Six Weeks, Two Days, Three and a Half Hours

Doesn’t sound like a very long time, does it? Well, it’s the longest I’ve lasted at any job in the past 4 years. Woohoo for the personal record I set there, bummer that I had to stick the punctuation mark at the end of that sentence today. I wanted it to work out. Desperately. But given my history with sales focused jobs, the writing was on the wall from the beginning.

Nonetheless, I accomplished a few small feats in the short weeks I was able to remain gainfully employed . . . pretend you’re impressed:

1. I arrived early to work every single day. Sometimes by 15 minutes! I realize other grown-ups do not consider this a marvel because they are on time to their jobs every single day. As a perpetually-5-minutes-late person, however, this goes down as a bloody effing miracle in my book. And no, I’m not English.

2. I (almost) secured a full-time position with benefits . . . if I would’ve met the metrics required to last beyond the probationary period, that is. The only other time that’s happened these past 4 years was when I got hired to sell gym memberships. Lasted one day at that.

3. I functioned as a semi-normal human being for the entire duration. I showered daily, put on makeup, and did my hair. I packed a lunch, ran errands, did chores when I got home, and carried out the mundane tasks of living. Again, not a grand triumph unless you barely leave the house. Brushed my teeth twice a day even, how do ya like that?

4. I socialized both in- and outside of work and was only a grouchy introvert a small portion of the time. In fact, I made a few friends and found it could be plausible that I am an acceptable human being. I went out for (3) drinks and pushed through my feelings of being a pathetic loser while surrounded by blackout-drunk coworkers who seemed to be just getting started as I was cashing in for the night. I stayed past what was comfortable, so at least I stretched outside of my box even if I’ll never fit in with my peers.

So I rejoined the land of the living. For a brief spell, at least. Built up some momentum. Now it’s time to hunker down, fill out a thousand online job apps again and pray to high heaven I don’t fall back into severe malfunction.

Unrelaxing relaxation.

I went for myofascial release today. 

Periodically my hip gets so bad that I nearly go berserk.  Then I google and research and strategize what I will attempt next to make the pain go away. 

So for various reasons I am running late to get to this appointment that is twice as far of a drive as I had allowed for.  Rushing to go relax, I thought to myself.  Makes a lot of sense. 

Because I am late, she forgoes the 2-minute clothing removal and does the MFR with my clothes on.  On any other day I would’ve thrown on yoga pants or something comfy, but no, toDAY I wear jeans.  Awesome. 

We can’t start on my hip right away because my sacrum is tilted out of whack, so we start with spinal decompression.  Have I ever injured my tailbone?  Why yes.  Yes I have. 

I knew I should have gone to the chiropractor first.  I scold myself for another failure.  I am annoyed that I always do the same crap, that I am always late, that I am supposed to be relaxing but my jeans aren’t very bendy and the whole thing is the opposite of the slow, gentle healing it is intended to be.  I wonder why I ever leave the house. 

She works on my jaw next.  I try to put aside my OCD issue about people touching my face in hopes that my TMJ will be alleviated, but mostly I think about my pores getting clogged and the breakouts I will wake up to tomorrow.

On the drive home I call to see if there are massage openings at this other place I go to sometimes.  In 25 minutes...perfect.  I squeeze in an adjustment since the chiro’s in the same building and, after all, why do another treatment when everything’s in the wrong place?  More scurrying around. 

For the massage I go bare.  Well technically, first I get on the table with my panties and my dignity in place, then I decide it will just make it awkward for her to access all the hip and glute muscles that have aching trigger points.  Sigh. 

Facedown with my head in the little circle, I fail to close my eyes soon enough and have to ponder the handwritten “grandpa” tattoo on her feet, along with her french-tipped toes.  She starts with my legs, and I anger at the stretch marks in places that weren’t there a couple of years ago.  I beat myself up over a few hundred more things. I panic at the slight breeze in my nethers, where a properly-tucked massage sheet normally should be shielding.  Oh, well.  Look at my privates.  See if I care. 

I tell myself that even fat people deserve massages as I internally apologize to the girl for having to squeegee across my fat rolls and dimples and stretch marks.  I contemplate the vulnerability of baring one’s ugliness to a complete stranger, who - truth be told - doesn't really have much of a say.  I wonder about the stories these people could tell of the bodies they have to look at.  The possibility, not the promise, of being in slightly less pain allows me to surrender to this humiliation. 

Accompanying me as always, the despair lingering beneath the surface.  This is my body I’ve destroyed that I don’t want anyone to ever see again, this body that nobody (save a massage therapist or doctor) has touched in years and maybe never will again.  This is my pain that may never go away that has ruined my life and my hope and my health.  This is my summation of failures in the world and the reason I don’t want to be with myself, much less someone else.  

Knowing when to give up

I've never been great at letting go.  At times, the refusal to quit is a great trait to have.  But there are those other moments in life when the line between persevering ... and trying to force something to happen ... gets blurry.  When is enough enough?  When you're satisfied that you've given it your best last shot?  When you're foolishly clinging to something that is probably not meant to be?

Being a person who has immense difficulty accepting failure, I've certainly held fast to many a thing long past its expiration date.  I've doled out too many chances to people who didn't deserve it.  I've given friends the benefit of the doubt, when clearly calling to see how I'm doing never crosses their minds.  But what's really weighing heavily on me at the moment is my career path.

I have a useless master's degree that hasn't been put to use in nearly 4 years.  I invested 7 years of my life in college, worked 2 years in my field, and now can't even get a job close to what my degree should be worth.  Am I desperately clinging to my "investment" because of what it *should* have earned me by now, under some delusion that the seven hundredth job application-resume-cover letter-transcript-reference letter sent out will pay off with a position after all this time?

Ironically, I DID give up on this career 3 years ago.  I gave away all of my books and resources and 99% of the materials I had spent years gathering.  But after trying in vain to get any kind of other job, I have found my degree essentially useless for that purpose.  In fact, I could have gotten more job offers with JUST a high school diploma.  So I tried once again to get the job I am licensed to do and loved at one time.  It's not happening.

Honestly, I just want to say "f**k it."  I am so blessed tired of begging for a job I don't even know if I want anymore.  I have screwed the whole daggone thing up: life, love, work, home, friendship.  *sigh*

One of those days. SOME of those days.

Sometimes I just wish I’d had the guts to get it over with the first time.  The thought crosses my mind a lot lately.

I am so tired of struggling.  I know I’m not the only one, but the only head I’m in is mine.  I just want ONE thing to start going right, instead of trying to cram pieces together that never seem to fit. 

Facing the reality of having accomplished so little to get my life back on track in (going on) four years now ... I just can’t effing stand it sometimes, and I want out.  I’m tired of playing this game and watching everybody else win.  A-holes that don’t deserve to win get to raise their trophies and gloat, and to be honest it makes me really friggin’ bitter sometimes.  Okay: a lot of the time. 

These are the feelings you’re not supposed to admit, that you don’t dare speak aloud, so I lay them out here where no one gives a damn ... much the same as in real life. 

Perched in a church pew at my cousin’s wedding this weekend, all I could think about was my parents’ dissolving marriage.  The start of a new family; the end of another.  This “impending” divorce just can’t seem to make itself happen.  Over a year later, there are no papers signed and appearances would suggest that nothing’s really changed.  And yet soon, I’ll be one of ‘those’ people (whatever that means, right?) from a broken family with no home to go back to.  Get it over with already, I think constantly. 

The difference between me now and me a few years ago is that naive old me believed without reason and beyond reason that things were going to get better.  If I just get through this, or make it to that, or accomplish the next most important goal, it’ll all work out in the end. 

It’s not the presence of happiness I long for, but the absence of misery.  And that sentiment epitomizes the core of depression that outsiders have no grasp of; in my mind I hear traces of a thousand know-it-all phrasings of the “well nobody’s happy all the time” line the blissfully ignorant throw around.  Only somebody who’s basically happy most of the time would be stupid enough to say something like that to people who think about killing themselves.  It’s ‘cause we believe we should be happy all the time and us self-obsessed whiners aren’t, gosh darn it! 

“I cried because I had no shoes until I met a man with no feet.”  That’s how my mother would put it, anyway; in a judgment-laden cliche purporting to be a comforting truism.

On optimism, and other qualities I usually don’t possess.

I have a little bit of hope today. 

For the first day since December of 2007, my hip doesn’t hurt.  That makes me blissfully happy.

This is a momentous occasion for me, because it’s only the second time in about a dozen years that I’ve been pain-free.  The other one was after a massage at the end of day 5 of RAGBRAI (a week-long bike ride across the state of Iowa) in 2006.  I hope it lasts more than a day this time!!!!

Torturous pain will fuel the fire of depression like no other.  Hurting all day, every day, every night for years could take even the best person out.  And I was pretty screwed up to begin with.  It has hurt so badly, for so long, that I’ve had a hard time believing it would ever end.  And I would rather die than live that way forever.  

If I can sit in a chair, or stand for more than 20 minutes, or get to sleep at night, or function somewhat like a normal human being, I could maybe keep a job!  I could maybe lose all the weight I’ve put on during the years I couldn’t exercise the amount I’m accustomed to.

This could be the beginning of a way out of the darkness.    

“Faith is the bird that sings when the dawn is still dark.” -Rabindranath Tagore

The Un-Life

Right now I am living the opposite of anything that could possibly resemble a life.  

An existence creeping far too slowly towards death, perhaps.  But a life?  No.  

My eyes are open twelve hours a day.  I try; I fail.  I try harder; I still fail.   

On most days, it seems the best is all in the past (“best” being a misnomer, because nothing I had was worth keeping).

Someone loved me.  Once. 

I had a career.  Once.

I was great at some things.  Once. 

Now I am nobody doing nothing headed: nowhere.

Most of the time, it feels as though I’m never going to make it back “in.”  Whatever that means. 

I’m terrified every moment of every day that I don’t have what it takes to do this.

I used to be the naive fool who believed if you just work hard enough, you can get what you want. 

The way the world actually works is: you can try to do it all right and still wind up with nothing.

Or, as House aptly summarized, “People don’t get what they deserve, they just get what they get.”

“You’re Fired”

If my life were Celebrity Apprentice, I’d be giving Donald Trump a run for his money. 

I’ve gotten great at firing people from my life.  You wrong me, you’re done. 

Some people get a few more chances than others, until that final slight that sends their sum of missteps over the top.  Yes, I keep track.  If you’ve ever worked with me, lived with me, befriended me, interacted with me in any miniscule way whatsoever, you have a running tally.  Unbeknownst to you, the tiny ways in which you thought you were screwing me over and getting away with it were all being accounted for.  Sound much like a dysfunctional, paranoid worldview with a ‘get them before they get me’ mentality?

 

Depression is as ruthless as the cutthroat world of business. One by one, those around you enter the metaphorical boardroom, their performance as friend or mom or sibling appraised.  Those who failed to show up during my hour of need are goners.

 

My chiropractor is next in line (yes, I realize how ridiculous this perverse game is).  After a couple months of teetering on the edge with his pushy sales tactics, the attempts to guilt me into coming more often have gone too far.  Sorry dude, I don’t owe you anything.  I come when I want, I pay you for services rendered; that is the extent of my dues.  I’m real nice until you try to take advantage of it, then (as CeeLo Green put it) forget you, and forget you, too.

 

Then the day comes when you look around, and there is no one left.  In all honesty, I’m less miserable and more at peace the fewer people that are in my life.  That way I don’t sit around wondering why people don’t call, why they don’t care, why I’m worthy of neither their time nor attention.  I’m tired of caring more about others than they do about me.

 

Then there are the other days, when the empty void you have created sucks the breath out of you. 

My aunt passed away on Tuesday morning in a hospital room by herself.  No one in the family even knew she was there; a coworker had driven her there two days prior.  Fifty-seven years old and morbidly obese, she’d been alone since a divorce and subsequent rape in her early twenties.  It’s always sad to see another human being essentially give up on life and love and happiness.  When it’s YOU, your own pain outweighs the sadness of others.

The sick part is, I’m jealous.  I don’t think I can do 30 more years of this bullsh*t.  Hell, I don’t know if I can do tomorrow.  I’m pretty sure no deity would answer my prayers to just up and die, but I beg to be let out of this mess anyway.  Let someone live who’s enjoying it.

I turned 31 yesterday.  Still jobless, hopeless, and a hundred pounds overweight.  Another year passed in paralysis, the weight of my screw-ups so unbearable that stillness is my only solace.  I have effectively shut everyone out of my life, and the only reward is that they can no longer hurt me. 

I can’t help but wonder if it’ll be another three decades before I’m dead and no one gives a damn.  The thing is, I don’t want anyone standing over my dead body who never stood beside me in life.