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.

Desperately Seeking Balance - 12-27-08

I took my shower tonight while listening to my “Can You Dance?” mix, which I hadn’t listened to in a while. I was searching through my playlists for something full, something that would make me feel, just a little. I’ve been a little restless, and I know why – since coming to my parents for Christmas, I haven’t been running. That always makes me moody and restless. And of course, that Old Faithful each month is here – bad skin from PMS and moodiness from PMS. How on earth will I ever be able to think positively about my skin when no more than a month will go by before I’m struck simultaneously with bad skin and a negative outlook? But anyway.

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When I started listening to my mix, the most beloved mix I have, I did feel something. I suddenly began breathing harder and reflexively ran my hands over my face as I was flung back to heat and running and freedom and “before,” the before I knew before school struck and I lost all joy. And that’s what made my eyes smart with tears – the remembered joy. I had it in that glorious August, the innocent calm before the storm, when I woke up every day looking forward to something, looking forward to getting dressed nicely, cleaning and tending to my new, lovely house, and going for glorious runs in the evening. Everything was so good then. And I thought again in the shower how long it has been since I’ve had joy. Now that I have calmed myself into an acceptance of my life and my job, I have calm, I have a measure of acceptance, I certainly have appreciation, and occasionally I have a sort of contentment. But I have a counterfeit happiness and I have no joy. I am numb once again or I feel the restless unhappiness and dissatisfaction. It is those two choices. Either bad or nothing. And I am spoiled, selfish, and terribly ungrateful. But no matter how hard I try, no matter how well I try to remember and focus on what I do have in my life, I can’t find a way to feel more than a dutiful, unsatisfying appreciation. I do not believe this is all life has to offer anyone – merely duty and obligation, no magic or anticipation or passion. But you’ll; be hard-pressed to find anyone who won’t tell you that some times in your life must be spent limited in such a way. It’s the toll to be paid to get through to the next good thing. But that also didn’t keep my chest from squeezing with the memory of lost emotion and deceased joy.

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I think of this summer, with its delicious excess of heat and the long, open days with plenty of room to do things, plenty of room to stretch. I think of reading the “Twilight” series over and over because the joy I felt in reading them changed with the advent of the school year from a free, happy enjoyment to a joy my hands clenched around in the growing swell of misery. I think of the perfect music-book association between those books and “Can You Dance?” and how for so many days and weeks, the music could take me back to a better place, a good place, a place landscaped with trees and heat and darkness and fresh air and solitude. I’m back in the meadow, out on the water, my feet eagerly pounding their way through my whole lovely neighborhood, before the misery threatened to chose those paths like thorns, before I had to blindly thrash my way to a calm acceptance and appreciation of what my life is so I could once again unclench my frozen fingers from around the expired joy of those runs. So much – and all of it good – in that music.

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The new year approaches. Once again. I am alone. Once again. I feel the same old way. Once again. And I struggled against tears as I thought tonight about It’s Just Lunch. And I still couldn’t stop myself from thinking, “Does it matter at all that I so desperately don’t want to do that?” You’d think I could have found a way to accept it and force hope back into me like a shot of adrenaline into a faltering heart. And I thought about this music, this beloved playlist that makes me cry with the joy it shows me because the joy is gone and has been gone for ever so long, it seems. And I thought how when one’s choices of feeling are numbness and pain, it is interesting to observe how one chooses numbness when necessary to function, but how one allows the pain just so one feels something. You go too long being numb, you start to wonder if any permanent damage has been done, like gangrene setting in a limb that has been asleep from an awkward angle for too long. You start to question your humanity if you stay numb for too long, so you reflexively allow or even pursue pain so you don’t get to that point. The questions of “Why am I here?” and “What’s the meaning of it all?” that originate in chronic numbness have their own icy pain, and few people are brave enough to take on the risk.

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I know this doesn’t sound much like acceptance, like that less lovely side of maturity. I have to call It’s Just Lunch and be done with it. I have to go through more and more dating. I just don’t know how. How do I tread that razor-sharp line between being reckless with my vision and controlling my control? I need to know the logistics of keeping the vision alive when it seems I must not focus so single-mindedly on marrying in 2009, on marrying soon after meeting, on being able to stay home when I get married, on focusing on starting a family soon after marrying, on those things which have a surprisingly strong effect on the potency of my vision. If I have to accept that he might not be financially capable at first of supporting me, so that I’ll have to keep working after the wedding, if I might have to stay in this loathsome job indefinitely, if a wedding may not take place this next year at all, if nothing I want or picture has a strong chance of working out that way, then the vision is murky at best. And dating is hard enough with a crystal-clear vision! I just feel like I’m drowning in my own vision because all of its elements have gotten rained on and are now running thick and fast down the canvas into my nose and mouth.

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So how do I do this? I’m supposed to focus only on the end result but that end result has been shown to be more amorphous, more prone to unexpected alteration, than I thought when I started. Or has it? Am I just supposed to hold fast to my original vision? Make it detailed and rich with color and movement and feeling? But how do I find that balance? And what am I to do?

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With New Year’s coming ever closer, I think on last New Year’s, the New Year’s of this year, and no doubt I refused to believe in anything happening this year. So I can’t do that again. I must make a statement of what I want to happen in 2009. And the first thought that comes is that I want to get married this year. But how can I hold to that when maybe that isn’t in the stars for this year? It’s all well and good to say I should plan with reckless abandon but not to lose sight of the essentials of those desires, as I determined a couple of journal entries ago. But how the hell do you do that? How do you plan when you must always think, “but if that doesn’t happen…” I just want to know what I’m in charge of doing. I know the universe is in charge of the how and even the when, but the when is integral to my vision. I don’t just want to get married. I want to get married this year. I’ve waited long enough, dammit! I don’t want to wait any longer! But do I just picture the wedding and not think “autumn 2009”? Or do I think that but always remember it’s the getting married that’s important. Then how does that timing aspect of the vision that makes it so much more focused keep its integrity? My brain is going round and round and I feel a burgeoning anger born out of frustration, which only makes me more frustrated because what good does anger ever do? When all of these questions swirl around and around the only clear vision I have is of having to walk through my personal hell indefinitely: going on date after date, blind date after blind date, never finding my rest. I am a stranger in a strange land. I am a pilgrim who must always keep walking. There is no rest for the weary. Surely God cannot mean to leave me so unsatisfied. But is he doing anything to clear the path between the One and me? Is he guiding our footsteps? And do I still even believe in the One’s existence anymore?

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Surely it must do something that I’m not the only one wanting this. My mother, Margaret, Jess, to mention a few, all investing energy, heart, and belief in my meeting the One at last. Does that all do any good? Is it smoothing or shortening our paths? Is it lighting our ways? As for me, I’m just tired, and heartsick that I must continue with a dating service. I guess it doesn’t make a difference how desperate my desire not to do something is. Now, if I can only stop thinking it does.

Purgatory of Persistence - 12-23-08

My mother reminded me today through her musings on the Secret that the key to making it work for you is “joyful expectation.” And it hit me again – but in a slightly new way – how completely that is missing from my life and just how long it has been gone. I used to have it. But it’s been so many weeks – really, since that date with Alan which gave me yet another epiphany but nevertheless wasn’t the date I had been expecting and signified still further continuation along this path. I think the real petrie dish for this lack of joyful expectation is my job. I have settled finally into a view of it that is not unbearable at every turn, but it is settling regardless, however necessary it is. I have found a few things that don’t blind me with their glare to focus my gaze on, and the best I can do is to continue calmly on, no longer flailing in the mounting waves, but also feeling no love or joy. In the Secret, you are supposed to manufacture those good feelings until you splash into the real thing, but I have not even come close to finding out how to achieve that, at least over a long period of time. So there is no joy to be found in my job, that enormous chunk of my days, and the most I can feel is a dutiful gratitude for what I do have as a result of this job.

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But I think it is only compounding the obstacles to joy that I am still alone. I admit freely I have not been going out and pursuing all possible paths to the One, scrabbling for any sign I’m on the right track without rest. I stopped actually doing anything after that date with Alan and hoped and hoped and hoped still more that somehow the Secret would entail a respite, some sort of ending in this endless-seeming solitude. I hoped and chose to believe that if I really didn’t want another dating service experience, if I didn’t want it strongly enough, then it wouldn’t continue to be my experience. I thought God and the Secret had to be creative enough to generate an organic meeting with my mate, one not so fraught with preconceived notions and expectations and choices and thought. But however much I hoped that could be for me, days passed, one after the other like dominoes caught in molasses. And I remained alone. And no opportunity presented itself. And my vision dimmed until I felt just like the old Nicole, unable to see myself responding to a man even in a natural setting. And joyful expectation eroded into utter stillness.

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A job that at best is merely bearable and a constant stream of reinforcement to my current reality as a single woman have conspired to make me feel nothing. I am blind and deaf and mute. I am once again numb. My life is a sensory deprivation tank. And I just can’t seem to find a way to change that, to access the key to change.

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It’s just been so long since I had something to look forward to. Christmas is already here, that most beloved and joyful of holidays for me, and I feel nothing. I see the tree and decoration and presents and it feels like any other Thursday. Occasionally I feel the most muffled stir of the old emotion I would feel every year prior, that awareness that yet again it’s just the three of us and would I ever find anyone.

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It seems pretty clear my only option is It’s Just Lunch. Just like my job, “I have no other options.” It is my life right now. Mom said a teacher of the Secret said it seems there is a force that prevents you from getting what you want until you’ve fulfilled a certain quota of persistence. That you have to suffer and wait for a certain, undisclosed amount before it comes, but it will come. And so my only options at this juncture and for who knows how long is Newsome Park and It’s Just Lunch, the two most loathed things in my life. Lovely. How did I use the Secret so well for so long only to be left with those two options? I may have faltered recently but I invested many good months. And all I have to comfort me is the job of believing that it will come to me. I just have to find a way not to count my days as they burn away, one by one. I have to just not think how all these days being wasted could be spent in love and happy. I am nearly 30 and still with nothing to show for it.

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So that is why I accepted that I had to stay in this job and that I have to do It’s Just Lunch or some other dating service. That less lovely side of maturity, of this real life of mine. I don’t know how. I don’t know how I will do another date and all that entails, the getting ready, the drive to one of the many restaurants that have tragically been linked irrevocably in my mind with blind dates, the first sight of each other, the forced conversation, the relieved moment when we can part ways and I can go home. I really don’t know how I can do that – not just two more times with I.J.L. but with the next dating service and the next and the one after that. All the while with nothing really good in my life aside from my condo that it seems I can’t afford and my parents. Nothing to get really excited about to remind me of what joyful expectation is so I can manufacture it to bring my future to me. The most I’ve been able to muster for a long time is a dull, forced reminder that it’s coming. But is it coming if I can’t feel that joyful expectation? What if I’m just caught in a downward spiral and I stay alone and trapped behind my classroom door? A purgatory of persistence? Screw that.

Let's Be Reasonable - 12-21-08

All right, let’s look at this levelly, cleared for the moment of preconceived notions and crystallized expectations. I need to clarify once again what I truly want, separate from all I want, because the two sometimes diverge. I want the world. I want a lot, but what I truly want, what is essential, is much narrower.

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I’ve been feeling weighed down, each day’s troubles and thoughts laying heavy on my shoulders, but in its own way, the passing alone of each day being the most draining thing to carry. On some deep level, I signified the loss of each day as some failure on my part, representative of some inability of mine to get my head on straight and laser my focus on my future. Something must be wrong with me, to be still alone, the hard chill of winter being so much more significant than the predictable climate change of another season. Why wasn’t it happening yet? I kept asking myself. What was I doing wrong and how could I fix it? Because surely the universe did not mean to make me wait even longer for love. I had to be the deciding factor in extending this bottomless, endless deadline.

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And involved in all that angst was no just meeting my mate, but a slow clenching of my fists and fingers over the “how” and “when” of this eagerly awaited event. Steadily, my simple vision of meeting my love rose like yeast bread in the warm, moist air of my imagination into far more details and strictures than I began this vision with. I wanted it to happen this way, I wanted it to happen at this certain time, I didn’t want it to come by this particular channel. All these little preferences clouding the issue and bowing my back under their collective weight until I could only see the ground beneath my feet and not the glorious future before me. No wonder I had lost all hope and vision.

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So now I have the reluctant task of differentiating between what I want and all I want, between what I must have and what I would like to have, like separating the wheat from the chaff. And it’s taken me all these weeks to come to that difficult realization because I wanted to believe part of the visualization process could be determining a little more of the “how” and “when” than maybe really is part of it. Maybe I need to rein in – just a little bit – my hunger, my passion, my all-or-nothing instinct to remember what’s really important.

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I want a husband. I want children. I want to be able to stay home with my children. And even taking each part and melding it to make it as rich, detailed, vividly visualized a whole as it possibly can be, I am still forced to admit that those are really the only essentials.

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If you dared to ask me what I would like, I would spill them out one after the other with the rat-a-tat-tat of a machine gun. I would like to be in love for Christmas. I would like for last winter to be the last winter I spend alone. I would like an August or September ’09 wedding. I would like to live in Chesapeake. I would like to be able to quit my job after this year to stay home. I would like to meet my husband in a natural, organic setting and fashion. I would like never to hear from or about another dating service again. I would like a romantic story. I would like to know instantly after meeting my future husband that he’s someone special. I would like to meet someone who is financially secure enough to support a family immediately. Lord, I could keep going with all the things I would like. But that’s not the point of this exercise. The purpose here is to remember foremost what it is that I truly want, the cornerstones for all the castles my imagination has been building with reckless abandon as the Secret taught me. And I do believe you need to be reckless with your visions, that you need to throw your arms wide to scatter all those details like seeds, let them fall where they may with trust that they’ll bear fruit. But maybe you have to be reckless without going blind to the basic desire. The trick is how to swing away with all that heart and passion without losing your feet in the glorious freedom of it.

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It’s Just Lunch called again, making it two attempts after the date with Alan. I kept clinging to a belief that it mattered that I didn’t want a dating service to be the how, that it made a difference to the grand plan. But maybe it didn’t. Maybe that was a “would like,” a perk, a secondary or even tertiary hope. But not part of the essential, the “that it happened,” not “how it happened.” Maybe the only thing I can really do is feel that hope as sharply as I can, throw it out there with all my might, and keep walking along the dating service path. If I got my wildly wheeling eyes back to the basics, I would say again, with conviction, I don’t care how it happens, I will bless any means by which my mate, my match, my love finds me. Do I want to take on It’s Just Lunch again? No. Most definitely not. But I didn’t want to return to Newsome Park day after day this year, either. But I do. Do I get to wake up each day eager for what it may bring me? No. But I wake up anyway. Did I curl into a ball when the last flicker of hope for another job flickered out? No, I did not. Do I fling my young, unsuspecting students away from me, even when they have tried the last of my patience? No, I compose my face and speak gently to them.

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I suppose that’s all just the less lovely side of maturity, of that real life I ached for and desperately hoped I could achieve. That’s being accountable for my choices and not being a victim. That’s facing yet another day the cold that presses on me without complaint, accepting that there is no shelter. That is the golden apple of faith, of belief in the unseen, that I must battle my way to grasp. It’s accepting that just because it’s not easy doesn’t necessarily mean it is not vital. This is my life. I have to live it, and I have to remember how to live it with grace. And somehow, I must keep my eyes focused on the prize.