Thank fuck for small mercies! Nothing else has changed though.
Most times when I've been battered down to my knees by life it's taken a combination of several simultaneous attacks on me. Life is too cruel to leave things to chance so, yesterday, for example:
- My mind was buzzing with a comment a customer made about over-40 year-olds being technologically inept. At the time I replied, "Wow, I'd better make the most of the next two years then LOL" but it did nudge the Sword of Damocles a little closer to my head;
- I resented working on a public holiday (the entire public sector in Ontario had the entire weekend off);
- I'd worked several days in a row at The Beach which, thanks to my ill fortune with dating, is now a district of Toronto I regard as (sometimes nauseatingly) ostentatious, and sinister;
- I was one dose behind on my meds;
- I'd just arranged a chat with an advisor at my bank which, strictly speaking, should be a positive thing - especially if I manage to secure a line of credit. However, yesterday all I could foresee was being judged by her, scolded by her, and generally having to defend myself because she neither understands nor believes in mental illness...much like my ex-wife and her entire family;
- Yesterday was the first day of 2010 it's been warm enough for me to wear flip-flops. Naturally then, when I left work the streetcar was just ahead of me and I needed to run for it, but couldn't. I remember thinking, "Well, that's what you get for trying to enjoy life. You're gonna have to wear combat boots for 12 months of the year, even when it's 30+ degrees, because otherwise life will ensure that there will ALWAYS be a reason why I have to run."
If you've been reading, paying attention, or caring at all then by now you'll recognise that 'all the above' is riddled with cognitive distortions. But, at the time, it was just too strong, and there were too many yesterday for me to be able to fight. They crushed me, dissuaded me, demotivated me, drained me. By 8.30pm I was in tears on the sofa, kittens in my arms. By 9.30pm I was in bed, crying myself to sleep, and rocking side-to-side the same way I used to before I hit my teens.
I just need a break. Just one break. In general, I feel like I have earned the right to sit back a bit, to cruise, to smell the roses. I'm 38 for fuck's sake! I went to uni late and had to fight to get in. I had to fight to change careers and get into PR. I had to fight to further my career vs people younger than me, with degrees from fancier universities than me. I had to fight the bureacratic inadequacies of both British AND Canadian governments in order to fight my way 3,500 miles across the Atlantic to Toronto. I had to fight for my reputation when I got here when employers bullshitted me, "Well, you won't be as effective as a Canadian PR professional because you don't know the Canadian media."
What rubbish.
In 1994, when I was 23 years old, I was afraid of scrapping my retail career and going back to university. I would have to start all over again. Circa 2006, 12 years later, I had just started to feel like I was getting somewhere in life - married, a homeowner, and successful at work with savings in the bank. My next steps were to become a father, diversify my financial portfolio, and change down a few gears from the breakneck speed my career development had been going at for the preceding decade. Then it all went to shit.
So yesterday I was feeling old. I felt as if my ex-wife had stolen away ten years of my life. Here I was, at 38, worse off, iller, and lonlier than I was 20 years before that. The ex got the house and the car because at the time of the divorce I was too ill to work and couldn't afford to buy her out of her share. I lost everything and barely made it out alive. I was at the point in my life when I SHOULD have been a Dad. I SHOULD have been settled. I SHOULD, finally, have become one of those nine-to-five people I used to hate at work, who always arrived no earlier than 9am and always left on the dot of five because their kids need collecting/dropping/taking to hockey/ballet/football/whatever. I've earned that right but it has ALL been taken away from me.
Life, sometimes, is like picking peanuts out of poo.
Back to square one...yet again...
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