During dinner, my friend turned to me and asked, “So what’s on your agenda for this year? What have you got planned?”
Clang!
I hesitated and then I filled the space left for me with words that made sentences but perhaps not sense. I’ve been asked before and I’ll be asked again, but I haven’t got anything prepared in advance because the words “I don’t know!” are so loud and frantic they take up all the room.
I don’t know. What I’ll be, who I’ll be, how I’ll be.
It’s a worry, I know. It was a worry way back when I took that redundancy and left my job. But it was also such a huge relief to escape the damaging and corrosive toxins everywhere that I felt I could wait a bit before deciding what I would do next. I had New York to visit first. I had to recover myself and my mind after a couple of very difficult years. I made a few attempts at being something else but I didn’t even get an interview. I said it was just as well. It obviously wasn’t meant to be. Yet.
After New York and after Christmas and after stepping into the New Year I felt ready to be something. I wasn’t sure what exactly, but I felt all would be revealed. Soon. And then I tripped and fell and dislocated my shoulder and then needed surgery and then needed physiotherapy and hydrotherapy. Endlessly.
And before I knew it another year had passed and it added up to 18 months unemployed. That’s a long time to lack the definition of a job. It’s a long time to not have to be somewhere at a specific time every morning and to have to stay there until a specific time of an evening. A long time not to be clocking on and clocking off, not to be earning a wage, not to be needed as a vital cog in the wheel. A long time not have the satisfactions, and the frustrations, of a job.
A long time not to be able to, in any satisfying and acceptable way, answer the question, “And what do you do?”
I’ve mended myself – my head and my heart at least and at last, after the terrible time. I’m urging my body to recovery now, too. And I’m out on a search for the confidence I used have. The confidence of the person in paid employment.
But I’m none the wiser about what I’ll be when I grow up. I have no irons in the fire, no replies I’m waiting on, no-one calling out a welcome on my first day. I am empty of resolutions and aims and objectives. I am not on a treadmill or a merry-go-round, I am not in the rat race. I have a quieter life by far these days, in which to grow older.
Sometimes, at the end of the day, I have trouble assembling a list of what I have done with my time. I do things, just not the kind of things that those on the treadmill can recognise. A life of luxury? A wasted life? Who needs the judgement?
It’s a scary place to be, but I tell myself I am.
And I tell myself that tomorrow anything can happen.
RosieL
endgame 