Life of an Introvert - Part I

In 2010 I had a breakdown. The details are for another day and another post, but suffice to say you will never find me on mental health medication again for as long as I live (as Jerry Seinfeld would say, “not that there’s anything wrong with it.”) I got out of the hospital May 25, 2010. I remember because it was my ex-husband’s birthday. He was more concerned about getting a cake than the fact that I was coming home. My mom drove me to a bakery and, if I may so myself, we bought a pretty bangin’ cake.

A couple months rolled by and I was still unable to work, again, for reasons that don’t matter for the purposes of this post. I knew I had to do something, anything, but leaving the house at that time wasn’t an option. I researched work-from-home jobs but they all seemed like scams. In November I found one -- typing legal transcripts from home. It sounded too good to be true, but since I had been a paralegal before leaving work, I had the experience of legal terminology, formatting documents, and my typing speed was pretty kick-ass.

By the end of November, I had my first assignment. I didn’t take a lot of work the first week because I still had my doubts that it was legit. I also didn’t quite understand the pay scale so I wasn’t sure how much I would make per audio hour. But when my first check arrived a couple weeks later for $600, I knew I had found the right thing for me, at least temporarily.

I had never held a job much more than a year to that point, and the jobs I did hold were generally odd. There were some regular retail jobs in there -- Rite Aid, PetSmart -- and then a stint as a journalist for a small-town newspaper which really just entailed covering local town meetings. I wanted to write and it satisfied that urge to a degree, but I wanted to write about BIG stuff. Murders, scandals, not whether Karen Karenson believed she should be allowed to put up a fence that encroached her neighbor’s property line or some bullshit.

The paralegal job was nowhere near as glamorous as it sounds (or maybe I’m the only one who thinks it sounds glamorous.) It was a single attorney in his late 60’s who had been sued more times than his clients with an office attached to his home. He was a hoarder -- a real hoarder. He had groceries that had expired ten years prior still sitting on his countertops. There was one narrow path you could walk through to get to his bedroom where we were required to wake him up at noon or 1:00 p.m. so he could start his day. (What attorney doesn’t wake up until noon on a regular basis?) It was not out of the ordinary to find him asleep naked in his bed, his C-PAP machine strapped to his face like a rabid alien demanding what life he had left in him. He also represented a debt collection agency an hour from his home office, which explained a lot of the numerous lawsuits he was embroiled in.

He was the example of a horrible boss, but not a bad person. Anyone who worked for him was entitled to free representation on any matter for the rest of their lives, regardless of whether you went out on good terms or not. And he wasn’t a bad lawyer. While working for him, he helped me with two traffic tickets. The only person he probably wouldn’t help -- not that she would ask -- was his similarly-aged office manager who bilked him out of thousands of dollars -- probably hundreds of thousands.

After several months of working in his home office, I requested to transfer to the debt collection agency where I would still work for him, but under the collection agency. When my “new boss” asked the attorney how much I made so he could make sure the pay was matched, the attorney told him $15 an hour, winking at me. I had really only been making $10.50. I remember hugging him and thanking him.

Years after working for him I discovered his home had been condemned and an agency that assists senior citizens had taken it upon themselves to help him restore it. He died broke and disbarred only a few months later. But when all was said and done, I learned a lot working for him and I certainly wouldn’t have gotten where I am today if it wasn’t for him. But I digress.

Ten years later I’m still transcribing. I moved on from the major national company that paid pennies for your work and went on to form an LLC. I am now a nationally-certified transcriber and take my work seriously, even if a lot of people don’t. It sounds so easy -- just type what you hear -- but you would be amazed at the drivel people have tried to pass off as a verbatim transcript. It’s time consuming and most weeks I work seven days a week, but I make great money. It was this job that allowed my husband and me to move halfway across the country to start a new life. It was this job that allowed me to be there for friends and family when they needed me because I had no boss to answer to.

I never intended for it to stay this way. It was only supposed to be a short-term thing while I healed. In fact, after the divorce of my first husband, which was only possible because I had this job to keep me afloat, I decided to enter cosmetology school. It had been a dream of mine but I had chosen instead to get married and not rack up student loan debt, which I ended up doing anyway. I maintained a full-time school schedule and a full-time work schedule, and some semblance of a social life was thrown in there.

Before I even graduated cosmetology school, I was already working at a national chain salon. After graduation, I continued the transcribing as well as the salon and my new boyfriend moved in at the end of 2014, six months after my divorce. Three incomes was necessary in New Jersey. He worked full-time, six days a week, morning to evening, as an executive chef at a seafood restaurant. I alternated work at the salon, some days mornings, some days evenings, and the rest of the time was transcribing. We had no life outside of that. Monday was his only day off and he was generally too exhausted to do anything and just wanted to catch up on news or friends or sports.

But we kept it up for three years, never getting ahead but at least surviving. During that time my mother passed away, his mother moved to Florida, each of our sisters had a child, and my sister’s husband passed away in a horrid car accident when my nephew was only five months old. Somehow through it all we managed to keep going, and in February 2017 we married in a small ceremony in our living room with an officiant we hired off the internet. We had a 6-foot sub for everyone to enjoy followed by a cake, and then we shooed everyone out so we could continue on to Foxwoods, Connecticut for our honeymoon where we gambled away my tip money from the past three months, ate a couple lavish dinners, and got a couples massage.

But shortly after returning from the honeymoon we knew we couldn’t keep up the game any longer. New Jersey wasn’t going to work for us anymore. I had dreamed since I was a child of a house in the country, of working for myself. I hated the new salon I was working at. It was a full-service over an hour from where we lived. I hated the boss, the people, and the customers. I was tired and as an introvert, there was no time for me to reboot. I wanted to transcribe full-time. It was in June of 2017 that I met Karen (not that kind of Karen) -- well, “meet” in the loosest sense of the term, since it wasn’t until over a year later that we actually met in person.

The previous January I had sent out multiple applications for transcribing for smaller local agencies, wanting to branch out from the major company I was doing work for. I wasn’t certified yet and had no idea what I was truly doing at that time. In June, Karen called me. It was early in the morning and I was working at the salon. I called her back on my lunch break and she asked if I wanted to send a sample of some work for her to review.

And thus began one of the greatest, most enduring, and most enjoyable friendships I’ve ever had. She became a mentor, encouraging me every step of the way whether it be certification or our ultimate “big move.” Even when we moved 1,100 miles from our home state of New Jersey to the countryside of Arkansas for my husband’s work, we still talked nearly every day, whether about life, children, or the current workload we had.

This is the only job I’ve been able to hold for this long. I have a home office, dual monitors -- one for research, one for transcribing -- and have invested thousands of dollars in the right equipment and software. We have branched out to numerous states and even obtained contracts. I knew early on, even before I reached working age, that I never wanted to work for someone else. Sure, I could. I have. We all have to do things we don’t like from time to time if we want to get anywhere in life. Those that think otherwise are usually the ones blaming the world for never making anything of themselves. But at the end of the day, the only acceptable long-term career for me was owning my own business. Bonus points if I could operate it from home.

For all the good it has given me, there has been some bad. There have been MANY sleepless nights, many missed special occasions because I needed money and chose to work instead of attending them (but I must stress that that was a CHOICE, just as I also choose not to live with regrets.) There have been child rape trials that have consumed my every waking moment for weeks on end. Camera footage of shootings and deaths that haunted my dreams. A police interview of someone with D.I.D. who murdered someone that was, at best, eerie. (Note the lack of detail due to confidentiality.)

As I strive to maintain positivity in my life and continue my spiritual growth, especially in the last couple years, I have grown weary of the constant negativity this work sometimes provides. Working 80 to 90 hours most weeks sucks the good vibes from my soul but yet, I press on as best I can, for everyone deserves that accurate transcript. I love the work, but sometimes I hate it. I’ve grown mostly accustomed to the ugliness in the world and I do my best to separate myself from it -- and, in fact, I have gotten pretty good at that -- but when a child is explaining what an adult did to them in excruciating detail, it can be hard, especially for a person that is all too familiar with that reality.

I got what I wanted, though. It’s not glamorous and I’m not rich, but in a sense, it is the “dream job.” Of course, my ultimate life goal is to be an author, but for right now, this will suffice. And when all else fails and I’m up working at 2:00 a.m. to meet a deadline, I bring myself back to one transcript in particular where a person’s cell phone began to ring with the Darth Vader ringtone just as an attorney began to speak. Then I laugh to myself and keep on typing.