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"let me scrub that brackish line"
Dec. 10th, 2019 01:58 pm Today, for a couple of hours, I leaned into this semi-retirement.
Today, I must call many people and pay many bills, write a handful of emails and make myself some lists. Then I go to therapy, a massage, and come home. If I am motivated enough, I will also go shopping for something for dinner, because I am going to very tired emotionally and hopefully very relaxed.
I logged onto The Beast's (old employer) job application portal to see what sort of openings they had, possibly just to make myself feel a little bit more like a failure. I don't really have an answer when people ask what I do, and it's not just not having a job, or not being a nanny anymore. Housewife, Spark's chauffeur, slowly slowly bleeding out in the name of an unachievable hope for a community I partially identify with, person with very many pets? Somebody finally admitting she's a tiny bit too broken to function in the world right this moment? I mean, I've admitted that all the time, but admitted it while functioning, so much like being a functional alcoholic, it doesn't seem like that much of a problem.
I did a thing, I thought I had accurately modeled the consequences. And some of them I had, but some of them I couldn't have imagined and so didn't and am now dealing with all this fallout that leaves me feeling unvaluable at best and worthless at middle distance (I'm not sure I'm ready to admit to myself what at worst is). And I don't know what these past two years have looked like to anyone, even to myself, but I think I might have strained some emotional muscles doing so.
Which sounds so steeped in self-pity that I want to delete and put something brave and forward-facing in its place, even if I feel neither brave nor forward facing. After some googling I found out the name for the space between forefinger and thumb is called a purlicue, and I keep fitting that space to the base of my neck, in some self-soothing gesture that I really don't understand the origins of.
I got up at my usual 6:15ish, pursued from sleep by some disorienting but familiar dream combining an old workplace, conA, and an awful old roommate. But I brushed my teeth, went downstairs, made myself a giant cup of Upton's Cacao Kisses tea (which tastes (to me) like a good strong black tea that was introduced to cacao nibs on a speed date and never followed up) and read 2/3rds of the latest book I am reading. (a near-future retelling of Sherlock Holmes, but Holmes and Watson are black women, and the political landscape has devolved into something that sparks another civil war. The tech is sort of incidentally SF but the story is definitely about the people and the mystery)
Today, I must call many people and pay many bills, write a handful of emails and make myself some lists. Then I go to therapy, a massage, and come home. If I am motivated enough, I will also go shopping for something for dinner, because I am going to very tired emotionally and hopefully very relaxed.
I logged onto The Beast's (old employer) job application portal to see what sort of openings they had, possibly just to make myself feel a little bit more like a failure. I don't really have an answer when people ask what I do, and it's not just not having a job, or not being a nanny anymore. Housewife, Spark's chauffeur, slowly slowly bleeding out in the name of an unachievable hope for a community I partially identify with, person with very many pets? Somebody finally admitting she's a tiny bit too broken to function in the world right this moment? I mean, I've admitted that all the time, but admitted it while functioning, so much like being a functional alcoholic, it doesn't seem like that much of a problem.
I did a thing, I thought I had accurately modeled the consequences. And some of them I had, but some of them I couldn't have imagined and so didn't and am now dealing with all this fallout that leaves me feeling unvaluable at best and worthless at middle distance (I'm not sure I'm ready to admit to myself what at worst is). And I don't know what these past two years have looked like to anyone, even to myself, but I think I might have strained some emotional muscles doing so.
Which sounds so steeped in self-pity that I want to delete and put something brave and forward-facing in its place, even if I feel neither brave nor forward facing. After some googling I found out the name for the space between forefinger and thumb is called a purlicue, and I keep fitting that space to the base of my neck, in some self-soothing gesture that I really don't understand the origins of.
