A point in time

First of all, I haven't been writing recently because I don't trust myself. After several weeks, possibly dealing with Lymes disease and then thyroiditis, I still don't feel like I have a great story to tell. What's to tell about existing and not knowing?

In my attempt to be faithful to something larger than myself, I am showing up on this blog. No guarantee that it will be pretty.

Mostly, I've been feeling very small and insignificant. I'm an extrovert and depend on human interaction for feedback or a reminder that I exist. It's not that I don't have housemates or caring people in my life. It is my own stuckness in my mundane daily life.

This feeling started before this last bout of illness. I think it is related to loss. But the past few weeks made it worse.

Over the past month with very little energy some days, I've had to figure out what one major effort I had the energy to invest in for that day. My world became smaller. It was also frustrating to experience fevers, difficulty swallowing and aches that bothered me, but some of those closest to me didn't see it. It was like my experience didn't exist in some way.

In my foggy state, time just slipped away. Wow, a month has gone by? You mean it is June already? Okay, thyroiditis. Just take aspirin and rest. Hmmm, an uncontrollable oil spill in the Gulf. Stay on the antibiotic, just in case. Genetically modified plants can't keep up with bugs and weeds they were designed to outrun. Sorry, can't help. Nope, not even a letter to the politicians. Then I would wander around in my mental attic picking up signals that haven't been too helpful.

One of them had to do with: how did I get here? Meaning - what about my fantasies of how life would be by now as I approach 50?

I had the idea that somehow if I completed a graduate program, my life would be easier in my later years. In some ways, it was a burden lifted after years of internalized expectations. It was what I was supposed to do. My parents had always expressed the hope that I wouldn't waste my mind. I now have the degree to prove it.

But since graduation, I have had several awkward attempts at fulfilling my counseling license requirements. This was something I hadn't really factored in. I didn't want to work in dysfunctional human services organizations. I have a friend who was a former social worker. She keeps telling me that she left social work to find employment where she is treated well.

Recently, two older women therapists whom I admire suggested that I was in a natural phase of mid-life stuff and that I was also trying to figure out how to apply counseling theories to real people.

Truly.

I look around me and see people in my field of counseling or pastoral counseling who have an active practice and a sense of vitality about their work. They are making a difference in peoples' lives. They know their way and have a great support network.

Then I made the mistake of Google-ing people from my music camp experience. The two people I was closest to are both professional musicians now. I'll spare you the details, except to say that they both have traveled around the world while I stayed home. It hurt.

While I tend to the family and community, these things feel very small. It is unpaid work and never-ending. As a Feminist, I never imagined that I would be in such a place. I've always had my primary focus on my family. I love being engaged in community work. Yet, I am also keenly aware of my own felt need to have financial security.

I can't believe I'm writing this, but I want to be rich and important. I want to be rich in utilizing my own education and life experience, and then, share it with people. Plus, I want it to matter.

Jung is attributed to saying that we need an ego, our core, our essential beingness needs to exist but that we want it to be as small and tight as possible - so that we can access the Self (Divine energy), where we then connect to a Source that is beyond us, allowing us to freely give and be available to others in their need. In the great circle of giving and receiving, we experience both more fully.

How can the culmination of my losses of so many expectations this past year be put into service? How can I allow space for the new? My hope is that there is a rich loam in my heart from which new things can grow.

If it is believed that God knows how many hairs we have on our heads, how can we believe we are insignificant? Even as my headaches are accompanied by a sun-burned feeling on my scalp, my faith is being tested, seared into something that while molten and liquid in the midst of them, can quickly harden.

Beyond housework, I'm trying to stay with the harp and meditation. Everything else is beyond me.

My rambling, unfocused mind scares me. There had better be a divine, loving presence in the universe. My own attempts to rationalize or understand my state seem limited at this point.