Living in this world was a big challenge to me before I realized that there was a lot that I could accomplish in my life by first learning to love and appreciate myself. For a long time, I had underrated my ability and felt like I had no place to fill or make a difference in this world. Everything that I was focusing on was not producing good results and with time I started hating myself. Worse still, I focused on what people said about my failures which made me feel worse about myself. Most people viewed me as a low achiever and a person who had no focus in life at all. Stress began to be a part of me and my life and I began to walk around feeling as though there was a dark rain cloud above me and some hefty pieces of lead in my shoes. I had begun to feel like I just couldn’t face people anymore, even my family and close friends just seemed to be constantly criticising me and the way I lived. What was going wrong? I just asked myself over and over, I thought I was giving life a good shot but it just kept handing me knocks. I really don’t want to go too much into it here but there was a period of about 3 months where I was jobless, friendless, boozed and bordering suicidal.
Finally when things were literally at their worst, I received a call out of the blue from an uncle whom I knew only from about 3 meetings of our families when I was young. He managed a big shopping mall and told me that there was a job going as a cleaner and that if I turned up the next morning I would have the Job. I told him I didn’t want it, that I was college educated and that cleaning toilets certainly wasn’t my thing. But for some reason I did show up, I suppose I was that desperate.
I was embarrassed to be there and hated my first week and did as little work as I possibly could and I spent my first weeks pay cheque on booze. The second week however, I was changed to the night shift which I really didn’t want to do. However, on the first nights break at about 1am, I met one of the most remarkable women that I have ever encountered. She just started telling me about her life and how she had 4 children and her husband had been killed in a car accident about 4 years prior. She told me that she had married very young and had never had the opportunity to gain any qualifications. She literally worked 3 jobs and that she enjoyed this cleaning job as it was the best money of her 3 jobs and she could basically do whatever she wanted as long as she got the job done. It also gave her time to think and listen to the radio which she absolutely loved. She never stopped singing and dancing.
She told me that I was lucky that I only had to look after myself and that if I had a college degree, ‘why didn’t I use it?’. ‘You could be doing anything she said’ with disbelieving look on her face. I just kept telling her that life sucked and everybody hated me and I hated cleaning and everything in my life was horrible and so on and so on. At the end of the break, she simply got up and said ‘I love working, I don’t care what the job is, I am working on my own terms, I work because I want to and because it gives me financial freedom and it allows me to look after myself and my family and all of those things make me feel happy and feel good about myself’. Then she said ‘I have meaning in my life, even if it can look from the outside that the meaning in my life comes from cleaning toilets’. She walked out of the break-room and was singing happily before she reached the door.
What she said got me thinking, she lived a completely selfless existence I needed to give up the self-hatred in favour of some sorely needed self-love, I needed to give up the negativity and find something to be positive about. This woman oozed positive happiness in everything she did. Underneath all of my pain and depression I suppose that is what I was missing, something to live for, something to aspire to, a challenge or a project that I could live out my talents and my abilities to find I wasn’t actually so bad and unlovable. And in fact the complete reverse is true that I am actually quite lovable and talented. It is amazing just how good you feel when you simply get rid of the massive preoccupation with self-doubt.
With a little bit of self-love and much less self-doubt I vowed that I would bring meaning to my life. Initially that meaning simply came from cleaning myself up. Not drinking at nights, going to see my family on the weekends and actually learning and succeeding at cleaning. I thought to myself, this is the job I now have, if I can’t do this, then I really should give up altogether. And I did, I mastered cleaning, I found that I could get all the things done that I needed to in about half the amount of time that my shift allowed and I soon became bored, but not before I managed to find all kinds of maintenance tasks that were way beyond the average cleaning tasks. It wasn’t long before my uncle offered me a new job with more pay and way more responsibility—All I thought of was ‘see, it is easy, you can do it when you want to, and look everybody wants you and likes you now, you are needed’. I decided not to take the job however, but actually go back out into the world and give it another go, I was now ready to start a meaningful life.
I could go on and on, but really the point of this article is not really about me, it’s just trying to share what I learnt. I hated my life, I hated myself and when you are like that, you have no meaning, you have no love and you have no happiness. I’m certainly no legend on huge money or kicking massive goals now, but I am now using my degree that I was able to get and I feel good about myself and I feel like I can give this life a good crack. I might just be able to pull of something that is really worthwhile. I’m not sure exactly what that is yet, but I will work it out easily in time. At present I am setting up my life the way I want to live it and once I have conquered that, I will move on to bigger and better things. Already, I have enough saved to buy a tiny apartment and I have a wonderful girlfriend who just might be the one, I have my newly found self confidence and my life feels more meaningful than I could have ever imagined and I am never ever going back.
About The Author
Floyd now has his life back on track but a lot of self love and understanding were necessary to get him there. This realisation that he found in himself has opened him up to many new ideas. This is one of them.