I was speaking to a woman a few days go, and I mentioned that my career was taking off gradually. Then, yesterday, I had another chance to speak to her again, and we were chit-chatting about non-import stuff. Suddenly she changed a topic and said, "Why don't you keep quiet about your job?"
I asked her why, and she explained that I would be able to keep all the income to myself if I didn't tell anybody (including government offices) about my work. She sounded thinking that I was stupid to register myself as self-employed and pay income tax, National Insurance, and all the other money I must pay by law.
Yeah, she was encouraging me to become a benefit fraud. How dare she suggest such a thing to me!!!!! Isn’t it the duty of every citizen to pay tax so that the government can run the country? I’m just a bloody foreigner who has no right to vote, but I report whatever I earn and pay tax because I live in this country! With her being an “ordinary” person of this country (at least she is extremely proud of herself for being “ordinary”), no wonder this country is still deep in recession.
I know that she has been throwing great amount of pity on me for my circumstances. But being a bit unfortunate doesn’t give anybody a right to become selfish, does it? I wish she will realise that there is no “get out of jail” card in the real world. A couple of weeks ago, she kept on asking why I was not entitled to the cold weather payment from the government, despite I kept answering that I was not entitled to the payment because I was not as poor as she thought I was. But she seems not being able to understand why I have been trying my best to become totally independent and how desperate I have been to shed those humiliating "charity case" labels that snooty people have enjoyed plastering on me. Strange that she was talking ill of unemployed single mothers the other day, and she now suggested me to hide my earnings from the government.
She is always like, "Maybe you can get a job when your kids become old enough” or “Maybe you can get a par-time job at Tesco because your kids are at school during the day”, or “My friend’s daughter got a part-time job. Maybe you can do the same now. Oh, I forgot. She has her husband who looks after their kids when she is working in the evening”, etc. And of course she thinks that I should be able to get a job easily. Who in the right mind would employ a not-young-anymore single parent who has no childcare or who has a long history of unemployment??
It seems that she has no capacity to grasp the real world where many different people have many different career paths. All she can imagine is me getting a unskilled job like many “ordinary” mothers do, and language-related job is a something that people would do as a hobby at their spare time. So, there is no way she could imagine that I have a chance of earning a decent amount of money by pursuing a translation/writing career even when I started trying in my 30s. I have explained to her about this, but her fixed ideas on jobs and “ordinary” folks’ lives seem preventing her from understanding my achievable career plan. She knows that I’ve got a BA, but maybe she thinks that I am stupid because I haven’t lived in the way that “ordinary” university graduates would live.
And she and some other people seem not liking the idea of me trying to improve myself and my life by trying to work like this. I mean, I have a feeling that they would be happier if I stayed as a poor lone parent who they can feel sorry for. No, not “who they can feel sorry for”. It’s more like “who they can feel better about themselves by looking at”. I must say that I know some people who are genuinely happy about the small progress of my career, and I can’t be more grateful for their support. But other ones seem rather disappointed that I’ve started crawling up out of the bottom of the dumping ground. What’s wrong with them? Do I have to apologize for robbing them a chance of sneering at me behind my back?
Yeah, they make me more determined to become successful.
Idiots. I know the type...
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