her old and dying car, and shortly thereafter I landed a job actually using the skills I was trying to build a career out of, though still paying barely anything more than the secretarial job had; adjusted for inflation, the new job paid about the same as the old one had when I first got it.

RECOVERY

Nevertheless it was at last a first step into a real career. My mom's car died half a year later but I now had the income and savings to replace it with one even nicer than the one that had lasted me five years, though still an "old beater" by the standards of anyone who can afford to pass such judgement. I finally had health and dental insurance for the first time in my life with the new job, though that in turn revealed that I had thousands of dollars worth of work that I needed done from completely neglecting (of financial necessity) everything medical for my entire life. But even through that, I managed to save back up to half a year's expenses again over the course of the year or so I was at that job... before our entire department was downsized and I was unemployed again for the first time in almost a decade.

But that layoff in turn just launched my career further. I was so beloved at that company by the people who actually worked with me that I had many very solid references and recommendations, and with that real career job on my resume and the economy recovering, job opportunities were more plentiful than they had ever been. Within two months I received six job offers, accepted four of them in total (accepting one part-time, another part-time that I then quit for a temp job that was then replaced with another part-time which became full-time when the first part-time job went out of business), and ended up making almost twice what I had been at the old secretarial job not even two years earlier, what turned out to be almost twice the national median personal income.

Within a year I had saved up well over a year's expenses again, the highest my savings had ever been, and I finally started to think about moving on to living the kind of ordinary middle-class life that I had dreamed of so many years ago, namely, buying a house, and finally escaping the infinite debt of renting, which seemed like it should have been completely possible considering I was now making twice what half of Americans made. As a short-term measure I managed to get into a mobile home of my own on rented land costing me no more than the bedroom I'd occupied for a decade had cost me. But it was only then that I realized how unbelievably expensive it is to actually own a real house on its own land, with multiple rooms and a yard and driveway and all that, and not have to rent at all; and how much more than the already-astounding (by my standards) money I was making I would need to make to afford mortgage payments, even after spending years saving everything I could for a down payment. I started looking at how anyone could ever afford anything like that, and realizing that as much as I was making now, it still wasn't even the average for my field, and that my field was just barely average amongst skilled, educated careers as far as income goes.

If someone decades before had told me just how much it costs to have that "ordinary" middle-class lifestyle, and which careers would take me there, or had at least pointed me into college and into investigating those questions as I was graduating high school, I would likely have a PhD in some science or engineering field now (which I'm plenty interested and apt at, just not especially more than art, philosophy, or many other topics), and be living that ordinary middle-class lifestyle I once thought everyone got as par for the course.

Of course then, I would likely not realize how everyone else does not always get it, how incredibly fortunate I would be to have it, and how despite any talent and dedication a person may have, some people simply lack the opportunity or the guidance to be able to, or even know that they need to, make the choices that would lead them to that kind of life, and not another that they may regret.