What happens when you look at the variety of roles available on job sites and still feel none of them are really for you? What happens when I scroll through them and think that each would be fun for a day or maybe a week, but that would be it? Is it because I’m looking at these jobs that other people are needing, that I’m just going to fill a need for them rather than filling a need for myself? Am I looking at this from the wrong perspective? How can so many other people just say, okay there’s a role, and I am willing to spend my time, energy, and creativity in that role? None of them I want to do full time either. I fundamentally don’t believe in working 5 out of 7 days, where is the time for leisure? Where is the time for personal growth? Where is the time for leading a healthy life? Where is the time for maintaining friendships and being a part of community? What about any time for developing or exploring your faith? Of course, also, where is the time to build and maintain a romantic relationship, and of course, a parental one? I don’t see how that is possible to do successfully, how it’s possible to balance all of those needs and do them at your very best when there are only 3 hours after a long day five days a week, and two weekend days to focus on being a whole person.

So what do I do? I’m in a job that I feel is very constricting and limiting because I have to be at a desk on certain days for this business, I feel chained to it. There isn’t flexibility in the days I get to do this, even though I’ve asked from the beginning. I’ve made it clear that I want more flexibility. I want a job that’s completely flexible. One where I don’t have to be at any one place at any one time with other people relying on me being there, I already have that kind of pressure at home being a mum and a wife, I don’t need it anywhere else in my life, I need the opposite. That’s it, because I already have such responsibilities that I have taken up willingly, I want a job to be the opposite of that, i want it to have flexibility, freedom, movement, change, the ability to not do it if I choose, the ability to ride my own waves of energy rather than force my energy to fit into a schedule.

So again, what do I do? What do I do about this? Clearly the option is to do something online. Clearly it is to stop looking at these jobs that will put me at a desk just in another business location. Ideally I would like to either totally work with people, or not though. I want the money from this job too, because now that I am remembering how nice it is to have money, I like it, and like to see my bank account rising each week. I like this. To replace my current job, I just need to make $350 for a two day workweek. I can do this. I will do this. I will go beyond this.

While in Tennessee visiting my family over the holidays, we went to the town of Oak Ridge. The only reference I have of Oak Ridge in my mind is of a country band named the Oak Ridge Boys, and I don’t even know what they sing. It’s a town that isn’t very far from Knoxville in the Eastern part of Tennessee with it’s beautiful rolling hills and deciduous trees. Oak Ridge was formed as a secret city during World War II to build the Atomic Bomb. It was kept off maps, and grew to a population of 70,000 people. It now houses the American Museum of Science and Energy to showcase it’s past. My uneasy feeling that a government can do major things in massive secrecy was only confirmed in this trip. How do we ever know anything is actually true unless we go there ourselves? It might be more transparent now than it was before because we have technology weaved into every part of our lives, but even then, how do we know.

We’ve just returned from a trip overseas, to my home country of America. This time we were situated near the nation’s capital of Washington, DC, and spent some time exploring through Virginia, and Tennessee as well. Virginia and Tennessee are considered the South, and although Washington borders Virginia, it isn’t considered the south, even though it has benefited greatly from slavery. I wasn’t expecting to have the experiences or to have the illumination of America’s past, but there it was in full glory, obviously something I needed to know about.

A trip to Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello which is the plantation house on every nickel in the currency, proved to be very eye opening. Being from California, we have been removed quite a bit from the black slavery past in America’s beginnings. So heading into the Monticello was like stepping right into it. Thomas Jefferson was an early president of the USA and although he apparently had strong views about slavery being wrong, he inherited slaves like property, and only ended up freeing a small handful which historians now have put together that they were his illegitimate children with one of his slaves. Even for someone with wealth, power, and influence, he still wasn’t able to abolish slavery, could he have tried harder? Could he have changed it within his own plantation? The marketing material touched on how the slaves did have “good” lives all things considered, and had houses built that were as good, or better than the poor white people at the time. The houses were all aligned in a row so they were able to form a community within themselves. Over the course of Jefferson’s life he had a couple hundred slaves, and all I could think when I saw the bells down in the cellar area, was that they had been beaten into submission to spring up to a bell and ensure that the Jefferson household was always taken care of. The feels that swelled up in me when I read that they had better lives than most, made my stomach turn. These poor people who were captured and held against their will in order to serve their masters. They were separated from their families, they had not stability in that sense at all, and that makes me incredibly sad.

I was reading after that Sally Hemmings chose to return to Monticello after Jefferson had taken her to Paris as a slave nurse to his daughter, because in France slavery had already been abolished, because of the promise to free her children, children which she would bear later from Jefferson, and I find that to be a long stretch. I don’t know what it must have been like for Sally Hemmings but I can imagine that her will had been broken like so many other slaves, held against their will, and possibly her ideas of freedom had been distorted due to this. It’s all so sad to me.

After visiting the Monticello, with all it’s beauty and grandeur, I was left with the unmistakable grossness within me that realised all of it was possible because of the slaves, his status and wealth was only perpetuated because of that horrible system. I feel this in Washington as well after I became privy to the fact that the slaves were the ones who erected most of the monuments. They were forced to erect these monuments cherishing their oppressors. Gut wrenching.

White guilt came flooding into me, and I started to realise all of the broken families, all of the heaviness that the African Americans carry with them. Not knowing their origins, not knowing even which country in Africa they really came from, and having the pattern of slavery, even if just at a subconscious level that perpetuates from generation to generation.