These days

These days all I feel when I think about going to work is dread - particularly on Sunday night. This isn't a feeling I'm really accustomed to - I mean, at least not at this job. It concerns me. It's a recent thing, like feeling unmotivated and apathetic. Not feeling anxious all the time has come with all kinds of other unexpected and unwanted things - I have no motivation to change my life, no motivation to help anyone else, I feel mostly indifferent about the state of my life, and now, to top it off, I don't really want to go to work either. My job used to be the thing I used, like a drug, for distraction etc., and some how - it isn't working these days. I don't feel like I need to escape through my job - so it isn't as appealing as it used to be.

It isn't that I don't like my job, because I do. I like the place I work and the people I work with, and for the most part my work is interesting and challenging. In the scheme of life though, I know that my job is not important. Not as important as it is to make sure that my nephew knows me, to make sure that I am of service to others, to make sure that I take the next right action. As I have eluded to in the past, much of my identity has been tied up in my job. When it really comes down to what matters in life, and my job isn't it - what is there? I just - think this is it? I don't find it fulfilling in the way that can sustain me through a lifetime. It doesn't bring me joy the way playing with my nephew did. It is the little things that matter - and I don't have those little things.

I keep reminding myself that my life won't change in the ways that I want it to, until I accept it the way it is - but if this is it - if this is the point, I don't know how to accept it. I can't seem to surrender it - my expectations and everything I ever wanted in life - how do you let go of that? In so many ways my life is what I thought it would be - and in so many ways it isn't what I thought it would be all. I just want someone to share my life with. The one thing I have wanted the most is the one thing I don't have. It is lonely here, even in the midst of rooms full of people. It is a lonely place to be. Trying to plan a life, alone, that looks like something I can live with. Trying to expect nothing, because it hurts less.

You can't live your life, waiting for the next thing to happen, because you aren't really living. You're just waiting. These days I'm still waiting, not living. Waiting for the next thing to happen, so that I can live. Waiting to find that person, so I can enjoy my life. Waiting for that next thing that will make everything right. All of this waiting is in the shadow of the reality that I live with - which is that life is short and that if there is a moment that needs to be enjoyed - it is this one. I live every day under a fear that I will get breast cancer again - that I will die before my nephew grows up, that I won't live long enough to have children or that I will leave them behind. I try not to dwell on what happened to me. But sometimes, the regret that is woven through these 30 years of my life is more powerful that I can bury. I may not have another lifetime to change it. Maybe I have 60 years, maybe I have 2. In either case it isn't enough.