I hate being placated.

This is something I've been meaning to write for a while. It isn't my typical opinion of things you might be interested in mumbo jumbo, so if that's why you're here, you can go ahead and skip this post, it will be of no interest to you whatsoever.

I'm tired. I'm sick and tired. I started writing years ago as an outlet. Occasionally I've had the courage to write about the things that really need to come out, about the things that aren't just about me, but of me. It has been a long time since I've been able to do that, though, so I suppose that I'm about due.

It helps that I've had a chance to read some of Michael's words, and many of them cause me to recall elements of my life. Some of them good, some of them bad. It's hard, though, because there's so many things that have built up inside of me over the years that I really don't know how to let them out. It's probably best that I don't, at least not all at once.

I'm tired of being placated. It's always something, or someone that tells me what I want to hear, the things that allow them to get to the next step, and then we'll deal with everything when it comes up. My job is a great example of this.

I've been in management for years. I've had good jobs, but for reasons I don't want to get into, I don't have them anymore. Now I've got this job. I'm below my level. It's obvious to everything there that I'm below where I should be, below the level that I interviewed for when I first tried to get the job. initially they wanted to put me into a position that was even further down the totem pole than I am now. I basically told them to go fuck them selves in the nicest way possible. The next day I got the call asking me to come in at near the level I wanted, it was open for advancement, it wouldn't take long.

It's been years now. I've been there for two years and whenever I inquire about moving up, moving on, moving beyond, I hear the same thing: "Soon". The word soon, for the most part, is one of the only words I seem to get from anyone, anywhere. I get heat because I don't work at the level I'm supposed to be at, but at the level I'm being paid for. I'm not sure why it's so hard for people to understand, but I can't see any reason to work harder for less, especially after years of hearing, "just a few weeks, another month or two. You're time is coming."

I've received recognition from superiors that are up the ladder high enough it has become something more of an escalator. One instance included, and I quote, "Stephen is more than ready for the next level, start training a replacement."

They're still not training a replacement, unless it's some secret project in another location that I'm just not privy to. But really, I don't expect someone to jump out of the cake one day soon and shout, "Surprise, you've finally been promoted!"

So, you might wonder, why don't I move on, surely someone else will gladly take me if I'm so exceptional?

That's a great idea, but as a single father supporting myself, my two children and my disabled mother, I don't have a lot of options. I can't even see myself trying to wait out the gap between the last paycheck and first paycheck at the new company. Beyond that, I don't feel that I have a lot of free time to go job hunting. Sure, I can sit here at night, after the kids are asleep, and I can blog, but most people in my field aren't interested in setting up a job interview at 1 o'clock in the morning.

Damn.

Financially, I'm in dire straights. These are terms I've come to. I need to make a change, and soon. I hate what I have to do with every fiber of my being, but I also hate the fact that within a few months I'll lose my home, my car, and probably everything else that I hold dear. A few months, by the way, is a pretty generous estimation, I'm not sure I'm going to make the payment on the first yet.

So Wednesday I will see an attorney. Actually, I'll probably be seeing a paralegal or aide of some kind, because I can't imagine that law offices specializing in bankruptcy actually have enough lawyers waiting around all day to interview everyone who has reached the end of the tether.

In my case, I'm pretty sure there's not so much a tether as I'm now literally tied at the stake.

Fuck.

There are things in my life that make me happy. Some of them more than others, but they are there. Normally, writing makes me happy, which is why I try to do it so frequently, even though I usually fail to spill out the things I really want to say. Normally, watching a movie or listening to music makes me happy, and so both are commonly occurring in my life, as time allows. My children make me happy, though I sometimes feel somewhat out of touch with them, they're already getting so much older every day that I worry about the day I lose them. My girlfriend makes me happy, but with all the strain of financial burden, and having my mother living in my home, our relationship sometimes seems to be hanging on only by a thread.

From that paragraph, you may notice a trend. There are a lot of things that make me happy, yet there's a lot of commas separating me from them. That doesn't mean I'm not happy, it just means that it comes with some caveats.

I worry. Although sometimes I think I don't worry near enough. I find myself often detached from emotions I feel should exist within me. Emotions that I imagine exist in most everyone else. It doesn't mean I don't feel, I just don't know if I feel right.

I worry about being alone. I've lost a lot in my life, I've made choices that were poor, at best. Now, as I sit here, the overwhelming fear that I'll end up alone consumes me, as it often does. I think, in my mind, that this can't be. I can't ever really be alone. But what I think and what I feel aren't always the same. My mind might tell me that you've got a girl that loves you, but at the same time I feel a deep rooted fear that she's not with me for the long term. My mind tells me that my children love me, but I fear that one day they'll discover their father isn't the magical destroyer of closet monsters they've idolized their whole adolescent life. I fear, too, that they might be whisked away by their mother, a woman who has left a slash mark through so many components of my life that I have a hard time as seeing her as a person, but more an evil presence that looms over me.

I feel pain. I feel a lot of pain, and I feel it in places that I don't think should hurt. I'm fairly certain that I have problems that are completely undiagnosed. Why is it, then, that I don't do anything about it? Why do I continually feel these pains, and yet I never see a doctor. Why do I feel this looming depression and never visit a therapist, a psychiatrist? I'm not sure. Apart from the fact that I'm not sure I can even afford the copays, maybe I just fear that I don't know where to start. Maybe I've lived with the problems for so long that I don't know if or when the healing can begin.

My death is imminent. There's nothing I can do about it. Taxes might not catch up with me for a while, but I know that death is always waiting around the bend. My older daughter has a classmate whose father just passed away. It's hard for your second grader to come to you with hidden feelings of terror that someone in her life could actually be ripped away from her at any moment. It's hard as a father to try and dissuade that fear because that same fear grips me night and day. I remember when I was younger, I never feared death would come. Now, I am always worried about the wheres and whens. Not just for my own life do I worry, but for that of my children, my mother, my girlfriend, and all of the people in my world that I care about.

Yes, my own life could end at any moment, and there was a time before there was anyone depending on me that I just didn't care. Even now, though, I have enough life insurance that it might actually be better if I were to die now, because my children would actually be better taken care of financially than I can foresee them being under the current regime. Yet I don't want to go, not yet. I feel that I'm one of those people that will gladly accept it when the time comes, when I'm old and grey, my kids are self sufficient, my affairs are in order, but right now, I'm just not ready.

Maybe what I need is a legacy.

Something to leave behind.

And I don't mean on my blog.

Where is the security that I seek? I knew, even when I was younger, that the real world was a scary place. I used to watch the things my mother had to do to make ends meet, and even as a child I knew that she was always a hair widths away from having the world come crashing down. I've tried to thank her for everything she did then, and everything that she does now, but I just don't think there are enough words.

That isn't to say that everything is just dandy though. My mother is, for all intents and purposes, crazy. I don't mean clinically psychotic by any means, and certainly for a woman in her position, forced to live with her son because she's disabled and can't find a job in her field, I can't blame her. She's gone a little stir crazy, and at her age, with her various convictions, she's also very opinionated. Again, I can understand this, and I think I handle a lot of things she says with plenty of grace. She's not afraid to tell me what she thinks of decisions that I've made, decisions that I'm making. While she knows that she can't make them for me, it won't stop her from putting it out there for me to see. This can, of course, make for an uncomfortable dynamic at times, especially for those that aren't used to it. A good example would be my girlfriend, which is funny in and of itself... I got it from somewhere, didn't I?

I have hope. I have hope like you wouldn't believe. To me, there's got to be a point where things change. Laws of nature dictate that for every action there has to be an equal and opposite reaction. I expect, perhaps, that series of actions that have kicked me into the dirt where I am have to be about ready to give way to a nice long string of upward motion.

Thoughts come at me most of the time in a way that make it loud in my head, much like being in a night club with the way-too-loud music blaring. The inside of my head is the kind of place you might go to try and pick up chicks, even though you'll never be able to carry on a conversation with them over the rhythmic thump-thump-thump of the bass.

The thoughts that come at me are distracting. They often mute the things that are going on around me, leaving my body in a near autopilot mode, going about my day, trying to get from point to point until it is over and I start over again. These thoughts are often about my situation, sometimes they're just memories of things that are never quite clear (Maybe that one time in high school when I tried to kiss a girl after school to find that she was confused by my intentions so that she ran off, nearly in tears, and I was later confronted by her friends because I hadn't called her in over a month. How exactly to explain that you haven't called a girl because when you tried to kiss her and ran off you decided she just wasn't that into you? Really, though, it turns out that she was into me, just had never had the kind of relationship where you hang out after school and kiss. I wonder what that relationship might have been if I'd played my cards just a little differently. Perhaps, too, it could be another high school memory of the time your girlfriend broke up with you by putting a note in your backpack but you never found it, and couldn't understand why she didn't seem to want to talk to you anymore. Of course we got back together, only so that she could cheat on me a couple more times.), maybe they're just story ideas. Story ideas that are sometimes as clear as if I'm living them at the time, sometimes fuzzy, hazy, almost incoherent images.


What does all of this mean? Not a whole hell of a lot to most people. You can take it at face value, you can analyze it and decide you know who I am. You can look at it and say, "it could always be worse." In the end, though, these are just some of the many things that are inside me, and sometimes it seems like they just need to come out.

Meanwhile, I've been awake since 5 o'clock yesterday morning, and I'm more than just a little ready to try and sleep. Perhaps, though it's not very likely, perhaps I will again try and vent my life.