jkatkina

so -- TL and I have always assumed we'd have a family. Right? Like, it was one of my conditions of entry back in our early days. I made it clear I'd eventually want to be a parent. She wasn't ready, and that was frustrating to some parts of me but overall, a-ok. The deal is we do it when we're both ready.

She finally feels ready, and our living situation is finally ready (or as ready as it will ever be), and the clock has ticked to the shit-or-get-off-the-pot moment. TL turns 40 next year. I'm 38 in a couple of weeks. It's kind of now or never.

Faced with that, with the very real possibility of starting, we're re-evaluating.

( More about that journey in here. )

I passed!

Walking home, I picked ripe blackberries on the side of a busy highway. There were hundreds of them. My fingers are purple. I listened to Sufjan Stevens and Cake.

Going, alone, to walk through a fire, and coming home, alone, having done it: for better or worse, these are the moments in which I feel most myself.

So TL and I booked our road tests for driving the better part of a year ago, and they're finally up. Hers was today, and mine's tuesday. She didn't make it, when she was very confident she would -- she got caught right at the end in a complicated intersection situation and got spooked, did a thing that disqualified her.

I've been having lessons all these past few weeks and I don't feel ready. I really, really would like one of us to have our license before we move next month, but good lord, with bookings happening eight months ahead of time... our best bet is snapping up cancellations, and without a vehicle of our own to test on, that's going to be hella complicated.

I really do not enjoy driving. Even with ten lessons under my belt, I still find it spooky as fuck. I'm a slow thinker, and the road is ever changing.

Wish me luck next week.

I've fallen off the DW horse again, which really shouldn't be, because this is a fascinating time and I should be documenting it.

I'm still working from home. The world is still mad right now. TL's still unemployed. The last few months have felt like melted ice cream: all goopy and running together and somehow wrong.

Inevitably, I've been grappling with feelings of helplessness and, interestingly, anger that at times threatens to just explode everywhere. None of us deserve this, none of us should be having to go through this, but here we are: at the mercy of our governments, of other people with foolish beliefs, of a merciless, mindless virus. And it's not fucking fair.

Everyone I know has tried their best to be a good person and to survive and thrive in a world that is stacked against most of us, and this is how that world is paying us back. I know there's really no rhyme or reason to anything, but my cultural background has instilled me with this gut feeling that good should be rewarded from above. (Though my family of origin is solidly atheist, our collective background is solidly WASPy and.... whatever the catholic version of WASPs are.) Framed charitably, I call this my sense of justice: in my worst moments it's a raging sense of entitlement. They're two sides of the same coin. Anyways, it's interesting feeling full of rage and helpless to change the situation. Horrible, and I'd rather we not be here, but here we are and I can at least frame it as interesting and channel it where it can do some good.

( Now here's the hope part: )

I had a minor breakdown today over the idea of things going back to normal.

( Precipitated by Mat telling us, it's high time for a hangout, don't you think? )

Even aside from the family stuff, though, I desperately don't want things to go back to normal. I don't want to be in a big warehouse painting in a cold room five days a week, with an hour transit either way full of strangers and through a sketchy part of town. I don't want my weekends to be full of social obligations that eat up all my time.

I don't want that crushing guilt over not being enough to return, but it's already coming back, and there's nothing I can do to stop it.

eta I suppose the upshot here, the tl;dr if you will, is that I have been enjoying my time completely cut off from people outside my household. Whatever horrible things that says about me. Because fuck personal preference, right? You're only good if you can exist in the ways other people want you to.

Entries tagged with fear

Weighing a diversion in the path

A big old N

driving

Hope and fear

who's labour is it

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