So my mother calls me today and asks how I am doing.
I tell her that the man from the agency dealing with this thing up in Lancashire for two months, has put me forward, but he was brutally honest about my chances. They’re good but they’re looking at my distance away from them, and they’re people applying who live twenty minutes away by car.
Right now, I’m just despondent. I don’t want to say that this process is defeating me, it’s just soooooo much harder than I imagined. Truth is, I didn’t have too many expectations, but certainly not this.
I just had a feeling in my gut about coming to England and arranged my life to suit. There’s a part of me that figured that as soon as I got here I’d find something to do and well, get this life shit underway. It didn’t have to be anything with bells and whistles, just something.
I have a feeling I have been slowed down on purpose. It’s fine to say that I don’t have money and need to work, but on the other hand I haven’t stopped working in fifteen years.
I am tired. I’ve thrown myself into everything I have done with little or no reserve, and I’ve given it everything I have, unfortunately mostly fruitless in the strictly material sense, but the return in experience made up for it.
At any rate, I really am tired. All those 36, 48 hour pulls working on projects; all those late nights at the office and the mind numbing drudgery of the last job I was at, it’s all trying to catch up to me.
The message the Universe keeps sending me, in cards and on the lips of God’s messengers (who don’t even know it) is, ‘Enjoy your rest’.
I want to try, but I’m not used to this.
The job search is hard.
“Don’t get too depressed,” my mother says in a kindly voice.
She told me to get in touch with the High Commision here, to get in touch with a few of the prominent people the family knows and see what turns up.
So, Monday morning that’s what I am going to do.
I told my mother I thought six weeks was too soon to give up, and she agreed, “You have to try!”
“It’s just I miss the routine of working so much,” I said, tears choking off my voice.
“Well this is so you appreciate the value of work and keeping it.”
I didn’t want to say anything. Later I’m thinking to myself, ‘Me? Don’t know the value of work?”
When I was fifteen I went out and got two jobs that summer to make enough money to buy my things for school. I was going into grey and white and Combermere, and it was fundamentally important to me to look cool. If my mother paid for things, she’d happily put me in an A-line skirt and one of those Bata buy one get one free black shoes, and *gasp* thin socks!
No… no… I had to get what I wanted. So I worked. I bought exactly what I wanted and paid a seamstress from my own pocket to make my skirts for school. Bought a pair of black high-top Filas, and the THICK socks I wanted (and the cut off socks to fill out my ankles) and that was that.
I’ve been working ever since. Even when I wasn’t working for money, I was working for Sunhead, and well… I just don’t know my life without work shaping it.
Veteran readers will remember my last vacation in Barbados, where I worked the entire time I was there.
“If it gets too hard, you just get right back on a plane and come back where you belong.”
Which is what my father said, except he put it, “There’s nothing that says you must stay there if you don’t like it.”
The job I left told me I could come back anytime.
I feel like Neo, looking down that rainy street from the back of the big black antique car.
I need a Trinity to remind me that I’ve been down that road before. I know where it leads.
Maybe I just need a rest…. and a rest is what I’m getting right now. Forcibly so…
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