Change Hurts

Change isn’t easy. Any change is a real pain in the butt. Even if you need it, even if it’s really necessary and you know it, It’s still a royal pain. It seems like it should be good, it should be really great to Get Past, to Be Free, to get “out from under,” but it’s still filled with petty problems and annoyances. Sometimes it feels like it’s never going to end, it seems like the goal will never get here, and, at the same time, I dread the looming deadlines. I want it to be over, but I don’t want to pass through all the crap that is between here and there.

Sometimes it’s not so bad. Other times I’m depressed: I want to cry, I can’t seem to focus and I want some routine to fill the time. Often, I just don’t want to think, and, sleep is hard. I suppose it’s the constant stress. I don’t know where I’m going and the prospects don’t look real good. Things are too expensive around here but I’d rather not move away. On the other hand, if you must, you must.

I managed to find some work, but that’s hard too. First of all, it’s a major step down from a 6-figure engineering job to Home Depot. My ego has some adjusting to do. And I’m not making enough to break even, I will have to continue to live off my savings. That hurts. It really brings home the debate about minimum wage. Years ago I could work jobs like this and make enough to get by, but now it’s hard to see how that’s possible, with rent and food and insurances constantly going up and wages have hardly changed in 30 years. I always got this point before, but now it’s more personal. All those years of minimum wage jobs used to be in the past, but now all that’s in my face again. I would have hoped that after 30 years, I would have earned some degree of choice in my life, but it seems like most of that is gone. All my choices lead to difficult outcomes.

My options were to stay in an unhappy marriage, with all it’s emotional frustrations and the endless “putting up with,” or to go it alone. With the kids gone, that means really alone. It doesn’t help that I let my wife define my social life for most of those years, not having any friends, or family, of my own. In the last few years, I have begun to change that, and now have a group of casual friends and acquaintances. Most of them have never met my soon-to-be ex, because she wasn’t interested in meeting them, being involved, or pretty much anything that’s important to me.

I made the mistake of letting her define who I was. I entered into this relationship so desperate for someone to like me that I was willing to put up with pretty much anything, thinking I could manage it. She took full advantage of that to try and remake me into, I don’t know, something acceptable to her and her friends, I suppose. I put up with a lot of it, because I thought that was what you do, that is what marriage is all about. You do things together and do your best to get along. It took me some time to figure out that I was on a never-ending path of subservience. It was a power game. I would never be good enough, there was nothing I could do to get the approval I needed to feel good about myself. No amount of success or doing or giving in would ever make things work.

For a long time, I would try to include her in my interests. At first, she acted interested, then, as time went on, she pulled away from all that. I thought that we should do things together, so that meant that I pulled away as well. It took me a long time to understand that I was erasing myself. We only hung out with her friends, her family, doing things that she wanted to do. The classic pattern of being under the thrall of a control freak. I know she has a different point of view here, of course, but this is my take, and I’m allowed to believe what I want, even if she doesn’t like it.

Various events and awakenings caused me to question the life we had. Not just my marriage, everything. I really tried to take her along, but she wasn’t and isn’t interested. I learned a lot from watching her and others along this journey. What I saw brought home the truth of something I’d heard when I first started. When I first began to understand the power that was available through breaking away from the common mold and awaking, I was told that you didn’t need to worry about the wrong kind of people gaining access to the kind of abilities that could make the dangerous, because their very nature would make that impossible. And then I watched, as this played out among all the people that I met on this path. Most of them interpreted the teachings and insights in terms of their existing world view, instead of changing their world view by accepting the teachings. I could see how that was limiting them and, in many cases, stopped them cold. That made me sorely question my own thoughts and actions. Was I going to use what I’d learned to further my agenda or was I going to adapt my agenda in light of what I had learned? This has been an on-going struggle. There are times when I feel like I’m doing a good job, and then I get slapped in the face with concrete evidence that I’m not being true to my values. I understand, intellectually, that this will be a process that will never end, but emotionally it hurts. I still want to “get it,” to understand, to “have it down” so I can feel like I’m “done.” But that’s never going to happen, and that really sticks in my craw.

My strong suit is to learn. That’s how I tackle every problem in life: I study to understand and accumulate facts. That works very well in any endeavor where knowing facts equals success. Unfortunately there aren’t too many of those in life. There’s always social stuff, the fuzzy subjects, that refuse to be reduced to facts and numbers and procedures. I’ve gotten that I need to face my fear in those areas of my life where I felt completely out of control. That it’s ok to not always be “in control.” Trying to control everything is what made my life miserable. It caused me to slowly back away from anything I couldn’t control, which is pretty much anything, so my life kept getting smaller and smaller. Giving that up is freedom, but it’s also really hard, which brings me back to where I started: Change is hard.

Things around me are changing. I have to change. I have to make decisions that will effect me for years to come and there’s no right or optimum answer. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the near future, and that keeps me on edge. Control is gone. People tell me when to work, where to be, what to do. My everyday choices seem to be evaporating while the hard choices won’t get done. I keep telling myself to trust and everything will fall into place, for the reality is that I can adapt, no matter what, but I don’t like it. I want there to be a clear path ahead of me that I know leads to the right place. Not having that hurts, physically and emotionally. I am starting to learn to reach out to friends for support, but it’s never enough and I’m always worried about using up their good will. So I ask as little as possible. I hate not knowing what to do when the situation is so important. Even meditation isn’t the comfort it was, probably another symptom of stress. I want to think this marks a transition, but, for now, it’s just one more unwelcome change.

I want to end this on a positive note, but I’m having trouble. I really wanted to write something and get this stuff out, but I’m having a hard time feeling the upside right now. There is one, I am sure, but it doesn’t feel that way now. I am so looking forward to having everything resolved and being on my own. I’m going to have to build a new life, boo, but that’s really the point of all this, isn’t it? They say you can’t cross a river in two jumps, and now I’ve gone as far as I can by just inching along, I either have to take that leap into the unknown, knowing that there is no going back, ever, or give up. I know I’ll look back on this, one day, and see it very differently, but for now, I’ve jumped and I don’t know where I’m going to land, and that friggn’ scares me.