15 April 2005

Doing stuff in the night

15 April 2005: Doing stuff in the night

It is about four in the dark well of the night. The world around me is asleep. Being April, the sky will be lightless, and the ground will remain in darkness, for some hours. I can hear rain slapping against the windows. A wintery wind is whipping the newly-budded trees in the garden. I feel unsettled and restless. I need paid work. I am also uneasy about being awake. I have been up, doing stuff (tidying, cleaning, housekeeping my e-mail) for the past couple of hours. I get anxiety attacks, adrenaline rushes, but not panic attacks - that is a path important for me to avoid. I wish I could cope more easily with change. Gizzajob. My services are no longer required at the place where I have been working for the past four years. I am being let go, made redundant, sacked. I was doing okay, but am now surplus to requirements. As a consequence I feel demoralised and depressed. Go on, gizzajob. The date on which my counselling work was to have ended passed a fortnight ago. The new people have been selected, appointed, and are currently being negotiated with. I have been allowed to stay on until the new people start work. I feel rather pathetic. Gizzajob. I have no firm plans, no leads, no irons in the fire, nothing in the pipeline. My chess pieces are not in a fighting formation, and I have been racking my brain to calculate how to move my king out of check. Do I look for a similar kind of job to the one that I have had for the past four years, or should I try to build up a portfolio of part-time contracts? At what stage do I decide that I have no option but to apply to work the telephone lines in a call centre or stack shelves in a supermarket? I have been scouring the job advertisements for some indication that I am employable, but the words in the advertisements seem not to register, as though written in some foreign script. Kind souls have recruited themselves to support me in my job quest, keeping their eyes peeled for job vacancies. In the meantime, I am sliding inexorably towards the lip of an abyss. However, despite my obvious awareness of the situation, along with being awake half the night, I also appear to be in denial, and cannot take in the horrific reality that the ground is just about to give way to empty space.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi Peter - David V here..

have discovered podcasting tonight - I think that might suit me better cos I dont always feel like typing but I can talk,...

Re the ground falling away.. Helen says you should read Pema Chodron - When things fall apart - Heartfelt advice for diffficult times...

Apparently the ground is just an illusion anyway it falling away is an opportunity.. a time of great moment... to be with what is...