I'd like to say I'm just having a midlife crisis (I turn 50 this coming Saturday!) because I am having serious, serious misgivings about continuing on with my career. Alas, I still love what I do, but I have noticed in the past couple of years that I simply don't do what I do very well anymore. I'm having trouble concentrating. Almost every.single.job.lately I have looked down with horror at my fingers as they just seem to be flailing around writing the most normal words in an unintelligible way. Okay, for MOST of you the whole steno thing is completely unintelligible, but when I'm writing, those things that are not identified in my dictionary come up in capital red letters that mean, to me as a court reporter, what the ....?
I blazed through school from 1989 (9 months of night school) through 1992, even though I had a baby during that time, making four kids for me in total. It was such a rush to learn something new and to see myself rapidly progressing. After nearly ten years of an abusive marriage, in which I was still entrapped, it was restoring to my soul to receive the praise from my teachers as I did well. Watching myself accomplish so much was very exciting. It was very much like drinking a long, cool drink of water after years in the desert.
I’ll never forget those first years. I was sure that as I became more experienced, my writing would miraculously become nearly error-free. It’s been almost 19 years since I began working as a court reporter, and that day never came; however, I did find that I was really good, especially with medical testimony. I enjoyed my work so much. It paved the way to bring me partially out of the cave of fear and self-consciousness to a place where, because I needed to speak up, I was able to become more comfortable speaking with strangers. Again, after all those years suffering emotional and physical abuse, my opinion of myself had plummeted, and now I had a job to do where I could walk into the room and be assured that I had a place and was needed for what I could do.
I was always sure I would never want to work in court, so it was rather startling to realize that I longed for that opportunity. I was so grateful to be interviewed and then hired for a position with the courts in Fresno back in 2005. I was only there for just over a year, and I often regret…no, I regret every single day that I left that job and jumped back, blindly, into the world of freelance. Mind you, I love Virginia, and I am glad we came here. And face it, my salary alone wasn’t enough to keep us afloat; however, the benefits and the steady paycheck were both tremendous blessings. And I loved that job. It was awesome to be part of a team. It wasn’t boring, by any means. I was moved around from court to court, so the people and the cases and the circumstances were constantly different. Unfortunately, there are no full-time reporters in the courts here in Virginia. Darn it.
When I’ve been asked to transcribe proceedings from my court days, I have been amazed at how clean my notes were. I didn’t drop, or at least I dropped very rarely. Part of that was due to my experience. Which brings up a side note. I was amazed that some of the court reporters who were my colleagues in the courts guarded jealously the opportunity to be assigned to a particular judge. I definitely got the feeling that they saw me as a newcomer who hadn’t yet done my time and didn’t deserve that opportunity. But the glaring part, to me, was that many of them had not been working as court reporters as long as I had, and they had only been in the courts a little longer than I. At any rate, the other reason, I believe, that my notes were so good when I worked in the courts was that I was in good physical shape. I didn’t have to schlep my equipment all over the place because I usually worked in just the main building in Fresno. In addition, I had been taking an anti-depressant/anti-anxiety medication for a while, and one of the first things I had noticed was that my concentration level was dramatically increased. In my profession, we often get behind or trail a few words when speakers speed up, but we can retain them in our memory as we catch up. When concentration goes, you lose that ability, which is devastating to a court reporter. My husband also pointed out, and this is something that I hadn’t realized until he brought it up, that I seemed better able to handle the bumps and jolts of life. If you refer to a previous blog where I talk about brake pads, you’ll understand that during the time I was taking this medication, I always had brake pads, and my life just peaceably ambled along, despite the ups and downs.
Now I have no insurance. Our financial picture is a disaster, much of it our own making, but a large enough portion due to some really crummy luck. I’ve spent 19 years working at this job and having nothing to show for it but an aching body and two decades of stress. It doesn’t help that one of my peers, only six weeks older than I am, has progressed far enough in his life that he has this awesome big white house up in DC, and here I am, just renting a cute but tiny split level in Virginia. I was excited to have the opportunity to interview for a federal court position a few months ago, but I really didn’t think I had a prayer. Sadly, it appears I was correct, and I secretly believe it was a good thing. I feel I’ve deteriorated so much.
This has been a tough summer for us. We never took an actual vacation. Well, Darryl and the kids managed to carve one out of our trip to Utah, but I only had the one afternoon in Park City (which was awesome!) and then the stops we made on the way home. It kicked our butts financially because I had given up two weeks’ work, and then I came home to the traditional slow time in August. Lauren, if you’re reading this, please do not think I regret for one single second that we came out there. I am so grateful for a wonderful husband who recognized even before I did that Lauren and I needed each other at least a little bit at that time.
No, the reason I bring up the tough summer is that it came on the heels of about three of the worst years in my life where I often wondered, “What’s next?” I didn’t think I could manage the stress and sorrow with which I was continually bombarded. Let me assure you that stress does a number on you physically. I haven’t been to the doctor for a checkup in about six years (!), but I’ll bet my cholesterol is high. I’ve lost a lot of the weight I had gained when I was taking that anti-depressant (seriously, I’m depressed so you think I should take a medication that will make me GAIN weight?) Still, I just don’t have any of the bounce…or the brake pads to be able to hit the potholes in my life and just keep going.
It was bad enough when it was merely making a mess of my personal life. The life that resides inside my head. Then I noticed that my physical body was beginning to suffer. I’m feeling aches and pains I’d never had before. My arms ache all.the.time. My back often gives me trouble. If I even think about not taking medication for my headaches, they will come at me with a vengeance. Much of the time they come at me with a vengeance right through the pain medication. And my moods are getting darker and darker. I used to call myself Polyanna. Now I feel like Pollyanna but in a movie written by Tim Burton.
Over the past couple of years I have noticed that I was having more and more days on the job where I simply wasn’t doing very well capturing the record. I found I had to rely on my audio more and more to help me fill in the couple of words here and there that I just had to let go. I was terrified that someone would ask me to read back a part where I had resorted to writing KHEK/KHEK (check/check), which would mark my transcript so I would know I need to listen to the audio in that part. And then that day came, and I had to say with a red face, “I’m sorry, I was unable to capture that. Please repeat.”
This year has been the worst. Even the “easy” jobs have been hard. Plus work has dropped considerably this year, so I’m afraid to check my year-to-date income to see how bad it really is. Then we came home from our unexpected trip to Utah, and I have had about a dozen jobs since then. And every.single.one.of.them. has kicked my butt. It’s great to HAVE audio to check, but my edit time has increased so much that I am simply exhausted after a job, knowing that I’ll be forced to work much longer hours to make the transcript reach my usual high standards.
And now I’m struggling with thoughts of death. Not my own. Sadly, while I wouldn’t take my own life, I wonder whether when push comes to shove, I’d have the desire to fight hard to stay alive? But the worse part is dwelling on thoughts of losing my loved ones. I never had those fears or worries, but here I am, almost falling apart in tears over this imagined misery.
Yesterday I came home from a job that should have been good, but it wasn’t. I’m no longer expecting them to be. And my sweet husband held me in his arms as I told him that I just want to quit being a court reporter. Several years ago I had interviewed for secretarial positions because I was only doing one deposition a month, and we were dying. It was really hard, though, because I clearly loved what I was doing. No surprise that no one called me back after I interviewed because even they could see my heart was not in it. But now I’m stuck with the realization that on Saturday I will be 50 years old, and I not only have nothing to show for all my years of hard work, but I don’t even like it. I don’t jump out of bed, eager to start the day’s work. I’m tired before I even get on that train. It doesn’t bring me joy or even mild contentment anymore. And, like I said, the one thing I’m good at I’m no longer good at.
But what does someone do who has been trained for ONE thing and wants to go ANYwhere else but here (jobwise)?
