I Am Not Enough of a Reason to Fight - 1-31-09

Remember this summer when I was so good about cleaning my beautiful new condo? All I wanted to do was vacuum my pearl gray carpet. The toilets gleamed. My soft, downy, white bed was always pristine, and the pleasure I got from opening all the curtains in my house in the morning and pulling them shut at night warmed me. I was doing it for my future, the future I still believed in and could focus on better now that the condo was squared away and officially mine.

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Not so, now. My ironing piles up. I vacuum only when there are visible things on my carpet that aren’t supposed to be there. I do my laundry and put it away promptly, but my bed remains unmade and I resignedly let stuff pile up on my bench and dining room table.

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I figured it was the depression from my job, over time sapping me of motivation for anything. I was right but not entirely. It is because before I had a reason. There was a point. I believe deep down that it is not what it once would have been – merely the novelty of a new home wearing off. I started taking better care of my housekeeping skills, picking them up from where they had always sat, collecting dust, before I moved into my condo, when the novelty of my first apartment had long since worn off. I changed my habits, no longer content to leave my clean laundry in the basket for three weeks or my dishes piled up to the faucet. It was because I had realized for the first time that what I truly wanted was to have a family and care of them. And here I find myself, in my still-beautiful home, but it is a little more dusty, a tad more cluttered, and wonder why.

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Long before I realized it today, encapsulated the undercurrent in words, I had slowly become blind, no longer with the vision that had peopled my bright new condo with a family and a purpose and I have come to no longer believe in the future I had perceived so keenly. Yes, my job leached motivation to care for my home. But it is truly that I have no purpose in it. What is the point? I have always needed to know the point, the purpose of the things I do. That is one of the tearing things about this job now for me. There is no point in pouring my efforts into these sieves sitting in the desks of my classroom, no point in education as it is now. And I find I have no heart to invest myself in other things that have no point after eight hours a day wasting myself. Things like caring meticulously for a home that was meant for more than me. I no longer believe my home will house anyone but myself. I need to have more reason to do as I used to. I was meant to care for others, for my husband and children, for more than myself. I am not a good enough reason.

Dissipation - 1-27-09

It cost $28 and change for my dissolution. A fair price for a sharp-edged peace. $6 for a pack of Virginia Slims menthol lights longs – the 120s – and $19 for a bottle of lime tequila which actually tastes good. I chose well. They complimented each other nicely in the smoky, candle-lit dimness of my laundry room last night – the room with no furniture to soak up the cigarette smoke. I avoid smoking for as long as possible because I can’t stand the smell which still lingers lightly over my house. I seem to breathe it out even now. It has been so many years since I smoked that I have no memory of the last time I smoked a pack, yet I recall at any given moment with crystal clarity my brand.

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I huddled in my laundry room on my intensely uncomfortable stepladder and hunched my way through a series of disconnected streams of consciousness, never achieving anything like the oblivion I craved but not surprised, either. I never was adept at being dissolute.

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I took drag after lovely, long-missed drag and thought of the peculiar irony that my hatred of children and my weaknesses swirling in that glass tumbler of mine could have no effect yet on my deep-rooted belief that I had much to teach my children. I thought how children should learn from their mothers and fathers – their most trusted ones – that humans are weak creatures, and yet they shouldn’t learn it too soon or too suddenly, and that it must be a coil for parents to figure out how to tread that line.

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The cigarettes and the tequila didn’t necessarily make me feel better, but they just made me feel not so bad. Made the numbness not shiver and crack so easily. That’s the thing about numbness that I knew before but forget every time I put it away: it never stays the same. It’s like the sea – always shifting but essentially staying in about the same space.

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It is with a queer relief that I notice that all my music is gone – no emotion to be found in any of the rich memories turned stick-figure associations. That no book quite reaches me anymore. That thoughts of running lay flat and still within me. Somehow, it is the numbness of the good feelings – to which I had clung so long and so very recently – that reinforce my belief in the numbness of the bad feelings. It is being unable to feel the loss of all these things which had been essential, had been the last splinters from the wreckage to cling to, that confirms to me that, yes, I am numb. I am deadened.

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And it is a good thing, too, or I probably would have reacted far worse than a closet smoker and drinker to the impromptu conference with Sherry and Langley yesterday, during which I learned that they have no confidence in my abilities or integrity, to remove out-of-hand a student based on a false witness by a parent without checking any of the facts with me, and also that all my Herculean efforts to come back from the hellish start to the school year and improve my relations with the kids and all those times when I did react calmly and fairly have, in fact, been worth nothing. All that I have done to do my job well, which was already far more than I was capable of giving, has now been rated as “not good enough” and I am now exhorted to do better, which I am not able to do. So I am left here with a bill I cannot fill, and I still have five months left. God help me.

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But there is no one. There is no help, no aid, no relief. Despite my fear that medication would endanger the numbness of which I am so protective, I can see I have no other option. I need the strongest medication at the highest dosage. I work both with children and with a hatred of children. I am constantly held to an expectation that is impossible for me to meet. I have no comfort, no love, no small pleasures, no tears. I am a shell and a husk, and I will walk in there tomorrow to face all the little pairs of spy eyes and betray nothing. And I will do this until I can start the heavy drugs. I have been reduced to this and the part of me that would object, that would care, is – you guessed it – numb. I am dead.

Cold - 1-27-09

I am always cold. I can never get warm. The heat never touches me. I am always covered in goose bumps and my skin is splotchy and purple with the constant chill. Will I ever be warm again?

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The spies are all around. And more will be here tomorrow. I will sweat them out in my room, turn the thermostat up to 112˚. They will smear and run with the heat, melt away and leave me standing there, a sculpture in ice.

Spies - 1-27-09

I realize these students are spies. Everyone in this building is a spy, and that includes these kids. They will report on me at the slightest provocation. There is no one I can trust, no one who is safe. I am in a war – for my reputation, for my sanity. I am a spy, too. I have no higher authority to report to – I was captured by the enemy and all knowledge of me was disavowed. I have no purpose in this mission, but that doesn’t change who I am. I am a spy infiltrating enemy territory. I will coo to these children, speak softly, and show no frustration. They will have nothing to report on me. My true feelings will not be betrayed. I am a spy among enemy spies, and as I have parachuted here on no directives beyond the order to come, I must simply survive, gather information while I reveal none.

Defective - 1-21-09

I think it’s done. I think I have finally given up, and while it will take a few months for the last echo of this death to bounce away, I feel the death inside me. I feel the numb cold of it, but then I can’t be sure, can I, when all I feel is numb and cold. I can’t do it anymore. I can’t slog through the mire of my day and still keep trying and failing to feel good, to use the Secret. If it is true that feeling bad literally pushes away the things you want and draws more bad to you, if it’s really true that whether or not you want something has no bearing at all on whether you will get it, that that is only determined by how well you live your life as if you have already received it – then I’m fucked. I have tried countless times in countless ways to feel good in spite of my circumstances, and all of it is mere words, tuneless buzzing in my ears. I can’t feel good. And I can’t try any more. My only options are to feel bad or feel nothing. I choose numbness.

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And I have to feel it on my own. I can’t tell anyone if I can at all help it. I have exhausted my quota of complaining – long ago, too – and contrary to my expectations, the quota is not refillable. I can’t hold off sharing my misery for weeks and have gained a little of that quota. Mom and Dad don’t want to hear and have grown impatient with me, even when I make passing, half-joking references that shouldn’t tax their patience too much. They are tired of it and are ready to have the old energetic, laughing Nicole back. So I keep my deepening, settling depression from them. My co-workers don’t need to hear anymore, either. They are in it, too, and don’t need anything pulling them further down, even though they would only show me support. Last Friday was horrible and I was pushing back tears all day and people kept asking me what was wrong. Jeez! I’m trying to spare you, people! Leave me alone so I won’t annoy you! But Jess came to my room after school and I hadn’t gotten out of the building yet and I couldn’t hold back. Fortunately, I still had a bit of my complaint quota with her left. I just cried and poured it out. I talked about how every day was hell and I was the Danaides in Hades whose punishment for eternity was to keep filling up a bucket with a hole in it. I talked about how I try and I try to be positive and not complain but I can’t remember what it was like to be happy or feel good or look forward to my life. I told her everything I’d been feeling and I could see sympathetic tears in her eyes, bless her, at my honest misery, and she ventured that maybe I should think about getting back on my antidepressant medication. That tore me up even further, though I didn’t show her that, because I had truly believed I had gotten past that, that maybe, once in a while, on a hard couple of weeks maybe, I would take Happy Camper. But prescription meds? Really? I have come to that? Again?

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But as I thought of it later, I was forced to admit that the thought of it brought me some relief. I had taken Lexapro several years ago when I was really depressed about meeting someone and only feeling my anxiety about it compounded by the pressure I felt about dating. Now, however, I am dealing with the exact same situation, goddammit, plus utter hopelessness about my job, which takes up a third of my life. Maybe I do need meds again. If I do, I’ll need a hell of a lot more than the 10 mg of Lexapro I was on. I’ll need Zoloft or Prozac or shock treatments.

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I just want to make all the relentless bad feelings go away. I have begun thinking about drinking in the evenings. Liquor like Vodka or tequila, not wine. Sleeping pills isn’t a viable option because I have no trouble sleeping. Some people deal with depression by not sleeping, others by sleeping often. I am in the latter group. Despite my damned restless, frenetic dreams where rest and peace are nowhere to be found, sleep is my escape. No, I want to find a way to numb the pain, loneliness, and hopelessness while I’m awake. Not at work or when I need to be driving, just when I’m alone in the evenings. I’ve thought – aside from all the known negative, life-destroying effects – how nice it could be to take a narcotic, an actual drug, to inject me with an untouchable peace. Oh, yes, maybe I should get on prescription antidepressants. These are not healthy thoughts. At least I’m not contemplating suicide this time.

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I think there is something wrong with me. I seem to have fashioned a lock to my heart based on an imagined key, and no key exists that will free me. I think I will never love. Yes, I think this. Again, it will take some time for this to truly sink in, because I had forgotten my hopelessness, had gotten used to feeling better and hopeful and open to possibilities. But I have become again the same girl I always was, incapable of responding to men who are actually living and breathing on this earth. There is no more faith or hope in me anymore. I had hope, and faith and vision and good feelings, for a year. Setting that year atop the previous 29 where no such feelings or vision existed, was already a Herculean feat. Is it any wonder I had an expiration date? I had been mired in hopelessness and loneliness for so long, unable to move, atrophying, and then thrown into a full gallop for a year – goodness, how could I go on without some return on that investment? And the thing is little things happen that probably are the Secret in action and still I am not moved, still I can feel nothing. It seems that nothing short of the big two – work and love – will shock my heart back into action. It seems anything less is simply not enough to encourage me. You may say I’m being foolish, that maybe it takes longer than a year of believing to manifest something like a new work and a true love. But a year was all I had in me. I had nothing more to give. It was precisely a year ago – the third week in January 2008 – that I picked up the Secret and began to transform my life – or at least attempted to. But the only major thing I manifested was a condo I love desperately that is more than I can afford. All the other, little small things – of which admittedly there are many – fade in my blurred, blunted memory. I have nothing left.

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If God will step in and save me, he will do it for himself, for his name’s sake, and not for me. And I will not know either way what he intends.

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I weep deep within me at the unending drudgery of my days and the biting loneliness of my nights. I am defective, created to hold myself apart while I yearn to be touched. There is no man who will swoop in and do that initial work to get to me. I do not yet think of laying my children again to rest. I should not be here in this job. God made a mistake. He should not have closed all other doors and trapped me in this pit. It was a wrong thing of him to do, to take a part of my soul, my nature, my makeup – my love of children – and retard its natural progression in me, and still further twist it and mutate it into a loathing, a hatred for all children. I hate them. I can’t stand the sight or sound of them. And in this job, you are not allowed to have a bad day. You cannot go into your cubicle and “just do your work,” because the children, like a sick sonar, will pick up on it and throw it back in your face magnified a hundred times. Not only can you not have a bad day, but you cannot even be quiet and calm but essentially dead to just do your job because the little demons must be entertained and engaged or they will make your life for those eight endless hours a waking nightmare. I hate it and I hate them and it is wrong of me to be in this position and be in such a state. There is a danger to hating this job that isn’t present in other jobs – you can do real harm. No, God should not have kept me here. I was always going to fail the task before me, with the price being young, impressionable minds, and I was always going to fall. And no one is picking me up.

Inundation - 1-14-09

Talk about inundation! That’s the word for the sheer number of emails I’ve gotten from Match.com. I need to go on my preferences and turn off those alerts so I can go on when I’m ready for the flood and not have ten new messages a day. I don’t know if this is normal. Does everyone get this kind of interest?

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But none of them have really sparked my interest. And I have started to wonder how you do this. You get a wink and you wink back and then you get an email and then you email back and then what if you find out you’re not interested after all? How do you extricate yourself? I suppose I should just cross that bridge when I come to it; isn’t that always my weakness?

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I also wonder – as I always wonder with a dating service – what comprises “good enough”? If I’m using a dating service, do I just have to assume there won’t be any guy who is truly together, handsome, successful, and funny? In other words, a “catch”? But look at me. I’m pretty attractive all-around. Never the type of woman anyone would expect to use a dating service. If I’m on there, couldn’t a male equivalent of me be on there, too? It’s just that when I do a dating service – it’s been a year and a half, so I’d forgotten – I start out rejecting every possible match out of hand because they’re instantly unappealing or boring, and then after 40 or 50 or 900, I start thinking back to the beginning and thinking, “Oh, well, maybe that one wasn’t so bad…” And I never know what I should do with that. Should I a) take that as a sign that I in my shameful lack of experience had not yet gained a sufficient frame of reference, or b) I’m starting to settle and I should stick with my first impression. I don’t know. But I do know when I consider option A, I get this instant let down from the idea that those few standouts that only stand out in comparison with worse losers, are all I can expect. And I just can’t help seeing me with more, with a man who’s amazing on his own merit, not merely because he’s standing among the dregs and so looks decent by comparison. So should I wait to respond on Match.com until I see a profile that really strikes me? Or will I just be doing what I did with all the other dating services and sit there and waste the money? Am I only in store for a groaning acceptance of a wink or email because I have to? Yes, it’s only been three days, but I have a lot of history to support that prediction.

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And I think I have finally, after all these dating services, hit on precisely why I loathe dating services of any kind, put off using one until the last possible excuse has been exhausted, and never take full advantage of them when I do finally break down and sign up. They make me feel so undervalued. I go on and look at profile after profile, surely enough to get a fair sense of the pickings available, and think with a quiet shock and a distant disorientation, “Is this all I can hope for? Is this all I am worth?” I had just always had a sense of being worth a great deal. While I am not perfect, I have so much to offer, and in an attractive, fun package, no less. And this is all there is to choose from? No wonder I hate dating services. Even with me on there, there are just so many people who clearly couldn’t get a date any other way. Where is my match? For surely these men could never be.

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I find it surpassingly ironic that most people go on dating services because they are hoping for anything, they go on because their expectations are so low and static, and I am on there for precisely the opposite reasons. My expectations are so high they interfere with normal dating where they have a far greater chance of being met than on a dating service. How does that make sense?

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I suppose I just have to hold to my vision, and hope he’s out there, this man among men, this man who is witty, kind, patient, successful, funny, and handsome, and somehow finds me. I suppose I just have to remind myself it’s only been three days, and that this might just be one step to a completely different path to my destination. At least I’m taking action. I just need to keep working on “letting go of my vision.” I had thought I was releasing more power if I kept visualizing but I now wonder if you have to at some point release it so it can do its work. I suppose it just symbolized my growing fear and need for control that I couldn’t let the vision go.

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And it must change. My life must change. I cannot be stuck for the whole of my life. I could not have walked in, for instance, my first day of student teaching at Newsome Park and unwittingly signed away my whole existence. That has to change. One day I will be happy and feel good and have work I love and a family of my own and actually look forward to my life, instead of just hurriedly surviving it. It must happen. Somehow. Someday. Someday I will be free. And until then I will cling to this belief and when I can only feel bad, I will go numb.

Onward to Match! - 1-11-09

My mother told me something I hadn’t heard before about using the Secret. She said one of the Secret teachers, Mike Dooley, recommends to visualize for five minutes at a time, no more, then let it go. That sometimes if you visualize for a long time, the opposite effect can sometimes be brought about, like when I was driving to Analiese’s Game Night last weekend and trying to visualize a good time and only getting more depressed about everything. When Mom shared that with me, I couldn’t see how I could pull that off. How could I not visualize all day long, even until my brain is twitching exhaustedly and all higher functions are blurred? Visualization was the only coping strategy I had to get through my life, even when it stopped working and I had lost all conviction in it. What was I to do with my brain then?

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I couldn’t see how it was to be accomplished, but I thought about it and that brought it about – a reminder of how the Secret works. It was that effortless; it didn’t even feel like I had done anything. But slowly, I started to let the visualizing and thought go. And I found in doing this that that must have been what had been stymieing the Secret for so many weeks. I was visualizing so hard because I thought I was more responsible for bringing my future to me than I was. Again. I didn’t believe that simple thought and desire would bring it all about, so I began working at visualization. And only working harder with every passing day at work. Desperate to get out.

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And it occurred to me, on the tearful even of my return to work after my winter break, that, more than all the things I wanted that I was visualizing so hard, what I really, truly wanted was to be happy again. I couldn’t remember what that felt like. The last time I had been happy was last summer, drenched with the glorious heat, full up with hope and satisfaction. And it had been so long I had literally forgot what it felt like to be happy. What I really wanted was to feel good, to be happy. I wanted to have something to look forward to. My life had become something to get through. Every day, my thought is “Let’s just get through this day” and each day ends with a dull relief that one more day is behind me. Meanwhile, my life is whizzing by, but I can’t slow down long enough to enjoy anything because then I’ll also be aware of my unchanging misery. The art of walking on a bed of coals is not to slow down or you’ll get burned, and my spirit was already constantly uncomfortably warm.

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So in my bed the night before my return to that hated place, I wept with the desperate thought that this has to change, sooner or later. That is the only constant in life – change. I cannot be 35 or 40 or 53 and still working at Newsome Park. Sooner or later – and I had already braced myself for “later” – my life, my circumstances have to change. And I wept with the broken thought that I want to look forward to my life. I had already a few days before made the resolution to have more fun in 2009. Life has become a drudgery and I want 2009 to be so much better than 2008. And yet here I was, a mere two days after that hopeful resolution, weighed down with my misery.

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So it is a relief that I actually have been remembering what it’s like to visualize and let it go. That is faith. That is releasing control you don’t have in the first place. And it felt good. Some of the burden lifted. A chink in my prison wall let in some light on my bleached face.

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Maybe that’s why I woke up this morning and unexplainably couldn’t find the stone dread that always accompanies the thought of dating or a dating service. Maybe that’s why I was able to go through my whole day with that unfamiliar lack and sign up for Match.com and make my whole profile with hardly a whisper of anxiety. Maybe that’s why I rediscovered “Meet Joe Black” and was finally able to remember the vision of my perfect mate to hold to. Maybe that’s why I finally got so tired of being alone and lonely, starved and childless. Maybe that’s why I finally let go of the how.

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I don’t give a damn if my perfect mate is on a dating service or not. Would I like a better story? Yes. Do I care, though? Not anymore. This life I’m so eager to push behind me with a nice check-mark at the top is leaving me behind. I want to be the bride. I want to be the pregnant mother at the baby shower. I want it. I’m sick of being left behind. I want to join the human race.