trials and trialities

This is why Americans are taking fewer and fewer vacations.

Coming back is a bitch. I spent all of Monday wondering if I could somehow invent a body double to come in for me, so I wouldn't have to deal with the First Day Back. Blugh. The peace and relaxation lasts into the work week for all of an hour before all the stress and worry you left behind redoubles in ferocity and you wish you hadn't gone away at all.

The Reckoning Time has come for the Big Unmentionable Screw-Up of a month or so ago, and I'm dealing with the repercussions. Boss-Man has been beyond understanding, but even his kindness has limits, and he's been emphasizing the employer-employee dynamics of our interactions, and less and less of the friend-friend or surrogate father-surrogate daughter. It's reasonable and understandable, and I certainly fouled things up royally and am doing my best to be an exemplary, shining, professional employee, and am taxing myself to the extreme to make the firm work to make up for it as best I can. At the same time I feel lost and lonely and sad -- he and his wife have become centrally important to me, and a rug has been yanked out from under my feet, and I feel disoriented.

Yesterday was a Bad Head Day. I moved into my own office -- a definite yay, because I could break down in tears a few times in privacy and sniffle my way through transcriptions. I drove home and spent an hour and a half just watching the cat, who is having another bladder episode and isn't doing very well. He was adorable, though, and we played a new game of Sarah Peeks over the Edge of the Armchair and Simon Ambushes Her Face with His Paws. Watching him play and wash his sleek black coat made me feel a little better. Mostly I felt shell shocked, barely capable of doing anything but stare fixedly ahead of me. I ate dinner because it's something one does.

At least I went to see HP5 with Joan. That was a huge booster.

It was a day of internal turmoil, and a sense of overwhelming aloneness. I get like that sometimes. Mostly when everything on every side appears to be yielding to flux, with little constancy. Work has been in upheaval for months, Simon's health yo-yos disconcertingly, and human relationships are tenuous at best.

These are the times that should throw me back on the solid rock of Christ; but these are the times when I tend, like the pillbug (or "roly-poly," as they're called around here), to draw myself up into the smallest spiritual ball I can and wait for everything to pass. Like I'm always afraid that, with so much hurt from relying on flawed human systems, if I open myself up to the divine, and God abandons me, I won't survive, so I'll just go it alone, thank you, because if I fail myself, well, that's nothing new, and I can live with me all right. Any finger poking from an outside source, and I draw myself up tighter.

And it's not like I talk to people about it much either. I'll talk to my mom, or Meg and Phillip, or Leigh Ann, but often, and sometimes even then, it's when I'm coming out of it. If someone who sees me on a regular basis asks me how I'm doing, I tell them fine, or okay, or not so good; I may even give them the facts; but I shy away from divulging how horrible I'm actually feeling (except to my poor mother. I bawled on the phone with her while driving to work this morning). Call people? Answer their calls? Nah; I have other things to do. Like mentally catalogue all the spots on the walls.

I don't know. I feel like I used to be a little more open, but maybe I wasn't. A high school friend of mine I was catching up with a few weeks back told me she had no idea how difficult my years were back then; I did a good job of hiding it, she said. But I think living alone, with no one seeing how I am when I come home and hounding me about it, has made me more reclusive. Instead of opening up and becoming part of a larger community, I hole up and shrink into my own four walls and mental corners. My attitude is less, "Be with people," like it was in college -- another time when I experienced a lot of stretching, flux, and pain, and then I didn't turn to everyone for help and talk about things ad nauseum, but I did spend all my time with people, just being in company, and the surrounding was healing -- than it is, "I'll get over it." I don't even really cry much anymore. I just sit there, force myself to go through the daily routines, and wait for it to blow over.

I suppose I should try to learn something new, however. The smallness of my own system of dealing with these times of pain is suffocating.

Eliot, as always, says it best:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but required, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.

You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.

~from East Coker

So maybe I'll get there.