I’m playing around the fringes of something here. A new perspective perhaps. I just found out a few days ago that my job will end in a couple of months. A more piecemeal form of it will remain available to me, which is – okayish, I suppose. I’ll be eligible for unemployment. And I have a marketable skill that I can also use in freelancing.
I wonder, though, about something. See, here’s the thing. It turns out that in the work I was doing, I was never fulfilling the role I thought I was fulfilling. When I was informed of the job ending, it was with a “thank you for helping us for so long” message. I’ve been there, off and on, for over a decade (the “off”portion was for the baby/toddler years). I thought I was a colleague, not someone brought in to help the real colleagues. So I toy with the question of whether I should respond with the anger I feel over that, if I might burn some bridges if I do that. And then I toy with the question of whether the bridge was ever really built in the first place. And maybe all that’s there to burn is my phantom idea of a nonexistent bridge that I’ve been so diligently building and maintaining…
So – what does this say about the rest of my life? Is it possible that as I strive for self-awareness, and reach for a safe and simple way to continue coming out, that I’m just helping? Or worse yet, am I just doing other people’s jobs for them? Is it possible that I’m trying to keep bridges from burning in places where there is no bridge?
I’m so “good,” so “cooperative.” I want everything to be “fair.” And right now, most of what matters intensely to me is quiet, unannounced in my external life. To some degree that’s really fine. I feel like some aspects of my life are incubating. So be it. But on some level I wonder if I’m just helping, rather than living.
And I don’t have a road map for how to make the change. I’m not twenty. I’m not leaving home to go off to college or something like that. I wonder, how do I find my way out of the places I feel trapped, but familiar? And even more, how do I discover those places where I thought I was being fair, but I’m really just “helping”? How do I determine what parts of my life consist of investing in relationships and lifestyle patterns that will never ever give back?
I suspect the answer is that if I have to ask myself if THIS or THAT is one of those places, it is. No wonder I’m exhausted. I think it’s time to sit back and feel the difference between real life and forced life. Just sit back, just observe from inside my life – what’s working, what’s not? And it occurs to me that a lot of what I need to “do” is – nothing. I need to do a lot more nothing in most of the places where I am investing.
It’s the places that comfort me and scare me that are probably real.
Holy shit.
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