That same friend of mine confessed this week that....

... he has hated his job every single day for the past 30 years. In fact, he says he knew he didn't want to be a lawyer from the minute he sat in his first class on the first day of law school. I was dumbfounded by this news and more than a little weirded out. The concept of hating what you do every day for years and years is bad enough, but to stay with it when you had a chance to bail at the beginning of the process? It gave me the heebiejeebies. So I called a second friend, also a lawyer, and relayed to him the basic gist of all this, keeping discretion intact. This second friend listened to my story, then revealed that HE TOO has hated every second of being a lawyer, from the day he passed the bar. I don't know about them, but I'm old enough to be seeing the end of the pavement ahead, and while I have plenty of miserable days at work, I can't say I hate it every day. In fact, there are parts of it I like pretty much every day. The idea of taking such a huge chunk of your life and spending it in abject hatred of what you do... and the fact that I know REALLY well two people who are living lives like this... it has really freaked me out.

I think some of us are just born a little different.

I knew this one guy in college. Total degenerate. Crazy messed up kid who came from a dead end nowhere mill town. He claimed to be a Satanist. He was weird and wild and definitely a guy who was going to end up in jail or on the streets. He never made it out of college, and then he just disappeared. He vanished. I half expected him to do something like this  eventually so I wasn't too phased by it. But what happened after that kind of made my head spin a little. He eventually turned up, 25 years later, as a Paris-educated world-famous wine critic. I'm 99% sure most of his bio is made up, but that makes sense because so is his whole new persona. And yet... it's like he KNEW. He KNEW he was free to burn up his teenage years because he was going to reinvent himself in the end. It's as if he knew from the very beginning. I SWEAR he did. That weirds me out a little. It's like my buddy who seems to have always knows deep down that he was going to become a big corporate attorney. I first met this guy when I was 13 and even back then it's like he had his sights set on where he is now. Or the girl I knew as a teenager who was absolutely WILD. I was mesmerized by how out of control she was. But it's like there was a preternatural calmness underneath the major hot mess that she was at the time because she could see twenty years down the road and see that she'd reinvent herself into the top upstanding tightly buttoned down pillar of the community and PTA leader that she is today. It's. Like. She. KNEW.

It's subsiding but not going away entirely...

Which is interesting.