enfinblue's Bluey (credit to Fifi for the nickname!) Diaryland Diary

"I am seeking, I am striving, I am in it with all my heart." -Vinc3nt V@n Gogh

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(By the way, I don't leave until Saturday late morning/early afternoon!) I promise LOTS of pics in Italy. Today it's just words, unfortunately. :)

UGHHHHHHHh...

It's now 11:30 and I'm cooking my lunch for work tomorrow.

I'm relatively pleased with the stage I am at in packing, although I'm still going to have to do a "dump and remove" tomorrow of clothes from my bag.

I think that most travelers would consider me to be a reasonable traveler - just one small duffel bag and one small daypack knapsack. And my purse, of course.

I'll admit that it partly stems from being quite a small person with small clothes - C. always marvels at how many changes of clothes I can fit into one bag. :)

But really, I'm probably taking too much. I mean, one doesn't really need THREE black skirts, does one?? And no pants.

Well, I'm taking my skinny jeans... :) When in Italia...

The thing is that I want to look elegant some of the time, classy at other times - because I don't know what the tours will be like, and obviously want to be well covered to go into churches - and clearly a HOT TAMALE at other times. :)

Well, I'll try, anyhow.

I never really pull off hot tamale. I'm more...cute.

But because I've been sick and I have huge bags under my eyes and yucky hair today, everything that I tried on looked uninspiring. I ended up throwing my black dresses out of the bag. But then of course when I get there I'll be positively yearning for a cute black dress to wear on a night out.

I do know myself.

At any rate, I felt old and drab tonight. It was not the feeling that I was going for.

Oh and today and yesterday I had some stress. They kept on selling out of Euro at the currency exchange by my office. (It's a big, main one.)

I mean, what sort of MONEYBAGS is buying out all of the Euro. Yesterday I went to my bank AS WELL, and they said initially that they had some and then...NOPE it was reserved for a client.

OY.

So I have very little Euro in my little hands. I know it sounds paranoid not to take some out when I get there, but I'm kind of a cover all contingencies sort of a person.

It's the over-analysis thing.

Oh well.

I'm sorry. This has been boring. And also overly-analytical.

By the way, if anyone else wants a postcard you can feel free to send me your address at marathongirl9 at hotstuff...if you know what I mean. Mz Bee of course already has her order in. :)

Quoi d'autres?

Well one interesting thing is that, and I mentioned this already :), I had a VERY interesting conversation with my anxiety counsellor.

It's kind of inappropriate to even call him *my* counsellor, since I've only spoken with him on the phone three times.

He's very nice. I called the employee service back many months ago when I was having panic attacks. I spoke with him twice at that time, and I felt that his advice was excellent. I felt very comfortable talking with him, even though I balked at the idea of a phone counsellor in the first place.

It's a weird thing talking to a strange man on the phone. Weird, indeed.

So anyhow, about a week ago I received a message from him saying that he was doing a follow-up. I remembered that he had mentioned that he would call again at some point to see how things were going. Initially I wasn't going to bother, but then I thought, "Why not?"

So when I was about to go over to C's for soup at 7 last night I remembered that he was about to call me. And he did.

I think that we were supposed to speak for an hour, but it ended up going for an hour and a half.

The long and the short of it is that we basically - and completely unexpectedly, on my account - started talking about how I am in the wrong job.

I mean, I really just thought we were going to talk about the fact that lately I've just had one worry replacing another worry - e.g. the paranoia about M. the other day, etc. - and that I know that I'm clearly doing this to myself, to sabotage my happiness in a way. And why the hell can't I just accept happiness and calm waters when they arrive??

Really, that is my question. I understand that it's a habituation thing.

So this conversation rolled and spun around and the counsellor even told me that he doesn't usually do this but he told me a couple of things about his own life, about how he'd changed professions.

He remained very professional about it, but I did find his story to be quite insightful.

And then the conversation went into needs and wants.

What do I need? And the answer came to me: freedom.

What does freedom mean to me?

Well freedom was what I was seeking when I was running. I was living outside of a box. I was doing something that I wanted to do, even though I didn't necessarily want to be doing it for a very long time.

What does freedom mean to me now?

Creativity. Room to be creative. It also means free to be myself and to be loved back for what that is, in an untampered-with form.

What do I feel I have right now in my life?

No room to be creative. I feel so boxed in by my job and this feeling that I'm always running behind. I can't give myself the freedom to be creative outside of work, because I'm always still thinking about work when I'm outside of work. I think it's why I write here so often: because it's the only escape that I allow myself from work guilt.

It's analogous to the hell that I felt I was in when I was working on my Ph.D. Every day I felt a ticking clock behind my ear. No matter what I did, I felt that I was playing hookey from my thesis. It was awful, particularly because I wasn't passionate about economics and I hated my supervisor. I mean, she is EVIL.

When I look at pictures from the weekend that I left the Ph.D. and moved away from Montreal, I think that I look sixty in them. I look so tired and so empty of life. And I was so. I was a woman left with not even so much as a thimble's worth of confidence. I can honestly say that at that time, speaking personally again, I thought that absolutely no one would ever be attracted to me again.

So here I am again.

And so the conversation was really just one big pep talk from this guy to live my life for me. He wasn't telling me to quit my job; he was even telling me that I could be both an economist and something ELSE more creative. (Oh GOD no, not the dreaded life of quiet desperation. :)) But he was telling me to do something.

And then of course Italia came up. And he seemed very excited because I think he viewed this as an attempt to live something else; an attempt to try something else on for size.

It is, I think. But I told him how I can allow myself to do everything else - write, knit, read, dance, sing, play piano - BUT what I most love (drawing, of course). I feel crazily trapped and what is THAT all about?

So what he said was nice. It's really just the standard line that's floating around these days but I believe that it's true.

Whenever you find yourself thinking about what you need and what you want and then starting to get stressed about how you'll get there (or depressed that you never will) you've gone too far.

You've gone too far because it's not your job to figure out how you're going to get somewhere exactly.

I know that this is true. As soon as you try to figure out for yourself the whole path that you're going to follow to get what you want you start to get depressed. Or at least I do. Things seem insurmountable, impossible, unlikely.

But that's the nice thing about learning to ask yourself what you need and what you want, and also relinquishing immediate responsibility for getting there. I know that it's counterintuitive but true: if you let go you find the way.

So I hope that this trip is the start of finding my way, unforced.

OK. I think I've just burned the crap out of my lunch. :) The smoke alarm going off should have alerted me.

:)

EEK!

I have SO much work to do tomorrow. I think I'm trying to win the Nob3l with this paper that I am writing and it is STILL NOT DONE. I know that my boss thinks that I'm half mad.

I probably am so. Sometimes when I look at how complicated I make things that should be simple, I wonder at how I could ever have imagined them to be so complicated. The end results are usually useful in a way, but I do wonder at whether the effort was ideally spent.

I know that that last line is exactly what I was meant to figure out from this entry about how I'm screwing up in life, but I can't quite absorb it at this time. What do I want? Well it's the most cheese-tastic and really not well-written poem ever - the one that the guy faked as Gabri3l Garcia Marqu3z's on his deathed - but it's what I think: I want to really enjoy a good chocolate ice cream, paint my hate on ice and put it out to wait for the sun to shine, and live in love. Definitely.

Sleep well!

11:36 p.m. - 2008-09-11

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

previous - next

other diaries:

stepfordtart
ohell
awittykitty
annanotbob
manfromvenus
smartypants
fifidellabon
hungryghost
hissandtell