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.
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