One of the pitfalls of my personality is that I'm always looking in the rearview mirror. It makes for great reflection and introspection, but it's not so good for envisioning the future or leaving crap in the past. While digging around in a rarely-opened box trying to find my tax records, I found one of my old journals. This is odd because 20 journals are stacked on the bookshelf in my living room, serving as the archives to my largely uneventful life. That's where all of my journals are supposed to be kept. What was this one doing in a box?
Apparently, I never wanted to be reminded of its contents. It was the journal I kept 3 1/2 years ago during one of my Dark Nights of the Soul. In it I documented my disillusionment with Christianity, my failure at 4 successive jobs, the loss of my apartment (again) and pet (again), and a very de-feminizing trip to New York for New Years.
Here is a look back...
I'm turning 30 this year. I feel stale, forgotten, shoved to the back of the vegetable drawer in God's refrigerator like an old, rotting bell pepper. Even if He did suddenly remember me, the chances of Him finding a recipe that calls for moldy pepper are slim to none.
It's the end of my third decade, and I have nothing to show for it: 4 pretty unsuccessful hits to my employment record. A litany of relationships either doomed at the start or doomed at the end. No home. No tenure. And as of June, no income and no place to live.
I'm scared. But more than scared, I'm disappointed. I wonder what I did wrong, to be shoved to the back of the drawer and forgotten...relationally, economically, spiritually. I'm caught in the rat race and I hate it... working 3 jobs, skipping church when I have no one to sit with because I hate being alone. I need a friend.
Is it stupid to leave here? Or ought I to have done it a long time ago, when everyone first started asking me what I was still doing in St. Louis?
Mostly I'm just restless. Tired of answering the same, boring questions; tired of going to the same chain bookstores; tired of regurgitating the same canned answers about Marzano's Instructional Strategies at job fairs; tired of dating the same passive, uncommunicative men.
I want to be shakened up and wakened up! I'm scared of leaving everything I know. But I'm not doing anything here. I'm a teacher's assistant, for Pete's sake and I stay here because it's what I've always known. But as all of my friends tend to their husbands and children, I'm restless. I've never intentionally challenged myself before, prefering to attempt only what I know I can succeed at. I've all but forgotten the question T.S. Eliot asked in The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock: Do I dare disturb the universe?
