There's a thought. Make yourself a shrine to truth. Truth and consequences seem to be weighted against each other...consider the truth first, and let it out unless the consequences are really dire, I guess. The stark reality is that most things don't need to be hidden. Not only do people not mind the things you might want to hide, but they need to hear them: they want to know who you are, not who you want to be seen as. And people are sensitive to your real Self, if you can let it shine through like a light through stained glass. They may not at all understand what they're sensitive to--either not "getting" you as a person, or not knowing consciously what is different about this one--but they can tell. It does seem to drive people off sometimes, but that's okay and really not any worse than I'd expect from any other way of being.
Today was One Of Those Days, when everything comes crashing down and I
can't cope. And then tomorrow I'll be all right. (Sisyphus was a king
of Corinth, killed by Theseus, and in the underworld his punishment
[it's another part of the story why he was being punished] was to roll
a giant boulder up a hill. Every time he was almost to the top, the
boulder would roll all the way down to the bottom and he would have to
start over. It's a fine literary metaphor for my mood swings these
days, and you could even graph it:
See that really steep drop? That was today.) One thing days like today do for me is make me really appreciate going to bed.
I'm starting to tentatively poke around Seattle and the few contacts I have in Santa Barbara, looking for jobs. I really don't want to go to either of those places--Seattle wouldn't be so bad except for what I'd be leaving behind--but I'm also starting to feel like I can't even find a retail or warehouse job here. It's not only inducing a crushing sense of pointlessness and lack of hope, but eventually I'm going to run out of money, and I managed to handily sabotage the primary relationship that was supporting me and helping me smile. So a couple of the things that define me--work and girlfriend, whether I mean them to be self-defining or not--are gone. Aikido doesn't pick up all the slack, nor would I want it to; but it's helping me focus as I flail around through this transformation I'm experiencing at a time when I have few points of reference and essentially no structure in my life. (I don't do well with no structure. I like some structure. I like having some semblance of a routine. I don't know why this is. Maybe it saves me some trouble of figuring out what I'm going to do next.) So I'm sort of floating right now, and about the only direction I have for certain is heading in a roughly linear but entirely monotonic manner towards being broke.
If someone like Amazon will pay me enough, I can live in a rathole in Seattle, keep my place at Houseness until the economy doesn't suck any more, and then visit often and eventually come back. Or something.
Finally, an appropriate response to not getting a job.
Once again I bring you something truly American.
I was talking with a friend at Woom about choices, and how some of the choices we make, about relationships or jobs or the general direction of our lives, are not obviously the right choices...it's more like the available options are a histogram, and we consider carefully and one alternative emerges as being a (possibly small) percentage higher than the rest on the chart. And the decision is right because we have decided it's right and is according to our priorities, but because the other decisions were anywhere from "not objectionable" to "downright tempting", there's the slightest hint of wondering. You don't waver or second-guess the choice you made, because it was the right choice for you and probably still is; but those other bars on the histogram remain and add a dimension to your thinking from then on. Not necessarily a negative dimension, by any means; just a deeper understanding of how you got where you are.
What is important to you? What is meaningful? What is your truth?