Rejections

The picture is from the Moss Mansion in Billings, April 6th (unfortunately not here!)

You can't win if you don't play, but playing and being rejected kind of sucks. I've been struggling with the job search, and the weather (predicted chances of snow for the next week makes it seem like spring will never arrive). I have to just keep going, and trust that what happens is what is supposed to happen. Or maybe just accept that what happens has happened and is now over. Move on. Keep moving on. And eventually something will develop on the job front. Or the school front. Or some front somewhere.

I don't like uncertainty, but I have gotten a lot of practice with living with uncertainty the past few years. I can still say, whatever happens, that I have learned a lot about myself, and I am stronger. I don't like rejections, either, but I've gotten rather good at dealing with them. And so it goes. Life. Still better than the alternative.

Moving forward

Even though presenting at a conference a week after having the flu was highly stressful beforehand, having 65 people in the session, getting good compliments, being stopped afterward in the hallways for more compliments and questions was a giant self-esteem builder.

Having a talk with someone who knows the situation I'm in was also very reaffirming. I was told that I was in a very tough situation, but that I have handled it well, and professionally.

And it was so, so nice to be around people who were friendly, curious, engaging with life and each other.

These things, plus my volunteering gig, which is full of awesome, professional people, are what are getting me through this week of crazy work melodrama. Only 79 more days as of tomorrow. I will be celebrating the 70s with a weekend in Missoula (now if only it could be in the 70s temperature-wise).

Longing, survival, and life

My week of flu has left me tired and unsettled, in only that way that more lengthy illnesses can. The physical tiredness mirrors my emotional tiredness, and together they break through some of the barriers I've put up while in survival mode. Tiredness + reading a book at the right time for it to connect violently to current emotions = a storm of weeping, followed by a few epiphanies.

1) My current situation of trying to weather a horrible job situation in order to get to a place I want to be reminds me of two other bad situations/times in my life - waiting for high school to be over so I could move on to college, and waiting to get out of my marriage.

2) Waiting for college left me in a deep dark depression, from which I am really amazed that I emerged alive. Trying to get out of my marriage threw me into an emotional eating hole that took a long time to calm down into something like normal.

3) I am back in an emotional eating hole, and teetering in a place that could throw me into a deep dark depression. These are both places I recognize, both places I vowed to myself to avoid, and both places which surprise me by their proximity.

4) Being in a situation that feels like trapped + waiting + longing for the future = bad, bad news for me.

5) I have 89 more days to wait.

6) I have to figure out a way to take a new path, to find new survival methods for this situation.

7) This will move me out of the comfort I've been trying to pull to me, and force me to try something new, which will not be comfortable. All this makes me long for that fragile, storybook place of "normal," in which it would not feel so difficult to interact with life in a "normal" way.

8) All my feelings of loneliness and alone-ness and fragility are pulled up and dragged to the surface by having the walls of survival come crashing down. And I long to be in a place where I have people, friends, family near me, people who can be strong for me when I am too tired to be anything but broken and not enough.

8) The Time Traveler's Wife has the same feeling of longing that so suffuses my own life at the moment. All I have to do is think about the book, and I am overwhelmed by a need to weep. This book will stick in my head and pop in at moments both opportune and inopportune (just like The Lovely Bones).

9) I am glad to have Callie. Her furry love is enough to pull me forward on days when it feels like I am walking through wet cement in steel-toed boots.