I've been there before....staggering....lost.....trying to find my way through this world where nothing is promised. A place where disappointments can leave you with a broken heart and a crippled brain. A place where dreams are uttered but seldom followed and life is nothing but a cycle of mediocrity. I know this place well and occasionally find myself back at square one....lost trying to find my way through a world where nothing is promised....
I remember my final days at Howard University. My dean Dr. Dawkins called me into his office after my exit exams and said: "You had a great run here in our music department, the world is yours and anything that you want to be, you can be!" He followed that statement with: "Aaron, you should go to business school or even law school. You have the grades and the potential. I think that would be great for you after Howard." I told him I'd take it into consideration knowing that I was done with school. I had just formed a band and my plan was to work this summer camp job at Langdon Park Recreation Center in North East DC and get a job at W.W. Grainger in the fall and that's exactly what I did. My parents wanted me to move back to Cleveland but I knew if I did that, I wouldn't make it in music and that was my one and only goal.....To make a living creating, singing, and playing music.
Fall came and W.W. Grainger became my first place of employment as a post graduate. I hated the job but I loved my co-workers. We all had dreams and supported each other. They're an incredible group of people that were placed in my life at the right time. We went through rough times at Grainger and the only thing that kept me from going insane besides Jesus Christ himself was my choice of keeping my intention for working there in perspective. I would tell myself every day before walking in there, "Aaron, you are here to earn money to fund your dreams of becoming a full time musician. You are here to make Grainger work for you!" And that's exactly what I did. I worked as hard as I could for me and not for my boss that cared less about his employees and treated us like trash. I used my paychecks to pay my bills and purchase the music equipment I needed to build a better studio. To this day, I have ALL of the music equipment I purchased when I was working there and it's still turning a profit for me. I worked at Grainger from 7:30am to 4pm, Mon - Fri and worked for Aaron Abernathy from 5pm - 12pm either rehearsing, playing gigs with my band, or recording. Grainger was nothing but a means to earn capitol to build the frame work around my dreams.
This weekend I met up with two of my co-workers from Grainger that I hadn't seen since I left the job in Dec. 2006. It was great to see how far we have come from that place. We reminisced on how we used to sit in that call center and talk about how this wasn't the final stop for us and how we had bigger and better things to do with our lives and now we're doing just that. It's my co-worker Tiffany that I am most proud of. As we sat at the dinner table in the Nation Harbor celebrating our other co-worker Diane's 40th Birthday, she told me she finally left Grainger this past April. That was the best news I had heard all week!!!
She expressed how hard it was for her to watch all of us leave Grainger and she knew that she had to get out of there. Our boss was stressing her out and still treating employees like slaves and I love how real she was about noticing that the stress on the job was effecting her relationships outside of work and that really convinced her that it was time to go. She said she began to make Grainger work for her and went back to school on their dime to finish up her degree in accounting. Then she contacted our co-worker Jay who had left Grainger in 2007 after getting a much better job at NASA, to see if there were any openings there. Thank God they were hiring in her field! After three years of total focus, non-stop prayer, and working in that hell-hole while finishing up her degree, she was hired by NASA making way more money then she did at Grainger and she loves her job. I love hearing that!! I love that she made Grainger work for her until she didn't need them anymore. She gave our old boss her resignation and he was shocked! He told her "I never saw this coming!" Of course he didn't! It's interesting how some people will never see you as better than the position you're in. It's your job to shock them and I'm ecstatic that Tiffany did and chose to make life better for herself.
I love Tiffany's story because it's much like mines.....
I left Grainger in Dec. of 2006 for a substitute teaching job in Prince George's County, Maryland to give myself more time to work on music. Then I moved to Los Angeles in Sep. of 2008 to pursuit music on the West Coast and while in pursuit I was the operations manager of a funeral home in Watts. Then I returned to DC in Dec. of 2009 and recorded music, performed live, toured the world as a music director, and got a record deal in 2010 just to be told Soul music wasn't in. I lost the deal in 2011....the same year I got a vocal polyp and couldn't sing again until Dec. of 2012.
There have been plenty of times between leaving Grainger in Dec. of 2006 that I have hit rock bottom and had to ask for help and take a 9 to 5 to survive. I remember tucking my pride in and calling Tiffany in 2011 to ask if Grainger was hiring.......and her telling me that our boss said they had no positions open for me. I had to fight through those times of regret when I second guessed my decisions cause my dream seemed so far out of sight that I felt......lost.....as I staggered trying to find my way through this world where nothing is promised. A place where disappointments can leave you with a broken heart and a crippled brain. A place where dreams are uttered but seldom followed and life is nothing but a cycle of mediocrity. In my final days at Howard University, Dr. Dawkins told me the world is mine and anything that I want to be, I can be.....but I'm telling you if you want that world you have to take it! You have to make it work for you cause no one else will and few people, if any, will care about you. I'm just like Tiffany.....
In 2013, after years of struggling....we both discovered that the world is ours only if we decide to take it!
Are you doing what it takes to make the world yours....
Something to think about.....
Signed,
Ab
