There was a papasan chair in that upstairs office. I’d hauled it up there myself.
Toward the end I’d go in, shut the door, turn the lights off, and sit in it. Not praying. Not thinking, particularly. Just sitting in the dark in the middle of a workday, numb, in a building full of people who had no idea I was up there.
What I remember turning over in that chair wasn’t how do I fix this. It was where do I go from here.
I found out over the next eighteen months, and the answer was: five jobs.
I had a sociology degree I couldn’t do anything with. My wife worked while I applied for things and didn’t get them, and after a couple of months of that I put on the best clothes I owned and talked my way into selling art at the Thomas Kinkade gallery in the mall.
I knew nothing about selling. I knew nothing about Kinkade. The paintings were pretty.
The model was this: a new piece would come out, and we’d work a list of everyone who’d bought before. I still remember most of the script. Hi, my name’s David, I’m with the Thomas Kinkade Gallery — we know you’re one of our loyal customers and we wanted to say thank you. Tom’s got a new piece in. Based on what you’ve bought before I really think this one’s a fit. Can I get you to come down and see it?
At twenty-four that felt like the stupidest thing I had ever been asked to do. I didn’t have the money to buy anything in that store and I was supposed to stand there talking about the work like an expert who loved it.
I never made a single call. Not one, the whole time I was there. I sold a few pieces to people who walked in the door, and the rest of the time I wrote poetry in the back.
I lasted under two months.
Pizza Hut next. Assistant manager, about six months.
They made an enormous deal about management trainees putting in forty-five hours a week — and then didn’t always schedule forty-five hours, and told you there’d be trouble if you didn’t hit it anyway.
There was also a thing at closing where you’d estimate how long your final tasks would take, clock out with that estimate, and then stay and finish. One night I clocked out about thirty minutes long and the district manager came by and I wasn’t there.
He accused me of cooking the books and fired me the next day.
That one was on me. I put the number in and I left before the number said I could. I wanted to go home; it was midnight. But it was my hand on the keypad.
Then a month spraying lawns in Oklahoma City. Weed killer and pre-emergent. That was the shortest one, and it ended for reasons I’ll leave alone.
Then February 2004. My mother had been quietly watching for anything I could do, and a friend of hers worked at an insurance adjustment firm that needed an office manager. That’s the job I’ve written about before — the one where the owner eventually offered me a dime.
Youth pastor to art salesman to Pizza Hut to lawn spray to office manager. Eighteen months.
Somewhere in the middle of that, I sat down and started writing a book called Okay, So Now What?
I still have the opening. It’s about being sold a lie — a degree that was supposed to guarantee a career and didn’t. And the diagnosis in it is correct, which is the part that gets me. Twenty-four years old and I wrote: I never sat down and planned out what I was going to do. I took the blame cleanly. I didn’t blame the university, I said the choice was mine.
Then I wrote this: This book is not as much for you as it is for those of you out there who are just like I was, clueless.
I was unemployed. I had no plan. I’d been fired twice in a year. And I sat down to teach other people how to plan their lives.
Here’s the part I didn’t understand until much later.
I’m forty-seven now. I could deliver that Kinkade script today with a completely straight face, because now I know what it’s for. It’s not a lie. It’s an invitation to a person who already likes the work, offering them a thing they’d want to know about. Every business that’s ever sold anything does some version of it, and the ones who do it well are doing a service.
Nobody ever told me that. Nobody said here’s why we call, here’s what it does, here’s the person on the other end and what they get out of it. I was handed the script and pointed at the phone, and because I couldn’t see the why, I decided it was beneath me and wrote poetry in the back of a store I was failing out of.
That’s the pattern. Not laziness. I’d have run through a wall for someone who explained the wall. I was headstrong and certain and completely willing to work — and utterly unable to move on anything until I understood what it was actually accomplishing.
Nobody came alongside me. Not at the church, not at the gallery, not anywhere in that stretch.
The kid in the papasan chair should have been keeping a journal. He wrote a manual instead.
I’ve spent this year trying to do the work rather than theorize about it — documenting what I’m going through instead of teaching from the far side of it. It took me until my forties to work that out. Turns out I got the posture wrong the first time I ever sat down to write something for other people, and then didn’t notice for twenty-three years.
I could still be saying the sentence I was saying at twenty-four. That if somebody would just lay it out in a way I could act on, I’d go and do it.
Nobody is coming to lay it out. I make the plan or there isn’t one.
I am not twenty-four anymore. There are times I have to remind myself not to think like he did.
David Willis 