False Pride.

I was fired last week. After the soft landing at the usual cafe from my erstwhile employers, I called my girlfriend. Despite I'd just been fucked up a great career leap, she later described my tone as "happy".

I was happy because I hated the job.

It's a commonly ascribed wisdom that nobody should go against their nature. A hetero pretty boy drug addict, sucking cock and bending over to pay for the needle. For six years my bank account has been refilled by going against mine.

I got into sales. There were many good, logical reasons at the time. I was unskilled. On paper, at least.

For the practical reason, sales was one of very few seek.com.au categories I could convince someone to hire me with potential to escalate well above minimum hourly pay. Except there was no pressing practical imperative. My rent in a share house was only $100 a week. The dole was enough. The get a job threats at the usual intervals were easily managed.

But there was another, much more compelling reason. It's galling to admit, my motivation was hardly original. To steal from Chris Rock, it's the same and only reason all men have bothered to leave the cave. I wanted to get laid.

Back then, the line I told myself was: learn how to talk to people. Ten years housebound by morbid obesity had ingrained a million behavioral kinks. Though I'd got down to a number and shape closer to nominal not-fat, social deformities remained. Stuttering, self conscious ticks, conversational sidesteps into bizzaroworld -- I'd become that afraid, weird kid in primary school, walking circuits around the schoolyard at recess, with no friends, withdrawn into a self-made alternate universe.

Sales was the vocation of human relations. Learning sales was learning human relations. Social misfits didn't make good salesman. At best I hoped to learn how fake normalcy. When I started on-the-job sales training, I was awful. I was embarrassing. It wasn't humiliation because to be humiliated, one must possess some remaining pride.

Eventually I learned. I wasn't a natural. I faked everything: the smile, the smalltalk, the charisma, the lot. My acting performance as Well Adjusted Human #1, on stage between the hours of 9am to 5pm, was literally award winning. Confidence begat confidence. People began to respect me. The respect was addictive, and bound to my accomplishments as a salesman.

The satisfaction of making sales diminished when I no longer had anything to prove. I could confidently deal with almost anyone. Even women. When my girlfriend moved in together, the malcontent that once pushed me to go against my nature and make sales, it moved out. My salesmanship had served its purpose.

So this week I'm interviewing for a new job. Somehow, I've got a very good chance to become the editor of an online magazine. The magazine is crap, the subject of the articles the antithesis of anything I respect. So I won't be able to completely respect what I do. I was twenty six years old when I got my first adult job, became a salesman. I'm thirty two, and throughout the last six years I could have completed a writing course a dozen times over. The piece of paper would have got me through the door.

I'm optimistic. Writing this I've got nervous palpitations, on a couch, just thinking about it. When I rehearse the scene when a stranger asks "what do you do?", I'll be able to explain and feel pride. Not the false pride gained from the respect of others -- but the true pride of respect for myself.