Thoughts come edging to the surface this morning as I feed the dogs and make my coffee. This is the tender and vulnerable part of the day where I do what I can to encourage my heart to open the luggage and see what it there. For most of my life, I have sent the ticker tape through my mind first and never knew what I really felt. So these days, unemployed with a roughly scheduled life, I have time to know what my spirit is trying to tell me.
Near the creeping end of my last profession, I sat in a cubicle surrounded by other bright, albeit socially inept, humans working for the government. Especially in the early morning, I felt the first tendrils of panic clutch at me, as I sat there in my Jones NY shirt and pants-my monkey suit I called it. I could feel the radical changes in the office as if they had come to rest in the center of my chest and I knew, soon, very soon, I would have to decide.
For anyone out there, right now, I understand the immense loneliness and ragged breathing brought on by the trauma of coming to the reality that all has changed around you and you will have to make a very hard decision. I could see it around me in the secret meetings managers had every day and feel it in the fabric of the tense, angry phone calls with the public, over and over and over again.
I was tense and afraid and panicked. I had lost 10 pounds over the preceding year and if you know me, that is not a good thing. I was almost out of my mind some days. Everything I worked for was about to be left at the door to this institution where I left so much of my hope, energy, diligence and my heart. I would have to give up so, so much. I survived and now, nine months down the line from that cubicle, I have memories of myself, sitting there in my cloistered world, writing thoughts on scratch paper, poems and angry rants in order to survive because there was absolutely no one else who cared to listened. I have made it out, and now I am free to feel other kinds of panic.
It is hard to give those traumatized days breadth in my writing. I am here now, trying to find the door to the next place that I can thrive in and give my energy, work ethic and my heart. It doesn't have to be perfect and it does have to let me over the threshold. And so, now I panic sometimes that I shall never work again. I am not a slacker nor are others who cannot seem to be recognized. In fact, we are mostly overachievers who feel compelled to produce something in life. Now, the rules have changed dramatically. It feels very strange now kind of like being isolated in that cubicle with almost 80 coworkers and no one calling the bluff of the man in charge. Even having a union meant silence. Unions don't protect workers. They negotiate contracts. So, now, it feels like a different texture and it is fear just the same. The remedy? Swim, run, cycle, hike, read, meditate and don't give up. Just don't give up. It cannot have been for nothing. It just can't.
What a gift you have, words spinning like shimmering drops of water from a dancing carrot. We have come (in this culture) to equate our worth with our work. Yet, alas, our worth lies in who we are, not in what we do. Always, it seems, a trail is spinning in our wake -- keep that silver ribbon spooling, those droplets of light spinning. It's who you are -- that being of light at the center of it all -- that matters.
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