oh bad

I am on the verge of emotional collapse. Of gibbering in a corner for hours on end. I can’t keep my house clean. I am six days from unpaid unemployment. I have a completely draining respiratory virus. I am subbing for another class tonight, one I’m not really up for at all. I can’t find it in me to cook at all beyond toast. My car is making expensive noises. I have to be with the family this weekend, tell them all that I am quitting a job next week and have no concrete offers for another one.

I am, to put it plainly, not functioning, except as necessary at work and interviews.

It’s not a secret here that I believe in God, and I don’t think it’s a secret that I talk to God when I’m troubled. I think it’s praying, but I don’t think of it in the same context as the “Our prayers are with you” kind of on-your-knees before-bed Christian-type praying. On rare occasions, I have had answers. Maybe they’re my own mind answering me. I’m fine with that. I’m also fine with an external force that nudges from time to time. Neither makes me crazy, in my opinion.

This morning as I was driving in, I was feeling so thoroughly beaten, so lost and furious at whatever force had decided to give me a nasty virus while I’m coping with all of what I’m coping with, that I was sobbing and asking God what I did to deserve this. In my mind I was backing up this request with the knowledge that this-all is not so bad compared to being homeless or abused or cold or hungry, but I still wanted to know, why did I get kicked this week when I was down? Why have I had over two months straight of no normal bowel movements due to stress? Why couldn’t I have found a therapist who could help me instead of one who was so impotent, who is on maternity leave now and can’t help me at all? What did I do to fuck up my karma so badly that I can’t get a good breath until it’s time to sleep?

What did I do to deserve this?

Nothing, darling. This is just the way it has to be. 

But…why?? Is something good coming? Will it all work out, like it did the last time I had a crisis like this? Will it keep getting worse until it works out?

Remember the anatomy class? Remember how hard it was, how you stuck it out to the very end, and how proud BF was of you?

Yes.

I want you to be proud of your own perseverance. You deserve that. 

Thank you, but I was hoping for more help, more answers.

…

Thank you.

Nothing that I do right now is helping; no amount of breathing or counting my blessings or thinking about the sheer number of job applications I’ve submitted and how one of them is surely going to be lucky or being optimistic or remembering that things have always worked out in the past or any of that shit is helping me. I do not know what I’m going to do on November 7th. I am completely helpless before the enormity of this not-knowing, and my helplessness is making me angry.

Being waylaid by this virus is kind of a double-decker of helplessness. (That’s part of why I’m soldiering through and going to work instead of just To Hell With It and calling in sick the rest of the week. Combating the helplessness.) I just don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t know what action to take to make this better.

Maybe the crisitunity here is about humility? About laying down my wish for action in the sight of the universe and allowing something to happen without me trying to direct it? I’ve been trying to read the universe’s clues for the past two months, and trying to act accordingly, but apparently I am no mystic because I feel like I’ve gotten it all wrong. I just feel hopeless. Like no action I can take will do any good, not even lowering my dukes. Not even resting in the utter rubble of my bad housekeeping and trusting my immune system.

The past few weeks have made me decide to attend church voluntarily for the first time in my life. There’s a Unitarian Universalist church in my town, a tiny one, and a much larger one in a nearby town. Neither of the projected sermons for this week seemed terribly salient, so I decided to go to the tiny one this week and see what happens. Maybe nothing will. I am just feeling so rudderless that I’m reaching out somewhere kind of obvious. It’s worked for many millions of others.

I have no idea what’s going to happen. This creek, the one I’m up, without a paddle, is unmapped.