40Angst Explained

Why this nom de plume?

The first part is easy.  I was born in 1966.

The rest, well, this year is officially a crisis for me.  30 was no big deal.  There was still time to get my life on track.  Now at 40, I look back at all the decisions I made and see how a great part of them were wrong.  I see my life as a tree, full of branches.  Thousands, maybe millions of leaves.  Many are healthy and thriving, some have withered and died.  Each leaf is a stopping point, a place where I am now or could have been.  I might be able to jump the leaf next to me, but I can’t go backwards or jump to another branch easily.  When I’m on one side of the tree, it is harder and harder to see where any of those other limbs end up.  I have always tried to make a decision that I thought was “right” at the time.  But sometimes you just don’t know which is the right one until after it’s irreversibly done.  And what about those times that there are no good choices?  (My grammar sucks here but I’m just trying to spit out the idea.)  Yeah, hindsight and cliches.

It took a while to distill the spirit of this concept.  Too long.  For many years I did not consider consequences when taking a particular path.  I have not only burned bridges, I fire-bombed them and took no prisoners.  Is it any wonder that I can’t go back?

I have blamed others for my own actions, when in reality I was too ashamed to admit that I was weak.  If those who loved me discovered that I had feet of clay I just couldn’t handle it.  In reality I don’t feel brave, smart or considerate.  I so wanted to be that I wore it as a false face, and it’s been here for so long that that to tear it off would leave a gaping wound.  There’s a lot more to this but although I can write legibly, I can’t *think in straight lines.  It seems as though the center of my universe has shifted, not once but many times.  Searching for stability has been a long and painful process.  There was a time when I was convinced that marriage and a family would be the concrete my soul needed.  But, I dynamited that too.  There’s a concept and I can’t think of the phrase, but something about how you can create a situation you fear simply by dreading it so much.  And denial.... oh yeah that’s not a state it’s an entire continent.  My own fanciful little kingdom.

And always nagging me at the back of my mind, the fact that my life is SO much better than a lot of people I know, yet I’m still not happy.  How dare I be so selfish?  One guy at work has a son who is near Michela’s age.  He has some indescribable incurable disease and is sick a lot.  He was not expected to live even a few months past birth.  How can I refuse even a single whim of my own healthy, gorgeous, intelligent child, knowing that a twist of fate could have given us the other instead?  I have a job I love (given the fact that it’s work... and I certainly wouldn’t do it for free)... and I’ve been singularly fortunate to love most of the jobs I’ve had during my life.  It’s also been easy for me to find employment (barring one 8-month period when I lived with Randy... but even then I earned money working for friends) so I could not understand those in my life who could not find jobs.  How dare I be so smug?  I lost someone I love with all my soul because of self-righteousness and denial.  I have a quasi-farm, a dog, horses.  I often consider giving them up to move “to the city” and “buy a real house” but to do so would be like an amputation.  

I’m trying to dispel the miasma of self-pity I’ve been lounging in.  Tried attending a couple of churches but haven’t found many that accept the concept of God as an idea, rather than a person.  Tried Paganism/Wicca but I really don’t care about “duality” of spirits or ritual. The Unitarians have had the best feel so far, but they turned me off quickly by asking about my salary before illustrating their beliefs.  The other annoying (to me) thing about church, worship, or whatever you call it, is that everyone does it on Sunday.  Yeah yeah day of rest, blah blah.  However, Sundays are the ONLY day lately I have to call partly my own – meaning, chores.   (Mow pasture, fix fence, mow front yard, pretend to clean house, trim the dog’s toenails, weed-whack, laundry, mow back yard, avoid washing dishes, and did I mention mowing?  Basically many outdoor things that need to be done and cannot be accomplished with a toddler in tow.  She’s too small to hang out with the horses where I need to be doing stuff, like cleaning water troughs, mucking stalls in the barn, dousing wasp nests in poison, etc.  If it were just Zyggy I wouldn’t worry so, but Ebony is a typical adolescent horse, completely unaware of how huge she is and how dangerous those feet can be. This is a bad time of year to be a horse, stomping to get rid of winged pests and running in panic from the B52s.)  

[[The preceding paragraph is true testimony to my erratic thought processes – what was my point again?]]