What is the highest bid you can take to buy your dream? How much will you sacrifice to live your passion? Do you set aside your integrity, your pride, or justice to attain that one dream? If you had waited years, and years to be given the opportunity to do what you love, what would you be willing to sacrifice?
Much of my hope had been, that I would be lucky, and not have to sacrifice anything. I was very wrong. To pursue my dream, I have had to take injustice silently. My husband told me that he admires my restraint. Restraint in the face of injustice is very hard, very hard indeed. I can feel the deep pressure in my chest from wanting to scream, “this is not right!”. To screams those words could cost me my dream, my passion, the job that I was born to do. I would say that if it was a injustice toward another, I would have to scream. This is my injustice, I do not have to speak up if I do not want to.
What has been done to me here, is a simple act of unfairness. One side has done something very wrong to me, and that side has been rewarded for it’s deed by the very structure that is offering me my dream. True, it offers it for it’s own gain, but still, it happens to be my dream up on the board. Do I take the eraser to it and walk away? Do I release the pressure in my chest, claim justice and lose my beloved life’s goal. I have decided not to. I want to have my career.
My mother was once in this very same position. It was not her dream in question, it was her job, and one that she prided herself in. She would come home from work miserable. She had been pushed to the breaking point, over and over again. Eventually it was over, she had survived with her dignity in tact, but much worse for the ware. I remember telling her, the know-it-all stupid teenager that I was, to stand up for herself. Now I see why she did not do so. My mother and I have something in common now.
I was humiliated, scolded and belittled in a hypocritical situation. I knew what was happening was wrong, even my husband testified to that effect. I took it. I did not speak up for myself. Should I have? In doing so I would have been walking away from my knife, from my stove, from my passion, and from my dream to be a chef.
Was it worth it? My integrity for a chefs knife? Will the Great Spirit know what I had to restrain to hold that knife? Will my food taste like the woman who sacrificed what was right in order to have the honor of preparing it? Will it taste of the devotion that I have for it? Will you take a bite of creamy risotto and release a tear, as I did in the dark room of injustice? What would you pay?