This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs.

Retail saleswork. Ugh.

Really. Of all the mind-numbing activities to undertake, this is the least pleasurable. It's far too routine. I can feel myself becoming stagnant. With passing minute at work, I pay less attention to what I am doing. Rapport with customers is automatic. Conversations are mass-produced--ready to use. There is no art, no care here.

When I am able to actually listen to myself, I hear a weighted tongue. Cumbersome. Simple syntax and grammar become difficult. I feel idiotic.

What's more, I feel uninspired. I love people. I love working with people. But not in this setting. You can't really relate to anyone one while you're pawning your wares. Just stick to the salespitch and you'll be just fine. No Mystery Shopper will find fault!

I need more space. This work is too circumsribed. I need the variety, the uncertainty. The possibility.

Maybe that's why I write. Some people sky-dive, others bungee-jump or join the Hell's Angels. I write. That's how I live dangerously. There's an element of fear in writing: writing lays bare all your thoughts, neuroses and experiences (well, at least those you choose to lay bare. That's also part of the beauty of writing: choice/possibility.) What's more, your livelihood is, to a certain extent, dependent upon what another thinks of your talent. You could be the most talented writer in the world, but if a publishing house doesn't think your work will sell, you'll be lucky to live out of a cardboard box! Deriving satisfaction from your work and deriving sustenance are two different things. Things which are often at odds.

It really is a fine balance. But I love it, this precarious line. Perhaps loving the paranoia that I will never again write a single phrase of any quality is perverse, destructive.

Perhaps.

But it's better than stagnation.