Time After Time

Seventeen days have passed since I was laid off from my job. I admit, I am bitter about it. I try to be gracious in my opinions and attitudes related to my past employment, but that will only get me so far. I must say that my heart is souring towards my previous workplace, and the way it all ended. I am grateful for the opportunity to learn what I did there, and for the time spent, but I cannot go back.

Struggling with “proper” emotions and feelings is a difficult thing. Culture and expectations tell me that a “high road” is there to be taken, but damn, if it isn’t an arduous, uphill journey. Michelle Obama makes taking the high road sound easy, but I know she would say that it is anything but easy. I am certainly feeling the burn right about now.

I received a phone call from my former colleague the other day. He had a question about a job function that I handed off to him that he didn’t know how to do. I did make myself available for such questions, but all it really did to me was turn the knife in my back. I want to be helpful, but the reality is that I don’t work there anymore and wasn’t given adequate time to prepare to leave. I miss the work and the people, but I cannot go back. I am not sure I would want to at this point.

I don’t know what I will end up doing next. I have sent out several job applications already. Though I am not collecting unemployment pay, I am trying to act as if I were under the state’s requirements to apply to several prospective employers each week. I have more or less met those standards, but have received either static or rejections in reply. It is truly disheartening.

I am complaining, and I feel that is natural, and even healthy, at this time. I don’t intend to stay here, in this dismal place, but I need to get this out there into the universe and out of my head. That is part of why I write here on my blog: to exorcise the daemons in my soul and force them out into the aether.

As I am writing, here early on a Saturday morning, the skies are lightening from black to grey. I hear a myriad of birds in the trees around my home heralding the dawn. I have always loved the sound of the avian denizens of the suburban environment. It reminds me that we humans but impose our so-called dominance on a planet of living creatures that co-habit with us on this world. We are but one of many species to live here. Even myself, with all my current work troubles and despair – I am but a green thing growing, only needing to be alive and strange as the birds are strange, singing to the rising of the sun. I require nothing else to be worthy of life.

Life will continue; I will find a way to support my living; this is but a passing time. Sure, that doesn’t make it feel any better right now. That is to be expected, after all. Low times are low times for a reason. But better things are coming, somehow I feel that. I can’t explain it or rationalize it, but emotionally, I believe in a better world past the brightening horizon. Today may be grey and depressing, but a bright sunny tomorrow is waiting to wake. I’ll take solace in that, for now, and move forward to what is next.