Monday, January 23, 2012

Vestigiality

It's a rough day here today. Seems like a lot of rough days lately. Overwhelmed. Everything feels chaotic. And I - feel useless. To be more specific, I feel like I have no use. I'm good at a lot of things. I have skills. I have a super-de-duper high IQ. In the Before, I knew I had been helpful. I'd been a teacher, a therapist, a family coach ~ a lot of helpful things. I was good at these things, but I didn't love any of them, at least not in a way that sustained me. In the Before, I was in the process of leaving my life as a therapist. We were moving somewhere warm, in part so I could get a farm job and just wait on something to claim me, wait on the universe to ask something of me, rather than my trying to figure it all out. Well. We know how that one happened.

So here I am still alive. Lately I am feeling like a very useless engine, a vestigial organ in this life. Maybe exaptation will happen here. But I know well enough that the Universe doesn't have to use you at all.


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and a weird sideways something - first, a reminder: since matt died, I have been looking for a farm so I could work with animals rather than humans. I am as alright as I can be when I am out with the non-humans. I often feel like I could be okay if I had the autonomy of my own farm. Or I had felt that way; the last months that feeling has gone away.

so I had this appointment today for an intake interview as part of a government study thing going on. I knew I would likely be required to answer questions about matt, and about trauma, so I was already feeling tired, emotional, and a little wary. It was a long and rather tedious appointment, with the interviewer being somewhat batty, not understanding her computer or her cell phone, and rambling on about this and that while wondering why her computer wasn't doing the "flashy" thing it was supposed to. While she was waiting for it to do what it was supposed to, she asked what I do for work. When I told her I worked on a farm, she shared that she used to raise sheep. She went on for awhile about her sheep - and I thought, well now, what are the odds of that? at least while we're making small talk, I can hear about her animals. After several minutes of talking about sheep and how she was "organic before it ever was such a thing," she said:

"my youngest daughter died in a very tragic way, and I never got through it. I went to bed for two and a half years, and when I woke up, I sold the house where I had lived with her and bought a farm. Those sheep saved my life."

Uh, what?

Oddly specific, that.





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4 comments:

  1. Sometimes we have to do whatever it is that will save us.

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    1. for a few strange moments, I wondered if this was a flash of the future me (if there is one), a me looking back, telling someone that my love died in a tragic way, I slept for a long time, and when I woke up, I started to farm; those goats saved my life.

      A future me looking back to the current me who knows absolutely nothing of what might "save my life."

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    2. A couple of months ago, I had a conversation with a friend whose father died a few years ago. She was telling me that her mother bought a van and went on the road and has pretty much been on the road ever since. It was kind of weird to hear all of this stuff as it is so close to how I have continued on with my life. It would be interesting to meet her someday - to talk of how a nomadic life worked for her and where it took her. Then again, maybe it is best just to ramble on, finding my own way, or having my future find me as it will.

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  2. wow! how very odd. I'm interested, also, in the lesser transition from sheep farmer to government intake worker concerned with "flashy thing".

    Also imagining what happened in the tedious interview after she said that. Yikes. Floodgates are opening for me, and I wasn't even there.

    *

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