Life After College - Part 2

                 Now on the surface, it might not be extremely apparent why getting laid off would be a good thing.  It has left me with little money saved for rent.  I got severance, which added a month or two to the fuse before “making it on my own” blows up in my face.  I got unemployment, which could add a few months on top of that.  There was the fact that I was miserable at work, so the good in being free of that is clear.  But, that doesn’t change the fact that being laid off left me with a small window with which to find out what comes next.  Saving money for the adventure I’d dreamed of after college?  Back at square one, and the clock is ticking.  It took me 9 months to find a job I hated, and I had no better prospects of a job I’d like better.  So, you could say that I was back to the middle of senior year, in need of a job, this time with the pressure of impending financial implosion on top of it.

                Yet as a left the China Basin for the last time, I smiled.

                Somewhere in the darkness of those final weeks I was working there, a small light was born in my soul, even as it was being crushed by my situation.  One night I was lying in bed, trying to avoid thinking about work.  And honestly, if you were to ask me to pin point the thought that started it all, I couldn’t.  I was half asleep, and all sorts of random thoughts were floating through my head.  One of those thoughts, my brain latched onto.  And in that daydreaming way we have when near sleep, I started building, semi-consciously.  I thought I was just building a dream.  A dream of how to keep other undergraduates from experiencing what I had just gone through.  A dream of a resource I wish I could have had, and wished I had right now.

                My sleepy mind took a step back to look at what it had built, and laughed at itself.  I wasn’t an entrepreneur or a social activist: I wasn’t the type to make a website.  Where had any of this come from?  And then I looked closer, and I was like, “Yo...yoo...YOOOO!”  This shit could actually work!

                Then I shook my head, and went back to sleep.  I resisted the urge to get up and write the idea down.  I told myself, if it is as great of an idea as you think, it will still be great in the morning.  But when I woke up, my mind began running on the idea immediately.  I started to flesh it out.  “Okay, it’s going to be a website, and it’s going to function like this…and in order for it to function like this it is going to need this”. 

I got to work, and instead of taking notes on my sales conversations, I was scribbling ideas down in my notepad.  I did this for almost 3 days before I told my mom about it.  I think part of me understood what this idea meant to me, whether it had potential or not.  I was like someone who had been abused, and found a kitten.  And in that kitten I saw a chance for the redemption of my soul.  I saw a way to rebuild myself from the ashes of my battered psyche just from the act of nurturing something pure and good.  I didn’t want anybody to ruin my certainty that what I was nurturing was pure and good.  I didn’t want anybody to tell me my kitten was really just a stuffed animal, transforming what had been pure into a sad parody of nurturing, further evidence of how hopeless my case really was. 

                I wanted to hold onto that feeling of purity so badly, but eventually I had tell my mom, show her this spark that had been born in me.  And to my immense relief, she told me that it was real.  But she told me that the true beginning of making this idea real was to share it, to create a community around it.  And I curled up around my spark protectively, instinctively.  I couldn’t bring it outside.  Not yet.  I still wasn’t convinced, and I couldn’t take the chance.  This spark was what I lived for.  It was how I got through the days.  I could stomach a day of work if it meant I could come home and scribble more ideas down in my afternoons.  “What were the key questions the survey would ask?  You could search by these categories, but what would be the potential options within those categories?”  No, I couldn’t risk that joy, small as it was.

                Then, a week after the spark was born, I was laid off.

                It was like the monster that had held me captive, the real monster I was hiding this spark from, just let me go.  I’d been hobbled, and suddenly I was free.  Free to stand, to stretch my mental muscles.  Free to roll the shoulders of my swagger.  Free to trust myself again.  And all my instincts were telling me one thing: go for it.

                And that’s what I decided to do.  I wasn’t going to try to find another job that paid me well enough to say I was young and successful.   I wasn’t drinking anybody’s Kool-Aid but my own.  Maybe I wouldn’t be able to save enough money to live abroad for a year like I had hoped to do.  Maybe I’d be foregoing some adventures.  But, at least I’d be foregoing them for another adventure.  At least I wouldn’t be sacrificing any more of my present for dreams of the future.  

                It was time to share this spark with the world.  It was time to make it real.

                But, how the hell was I supposed to do that?