Composure Trouble
These are the days of doubt and worry. My exterior calm is a practiced pose, while my inner senses are unsettled by an awareness of uncertain futures, a slow feeling of rising cold water, chilled by the modern realities that are somehow both public and personal, private and societal. The growing realization of my precarious future, mixing with the chaos of public events, has me feeling unbalanced almost daily. I worry I need help, but worry more that there isn't anywhere to find it.
Where will I live? How can I earn enough to support myself? What will happen to my family if the old supports suddenly give way? How can I help them if I am sunk beneath tides of chaos? Debt is a chain, and compassion is being swallowed by serpents.
These past few years have me feeling old and fragile. I know I am not immune to worldly changes. I no longer have the seemingly certain buffer of youth and optimism to fix or repair the mess my life is in. I'm no longer becoming something; I am what I am. No one gets forever. Maybe the comforting illusions are falling like scales from my eyes. I don't know. Uncertainty seems to be the human condition. I know my youthful failures have sealed my senior circumstances to a degree.
I refuse to be specific about my problems, but I do try to name and understand them most days, when the waves of emotion surge too strongly. Poverty is hell. For now, troubled as I am, I have a place to stay, but not much of a plan for the future. No guarantee that my current circumstances will last several more years or even a handful of months, certainly not forever.
Imagine being at a failing company. You work your job like normal, watching your coworkers (whom you have worked happily with for years) go separately into the boss's office, and leave crying because they have just been fired. It's unlikely you'll see them again. Alarm spreads through the workplace, but everyone avoids showing it, putting on a brave face, hoping that a calm exterior, no matter how false, will protect them from being singled out for doom. You feel like a prey animal hoping to hide in the herd and avoid being tackled and eaten by the predator, who you feel at the edge of the group but can't see. Somehow, for weeks, you've avoided the inevitable, but the rising sense of misery and gloom are getting to you. You wonder, as you do your job as before, when it will be your turn? If there is any valid business reason you haven't been sacked yet, or if it is just random chance that your name isn't higher on the list? Will the doomed company survive, or will the final axe fall, and everyone is suddenly out at once? How do you prepare for turmoi? How do you reach equanimity in the teeth of a wolf?
I really don't know how to prepare myself for my personal uncertain future. I am working on it. I know I can't avoid the future forever. I pray God will help me find my way through. I have never been good at making personal decisions and plans, but I don't think I can avoid it anymore. Do I train for a new field? Do I stop worrying about what I can't control? How do I do that if I don't know what is controllable or not? The fiddle playing grasshopper must turn to the ant to teach him the lessons of security, because song and dance can't comfort him any more.
More could be said, more could be explained, but for now, I'll continue to try and rekindle the embers of hope.
Depression is an old habit that sneaks up on me again and again. I can never seem to get rid of him, because he says he's the only one who can tell the truth, and I do like cold truths over happy lies. The trouble is, he can also tell some pretty convincing lies himself. You never can tell.
28 July 2024
Comments:
Post a Comment
