Part of my emerging awareness of the world around me and my improving mental health is the realization that there are some things that I want to be different. I want to live in a nicer place. I want to be able to have a little dog. I want to not have to worry about every penny.
The way to accomplish all of these things is to work. I am recovering as rapidly as I can. My growth this year has been incredible, gaining back so much of the ground I'd lost. I want to go for it. I am afraid of failing again. To have a real career again, then have it snatched away again by mental illness, that would be devastating.
But who is to say that would happen? If I can continue to improve, maybe I can do it. I say I want a "real life," but the fact is that there is no other kind of life but the one you live from one day to the next. I have a real life. I do what I can with it each day. Having a job and more money will not make me any more real. Having greater mental health and physical health will not make me more or less real.
All there is to say is that I am scared to try, and scared not to try. I don't want to slide back into the grinding grey sameness that has been my life for the past several years. I want to move forward.
This is going to take some thinking about. I need to move it around in my head, try it on for size, think of the angles and curves. I need to talk to Captain Husband and Brotherman about it. Most of all, I need to be realistic in evaluating how ready I am. Hesitate and thus miss a chance, or rush ahead and risk losing it all?
What a mess. But it's a more hopeful mess than it has been for the last 8 years. I don't know what to say. I don't know what to do. I don't have to make any decisions tonight. Maybe I can wait and see how I do through April at the job I've been given. This is not the first time I have contemplated moving back out into the real world. I've made several attempts and failed to get very far into the process. Maybe I just wasn't ready then, but I'm becoming ready now.
All of this musing is in response to the possibility that there might be an opportunity at a part time position in the program at USM. A friend has mentioned it positively. I'm almost too terrified to hope.
Dear Jokamo,
ReplyDeleteYour life is as real as you are. It isn't a dress rehearsal for the real thing. Good for you for realizing it.
Go forward, in baby steps. Part time. In small ways. Each step will make you stronger. Set up a safety net that can help catch you if you begin to slide back. Expect to go a step back on occasion, that is not the end. Giving up at that moment and just sliding backward because of one small blip on the screen is not where you want to go.
Small steps to a changed life. That is a great goal.
messymimi