Would you do it again?

"Success is not the key to happiness,

happiness is the key to success.

If you love what you are doing,

you will be successful."

- Buddha

One of the worst things about growing up and growing old is the knowledge that some of the best days of your life are behind you and cannot be repeated. Even if you could go back to a certain time, you are not the same person, and chances are, that environment is not the same, either. It would not be the same experience. I think about the times that I miss the most, but I think about them from the perspective of the person I am today, not the person I was back then. I also tend to picture those days as they were then, not as they are now.

Let me be more clear. I think a lot about my time working at Disneyland. I did it twice - '96-'00, then '01-'05. The first run was in Attractions, the second in Entertainment. Both times I left rather disenchanted with my experience. Both times I wished I had done a million things differently. However, I never regretted either experience. They were the experiences - good, bad, and ugly - that made me into the person I am today. I know that when I look back, and when my friends recall the days, they remember me being miserable there. And I was. In Attractions, I was immature, a know-it-all, and had a bad habit of sticking my foot in my mouth at all the wrong times. In Entertainment, I followed the wrong examples, and before I could see what was going on, I was on one side of the fence, and my leaders and co-workers were on the other. I did the jobs themselves very well, but once people had made their minds up about me, it didn't matter how good I was at the job itself. It's like Survivor - so much of the game is social, and the actual technical part of the game is not as important.

Those experiences taught me so much about what it's like to work for a big corporation, what it means to be a part of a team, whose examples should be followed and whose should merely be observed, and most importantly, how to be the best possible member of a team without trying to swim upstream too much. I think, especially in Entertainment, that I was so desperate to shine that I forgot the importance of being a supporting player. Imagine "Ferris Bueller" without Cameron. If you take a closer look, Cameron is the most interesting character in the whole story, and perhaps the movie is Cameron's story, told from Ferris's point of view. Cameron as a supporting player absolutely shines, and he is not trying to be the star.

Naturally, all of this is hindsight. If I had been the person then that I am now, I bet I would have done a lot of things better the first time around. However, as I said above, that would be to assume the world that I was a part of then is the exact same world now. We all know this is not the case. I left the park five years ago. So much has changed. It's foolish to think that I am a different person now, but everything else is the same.

I can see now that one of the turning points was when working in the park became about the money and not about the joy of being there. Now I know about the difference between working for joy and working for love. Once it became about the money, I became more obsessed with things like seniority, training, shifts, locations, and all of the things that were completely out of my control. Oddly enough, when it became about the money, I would ER every day, and my paychecks would be virtually nil.

Here's the thing that gets to me. While I know I was an unhappy person, and I know there were so many things about the jobs that I hated, I still feel joy when I think back on my experiences. I really love knowing I was once a Cast Member. I loved those little things that only CM's get to experience, like being in the park when it's empty or dead silent, or running up and down the mountain, through the jungle, through the temple, and through those areas that you have to be special to see. I felt excited knowing how rides worked or where the random exit doors were. I thought it was exciting seeing men and women transforming into characters, or even more so, seeing characters carrying their own heads around. It doesn't seem like much, but knowing the majority of the world doesn't get to see these things, it excites me to know I got to be part of the elite few who did.

How many events did I get to see that I never would have been a part of otherwise? I was there for the last night of the Main Street Electrical Parade, and I didn't have to park it on the curb all day. I was there when the Angels won the World Series and celebrated with a day of park events. I saw the premiere of the first "Pirates of the Carribbean" movie. I saw all of the special events people doing all kinds of things that I had never thought of. I saw what it takes to make it all so incredible. I am so blessed to have been able to experience it, even as an observer.

The most difficult question is whether I would do it again. For the longest time, I said that my time at Disneyland was among the happiest of my life, but I don't think I could work there again. Now, I want to re-evaluate that statement and say that yes, I would do it all over again. I would go back and be the person I wanted to be the first time around. I would take my 32-year-old, educated self, and re-live the feeling I had when it wasn't about the money. And that's the catch right there - it can't be about the money. It couldn't be my main source of income again. I would have to be a CR at most, working only weekends and summer nights. I would have to have my primary source of income elsewhere. I would want to remember the excitement of arriving, picking up my costume, and going out to have fun. Now I am better at not letting the little things get to me, and at keeping my head up and my smile on. Those were things I missed the first time around, and I would love to rewrite my own history.

If you could do it again, would you? Would you go back to the last thing that made you happy and do it all over again, before things like life got in the way?