PopcornJackTerry

The guy that is in training with me at my new job reminds me of someone. The problem is I can’t remember who; however this may not be a case where it is totally my fault because I think he actually reminds me of two people. Specifically I think he looks like someone I know and sounds like someone else I know. I even told him this, and that if he is ever talking to me and I just look away, it is because I am trying to hear the voice without seeing him in hopes of the voice clicking for me.

Granted, this is just one of the reasons I can’t place who he reminds me of, the rest of which rest solely on shoulders. I’m not good at remembering people’s names to begin with. I’m downright horrible at it, and the best I can do is make a joke about it. Dale Carnegie taught people that if you use the person’s name three times in the first minute of meeting them you’ll always remember it. “Hello Susan. It’s nice to meet you, Susan. Who else do you know at this party, Susan?” Of course in doing that you sound like you’re one step away from starring in the sequel to Rain Man. But when I make a joke about it-“Can you imagine saying something like…?”-I’ve used it three times and remember it forever. Forever being another way of saying fifteen minutes.

Another problem is that having lived so many places and meeting so many people, I can say this about any race: we all start to look the same. There have been times when I was convinced I knew someone only to finally remember that I didn’t know them but their doppelganger fifteen years ago when I lived in Los Angeles. The last problem comes from the fact that most of my socializing over the last, well, most of my life, has happened in bars, which helps create a situation of not being able to remember pesky things like names.

As happens when you start a new job, inevitably you end up playing the life story game. Since he’s 24 and I’m not, my story is a little bit longer and included me talking about where I moved here from. That information gets one reaction and one reaction only:

“Why would you move here from there?’

The easiest answer is the one that most people nod to and say “That makes sense.” I simply mention that my mom’s getting older, my nephews are getting older, and I figured it was time to be closer to them all. If all that answer does is set them up, then I can knock them out with “After 19 years in the restaurant business, I was burned out.”

Now to be fair, both of these answers have a kernel of truth in them. A lie of omission may still be a lie, but people I’m just meeting don’t have to know that, if certain situations hadn’t arisen in my life, I would have continued living not close to my aging family and not seeming burned out. Between those two answers, almost everyone has been satisfied. But not the guy I work with.

He seemed incredulous that I would have walked away from that. To him it seems like a golden opportunity, and it is, most certainly. Especially at 24. That’s how old I was when I got into the business. At the time I never had aspirations about being anything other than a busboy (I was going to be a world famous actor, you see) but as the world turned, one thing led to another and I ended up with a pretty enviable career. That makes it that much harder to explain to anybody why I don’t have it anymore. As he kept trying to rationalize in his mind how I could get back into the lifestyle up here, I felt myself struggling with how to end the conversation.

It certainly isn’t that talking about that makes me uncomfortable, it’s just that that chapter of my life is done. I’m used to just being blunt in situations like that, offensively so, just to shut people up and get my point across, and I knew that if i were to say why I left Key West the when and way that I did, he wouldn’t have anything else to say, period, much less about my job choices. problem is I didn’t want to do that. First week at a new job I didn’t want rumors circulating about my drinking problem, and in general I don’t know this guy from Adam. Yes I am open about what I’m going through (and a cynic could say that if anyone wanted to find out about my past and present they could do it in about two minutes, thanks to my blogs) but there is a reason for discretion, and not just because it is the better part of valor.

In the process of trying to redefine myself (or more accurately rediscover myself) it is up to me to cultivate my growth. Just because I can not change my past nor escape it doesn’t mean I have to be defined by it or chained to it. There is a lot that I will go through, some that I will choose to and some that I will have to, in regards to my past actions and behaviors. But that is work I have to do to rectify the mistakes in my past. My present is a new situation, and I have to learn to judge it on its own merits, and trust my own merits along with it.

Every day we are presented each of us with a new slate of opportunities and we have the power to do with them what we choose. My past is mine and how I choose to have it serve me as I move forward is my choice alone. But just because any of us have made mistakes in our past does not mean we have to continue to identify ourselves by them. Our lives are here and now, and we owe it to nobody but ourselves to be fully present in them.