Left Turns

Are you afraid to make left turns when you drive?

I know. It’s an odd question. But I’m asking because I HATE them. Do you know why? I’m not good at them. Do you know what else?

Don’t take this personally, okay?

You’re not very good at them either.

The general population is lousy at making left turns. My job gives me a unique perspective of those moments at an intersection where you’re waiting for the oncoming traffic to clear, often with a line of impatient people behind you. You think you have enough time, enough space before that oncoming car hits the intersection. Then next thing you know…

T-boned, dude!

Sometimes, you’re lucky enough to have a protected arrow. Those are the best. They’re safe. You wait patiently in line and there’s no pressure from the cars behind you because everybody knows you must wait for the little green arrow before you can go. Sometimes you spend your time waiting for that protection, for that green arrow, but it only protects you if everyone else is following the rules. Sometimes you take that green arrow, and somebody runs the red light on their side.

T-boned, dude!

Left turns are a bitch, whether it’s on the road or in life. I’ve never been good at navigating them in either place. I’ve gotten to the point where I’ll drive out of my way to avoid them. I wish I was joking. I get terrible anxiety when I’m driving and I’ll make a right turn three times to get to where I need to go if I can avoid a left turn. Left turns have paralyzed me.

That’s why I’ve spent so much time navigating my way through life as safely as possible.

But safe can be paralyzing too.

Safety often means you never experience new things, or that you miss out on opportunities you never knew you could experience. Safety sometimes means you’re not really living.

I’ve worked at my job for sixteen years. I know people who started several years after I did, and they have moved so many rungs up the ladder that I can’t even see that high. They were ambitious and this was not a job for them. It was a career. Their life’s work.

This job is not my life’s work. It was not a career for me. It was a job. It was a paycheck. It was a means to an end, with the end being a comfortable retirement. I never pursued it with any kind of passion or fervor.

That’s not to say I didn’t work hard. I worked damned hard. I worked twelve-hour days, six days a week, for months at a time during peak times. I’ve worked more overtime hours, weekends, evenings and holidays than I can count. I missed out on a huge chunk of time with my son while he was growing up. I’ll never get that back and I can never be compensated for it.

I did it for what I thought would be that elusive goal in the end. I thought I was working toward a reward. I set aside doing things that fulfilled me, trying to do the safe thing.

It’s like I gave up waiting at the red light. I merged over out of the turn lane and started driving straight ahead. I had my eyes on the prize at the end of the road.

On May 4th of this year, I found out the road is a dead end and there is no prize.

T-boned, dude. Right at the intersection of Middle Age and Where Did My Youth Go.

Injury to my ego. Damage to my long-term plan. Angry, upset people all around. I’m one of them.

There is no claims adjuster to pay for my damages or to make up for the inconvenience. Just me, a Husband Dude who already works too hard, and a stack of bills we racked up replacing things that decided to break down at the worst possible moments.

In auto adjusting terms, it’s a Total Loss.

Try getting news like that at noon and then march your ass back to your desk and continue working to 6:00 p.m. I dare you.

You aren’t so much sitting at your desk as you’re sitting on the proverbial curb, staring at the wreckage in front of you. Then the person who T-boned you comes walking down the aisle and asks if you’re okay.

Am I okay?

So many things come to mind, but okay is not one of them.

I’m blunt, and I’ve got a colorful vocabulary, but I’m not stupid. I still need to salvage something from this shit storm. That wreckage I’m staring at is still worth something. A means to another end.

In the ten seconds it took me to take a long drink from my bottle of water and she and I eyeballed each other, I got T-boned again. This time it was in a good way if there’s any such thing.

In those ten seconds I realized safety was no longer a priority. That was over and done with. Time to be a little daring. Time to quit doing something I don’t enjoy for a paycheck. Time to spend time with my loved ones instead of just coming home long enough to drop off a paycheck and then turn around and leave again. Time to do something I love. Time to do something I do anyway and start making money from it. Time to have a career instead of a job.

Time to make a left turn, bitches.

I put my bottle of water down, leaned back in my chair and looked her in the eye. I don’t know if I looked crazy or if I had my Resting Bitch Face on.

“I’m fine,” I said a little more emphatically than I would’ve liked.

I’d be lying if I said she didn’t look a little surprised.

“Are you sure?” she asked, with a concerned look on her face. I guess I looked a little crazed.

“Absolutely,” I said with a little more sarcasm than I intended and I shrugged. Because really, what is the expected answer to this question?

She stayed at my desk for a bit, chatting. I honestly don’t remember much of what she said. I think she might have been offering some tips for things I could do for job hunting around here since I made it clear I had no interest in moving with the company.

When she finally walked away, I opened Google on my computer.

How to make money writing.

That’s literally where I started. Probably two million searches later, here I am, with a ridiculous blog and very little real-world writing experience. If I’m to believe what I see on Twitter, I’m about twenty-five years older than many of the beginner bloggers out there, and I don’t write about lipstick or trying to keep my 143,000 followers while passing a statistics class.

I’m not making money.

Yet.

Baby steps, you know.

This is new territory for me. I’m mostly a safe person. In my life, I’ve probably only made two big left turns.

The first one was when I quit my job, packed up my apartment and my three cats, and I moved 900 miles to marry a Dude I met on the internet five months earlier.

Some might disagree, but it seems to have worked out well.

The second was when we took out a loan, went to a fertility doctor, and trusted that the procedure would work the first time because that’s all we had the money for.

It did. He’s fifteen now.

This is the third one. I’m at the red light, in the left-turn-only lane. My hands are gripping the wheel tightly, and my palms are sweaty. I’m nervously checking my rearview mirror, feeling the pressure to just move.

I’m not going to lie. I’m nervous. I’m worried. There’s a big part of me that is just certain I’m going to get creamed, but for the first time in a long time, I’m able to quiet that inner voice. For the first time in a long time, my doubts are less noisy than the voice saying: Just let go and do it.

When the light turns green, I’m making a break for it.

And I’m going to make it across. No T-bone this time, dude.

Count on it.