with bones straining (or, you’re so long gone;)

The last three months have been agony. 

I’m beginning to feel like my brain is acting like a shredded tendon–achy, bruised and practically useless from overexertion. No matter how much rest I get, I cannot shake the feelings of dread and bewilderment. I wake up in the morning with a cold, heavy weight in my stomach, and go to bed numb– numb eyes, numb heart, numb soul. The anxiety is beginning to affect my appearance.

"You look… bereft." my sister told me the other day. "Like a puppy kicked one too many times." She paused and handed me a Chinese takeaway container. "Have some food. Watch some Netflix with me." 

I put on the strongest front I can during the day, but lately, at night, I’ve been crying myself to sleep. 

My adult life is collapsing in on me, one possession and institution at a time.

EMPLOYMENT

I quit my job as a project manager in February, unable to stomach it any longer. On paper, it was a terrific job. My parents were finally satisfied I decided to "get with the program" and work in an office again (beforehand, I freelanced, and loved it). I had a title and my own phone line. I had responsibilities and keys to the office. I had an opportunity to exchange feedback with my boss. I ate great food because we were surrounded by international restaurants. I liked almost all of my co-workers. My boss was accommodating. I lived around the corner from work, so my commute was negligible. I got to know all of my contractors. I was in charge of accounts payable and client management. I got to hire and fire people. I even was working in an industry near and dear to my heart– foreign language.

The problems that made me quit were pay, early mornings, ADHD and my angry coworker I shared the department with.

Despite being a part of an industry where huge sums of money change hands– translation and interpretation– and despite having the fancy title and responsibilities of "project manager", I was only making 10 dollars an hour when I quit. ON the clock, I was supposed to work 45 hours. Often, I’d stay much later than that, and come in much earlier because I lived around the corner. Because our biggest client were two major hospitals.  I would be up late in the night attempting to secure an interpreter in an exotic language last-minute. 3 am Arabic, 2 am Sign Language, next-day Somali, Spanish around the clock for 3 weeks… you name the project, I worked on it.

The biggest problem was always money. My boss was extremely cheap. How cheap? We frequently ran out of hand soap, toilet paper, toner, ink pads, Post-It notes and paper towels. Our computers were slow and dated, our office supplies bought from Craigslist. Half of the equipment we used in the office was worn to pieces.  We printed internal documents on recycled paper. A significant amount of my day was shuffling to the (inadequately stocked) supply closet, sorting through a dusty box of previously translated documents and figuring out what had a blank side and what didn’t. Because I received invoices from contractors and sent invoices to clients, I did the most printing in my department.

A person in my position and wearing as many hats as I did would have easily been making 40,000 a year to start. My starting salary was less than half of that. Even with the fancy title and the weighty responsibilities, my friends who were working in fast food were making more than I was, and with less time at the job. 

The second problem was how utterly useless I am before 10 am most days. If I’m up and about before 8 am, it’s because I’ve spent most of the night awake. Despite being a 30 second drive and a 5 minute walk from the office, I was constantly late (fortunately, so was everybody else). Even once there, I could barely focus.

The third problem was the complex nature of the job. Every day, we’d have 10-25 simultaneous interpreting projects going on around town. I’d receive the work order from the client via fax or email, or sometimes via telephone.I put it in the schedule (which was nothing but a modified Excel spreadsheet). I’d send a mass text or call all the interpreters we had in our database (another modified Excel spreadsheet). I’d wait for the right person with the right price to respond to the assignment. I’d create an assignment sheet for the contractor and send them an email. I would text them and confirm that they received their assignment sheet and are prepared to go to the assignment. I would await their reply. I would call the client back and confirm via telephone. I would send them a confirmation in my email. I would change the colour of the assignment in the schedule. If the assignment went well, I’d receive the work order from the contractor. I would send the invoice to Accounting. Accounting would process the interpreter’s invoice. I would collect the payment information from the interpreter and make sure the translation project manager (who also did accounts receivable for some reason) sent them their payment. Accounting would create the invoice for the client. I would submit it. Only then was the project completed. I’d change it in the schedule. 

In case you weren’t counting at home, that’s 19 tasks per SUCCESSFUL FOREIGN LANGUAGE project. SIGN LANGUAGE projects were even more delicate because ASL interpreting is regulated by the state; there were always legal issues involved AND sign language interpreters are the most expensive. Many times we’d have unsuccessful projects– unreasonable clients asking for Mongolian at 3 am on a Sunday, a flaky interpreter with a sick kid, a misplaced work order (on the client’s side) or God-forbid, I missed a task OR sent an interpreter that was either not that qualified or disliked by the client. The unsuccessful projects were always worse because of the amount of cajoling, wheedling, reprimands and other clean-up I’d have to do. These are just the tasks that WERE covered by job description. There was also accounts payable, business development, recruitment and social media tasks I also had to account for. Each of those tasks could demand a $20 hour salary on their own. 

In any case, any normal human being would feel overwhelmed with the workload. I struggled even more mightily because I have ADHD. For every 1000 tasks I was given a day, I was only hitting, on my best days, 800 of them. 

I would have continued to struggle through all of this if it weren’t for the angry, obnoxious woman I shared the department with. She was a good-looking woman– blonde and green-eyed, with a svelte figure. Her boyfriend was a head honco at Chrysler, so she always had great clothes and great makeup. She is as mean as she is beautiful. Cruel, petty, manipulative, dishonest and critical, she was the reason I hated getting out of bed in the morning. I rejoiced every day she decided to work from home or was absent or left early for any reason. We made a great team nonetheless, mostly because we wanted to get the work done as quickly as we could so we could get away from each other. The company was too small to avoid her. The worst bit? She was the senior employee, and never let me forget it. 

One day, I simply decided I was pulling the trigger on leaving. I gave a two week notice but only stayed 8 days. I literally couldn’t take theabuse anymore.

I wrote all of this to tell you where the financial struggles really started.

It’s June, about to be July. I’ve worked plenty since then– a part time job as a caregiver  and struggled to eat between freelance jobs. I’m nearly 7000 in debt. I’m living with an old friend who’s 100,000 in debt and living in her parents’ foreclosed house until the sheriff kicks us out. 

I would have been okay if the car didn’t quit on me.

My car is dead, in need of a fuel pump and a catalytic converter. My house is in the boonies.

My room mate and I struggle to deal with each other often. She’s the only one bringing in any money right now, and her income is meager, especially in comparison to her debts. She and I have different ideas of clean. I promise you I’m nobody’s slob, but it doesn’t bother me when the house looks a little lived- in. She can’t stand it if the floor isn’t mopped every single day. She wants them buffed by hand. She thinks I’m lazy and has screamed this in my face as we had a late-night argument about how to mop the floor. Since then, no matter how much we’ve apologized to each other, I still haven’t felt safe emotionally there. I’m a like a prisoner in my own house, especially since I don’t have a car. I’m far away in a country town with less than 6000 people and a room mate who scrutinizes me and never forgets anything– to the point where she doesn’t fight fair. 

I’ve got a few tough outcomes that are ahead of me. None of them are good.

The house my room mate and I share got sold in a short sale 28 March– over a month before I got there. We have, at most, until August, to find another place suitable to live. The first thing I’m doing when I get back to the country is selling practically everything I own to scrape up cash. How much I’ll end up with at the end of it all, I’m not sure. Even with that sum of cash, there are so many debts, I’m not sure what to pay first. It’s like showing up to a forest fire with only one bucket of water.

Depending upon what I have towards the ends of that, I have to choose which big fires are worth extinguishing first– the car situation? the debt I owe to my previous landlord? my three month overdue phone bill?  my payday loans? the move-in costs I promised my room mate but wasn’t able to deliver? my overdrawn bank account? 

Will all of those things have to wait and I’ll have to put down a deposit on a tiny room in a hovel somewhere? 

Our worst fear is that one day, we will come home and the locks will be changed, our things strewn in front of the house or tossed into a gigantic dumpster before we can vacate properly. This fear consumes my room mate more than it does myself. She decided not to move with her parents to Las Vegas, and my parents don’t have the will or the room to take us both in.If this situation happens, I won’t be homeless (hopefully) but she certainly would be. 

My second worst fear is that I’ll end up  selling everything for such a small sum of money there’ll be nothing I could do about my situation for literal weeks.  The night job is very far away from my parents house (because it’s close to my current one) and the possibility of scoring another midnight is slim. I’d have to come home to my old bedroom with little more than a coffee percolator (maybe), a suitcase full of clothes and a couple of worn paperbacks I’d have trouble parting with (The Prophet, Soul of a Citizen, Tuesdays with Morrie). My parents are angry, resentful people, and I left haughtily. Coming back would be worse than it was when I had left. I’d be a prisoner there too. Add the noise and grime that comes with 4 children under the age of 13 living in the house and it’d be even more soul-crushing.

And my third fear is that my father will get in one of his resentful, angry moods and decide that I’m not the worth the trouble of taking in again, even temporarily, and I’ll end up homeless for a bit, burdening yet another one of my friends for food and their futon. I hate taking anything from anyone, and yet these situations come up anyway. 

My parents—the grace of Jehovah being the only reason this has come to pass- have allowed me to stay here for almost two weeks  to get some business done for my new (night) job as a caregiver at a group home. This job will be part time and midnights. It pays 8.15 hourly. Despite the low pay, low number of hours and odd schedule, I’ve had to struggle mightily through a long hiring process. I’ve had to take several classes on patient rights, CPR and bloodborne pathogens. I’ve had to get photographed and pricked for TB and fingerprinted. I’ve come to their office– 35 miles away from my house and 12 miles away from my parents’ house– no less than 4 times since this job started. My bank accounts are so overdrawn I can’t afford the bus fare to get there and have to borrow the money.

I finally start that job Wednesday.

After applying for hundreds of jobs and calling the HR department at my room mate’s job no less than 6 times, I finally scored an interview with her employer Monday at 10:00 am. There’s also a position on my side of town I’m interviewing for at 2:00 pm that same day. This is significant, for if I can get into my room mate’s job during the day time, I won’t have to worry about getting there for the first few weeks without wheels.

I’m praying constantly that this nightmare will be over soon, and I can get back to life again. Except for two friends, my last ex and my sister, no one has come to visit me since I’ve been cut off from everything and everyone I’ve loved for the last two months. I cannot go anywhere. I cannot do anything. The town doesn’t have a movie theater or a concert hall. There’s no dance lessons. There’s barely any internet up there. I’ve got to get out.

The other thing I’m exhausted from is trying to get over someone I have loved for three years who does not return my feelings. 

He is 30 years old. He has olive skin, wide brown eyes, generous lips and sleek black hair. He is tall with broad shoulders and a strong physicality from years of soccer and marathons. There are laugh lines forming around the corners of his eyes and freckles on his forehead from days in the sun. He has a breathy, soft, lilted tenor and a wide grin. His personality is sweet and warm, but he also has  a wry and witty sense of humour. He speaks honestly but with heart. There’s a traditional flair to him because of his Sicilian roots. There’s a Bohemian streak to him because of his constant travel. I fell in love with him when we first met. I was 16. He was 24. I knew immediately. We spent one afternoon together by chance and I never thought I’d see him again.

I moved with my family when I was 19 and it happened to be in his neighborhood. We went to the same Hall for about a year. I got to see him on great days– happy and jovial and patient and whimsical– and on bad days– drawn and silent and sad and seething. I saw his baby pictures. I met his family. I ate food in his house and in his car. Weentertained him at my house. His mum attended my sister’s grad party. I knew in my heart of hearts that he was the man I dreamt of all of my days- handsome, intelligent, kind-hearted, open.

Despite what seemed to be a promising beginning, he revealed wasn’t interested in dating me. Why, I fear I’ll never know. 

He has since moved away twice– to a town an hour away and now, to one four hours away. Sometimes, we still run into each other because we both have roots here, and it kills me every time. He always seems shocked and sad about it too. He will stare at me from across whatever room we are both in with wide, forlorn eyes and then leave shortly after we speak, choked up.

I attempted to move on with my last ex, who was a great fellow and whom I miss in his own right. 

But I was still haunted every night by visions of the one I really loved– his hair blowing in the wind, his eyes burning into mine, and then him adjusting his tie and looking down at his shoes, flushed. I could still feel the curve of his shoulder brush against mine, and still see us talking on those late summer evenings– him in dark suits, me in seamed stockings. I’d dream of his hands in mine– pale and roughened from work but softened by lotion. I’d dream of the nape of his neck against my nose when I’d hug him in greeting. 

I always woke up with the word "lost" upon my lips. Even now, I fear when others mention him because I still weep on the inside.

I can’t talk about it anymore. At the height of my agony, he was the only thing on my mind  and hence, on my lips. My family and close friends tired of hearing of him years ago. I got a chance to say goodbye to him before he left unexpectedly. Two weeks later, I stopped following him on every social network I could and deleted his number from my phone. I couldn’t bear to look at him any longer, and see him somewhere else carrying on happily without me while I struggled every day to just get out of bed with the knowledge he could not, did not, would not love me back. 

Sometimes, my dear ones will see me staring off into space and will know I’m thinking of him. 

"What’s wrong?", they’ll ask, tense.

"I don’t want to talk about it.", I say, tersely. They’ll see tears brimming in my eyes and know it’s best to leave me to suffering in silence.

Jonathon Safran Foer once wrote:

"Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all of the lives I’m not living." 

That is how I feel all day, every day of my life. 

I’m disappointed in myself. I feel like all of my problems– especially employment and in love– were self-inflicted and all I had to do was be a little smarter, a little stronger, a little sexier– and could have spared myself many pains. I have dreams of being slender and well-dressed, of living in a city that is more alive with music and dance and places to go and things to do. I have dreams of being confident,happy and well-liked, instead of introverted, miserable and simply tolerated. 

I’m out in search of joie de vivre.

This search is proving difficult. It’s mostly difficult because I don’t know have a real grasp of what it means to be happy, except for moments.

There are moments like when I’m behind the wheel with no real destination in mind, walking round in the forest and spotting a deer,  dancing with a man I’m attracted to, wearing a dress I feel nice in, coming into New York City for the first time, when I clocked 198 after being over 225 pounds for 10+ years…. there are moments of joy, but it’s not like I have a reservoir of it somewhere inside of me. When I am alone, I find it hard to feel content even though I have many things to be grateful for.

Inwardly, a voice is always constantly whispering in the back of my mind, The ‘good life’ is out there somewhere….

But what does the “good life” even mean to me? People talk about riches or lavish vacations or expensive clothes or wild parties when they speak of “the good life”. Those things are only secondary in my mind. I think that when I’m thinking of “the good life”, I’m thinking of a time where I will have a reservoir of joy within me, and that reservoir only comes from love…. love of yourself, being loved by others, loving what you do, drawing close to Jehovah.

I’m working on all of these things, but the one that seems to be the hardest for me right now is the love of myself. I was trying to explain this to my room mate a couple of nights ago and she listened to me, though not with comprehension.

“What’s there to hate about yourself? If you hate yourself because of what you do, then change it!

It’s such a simple way of putting it, but in practise, it’s nearly impossible. How do you rip out your entire inner person and start over? I wish that personalities were something you could buy in a pill bottle at a drug store; that way,when you get sick of yourself, you can become someone else instantly, with no trace of who you used to be knocking around in your mind. But that’s not how it works, and I’m afraid that what I hate the most about myself– my utter spinelessness, my passivity, my weakness of character– will never change…. and I’ll be advanced in years still whining about the same types of problems I had in my 20s.

The “good life”, to me, means to not hate yourself. It means to look in the mirror and not feel disgusted about the way you look, act, or think. The “good life” means to be comfortable in your own skin, and not be so overtly sensitive that people are afraid to deal with you. The “good life” means to esteem yourself as a being created in God’s image instead of looking at yourself as an aberration.

The good life means to allow yourself to enjoy pleasures, and not just feel like you don’t deserve them because you’re that terrible a person.