When Life Gives You Lemons...

...sometimes you still really just want some orange juice. That's a metaphor, just go with it.

I hope you'll pardon me if things get a little odd, because I've not slept a whole lot lately. I've had quite a bit on my mind, and while I used to have an amazing knack for just shutting off entirely and zonking out pretty easily, in the past 4 months that has no longer been the case. You can probably guess why, but I'm not going to come right out and say it.

I've learned about myself this summer, and about life in general. If you know me well, you'll know that change is a concept that I sometimes struggle with. Not all change, mind you. I'm not that crazy. Really for me, I've always had a hard time with "unnecessary" change - which I have conveniently defined as any change to my personal existence that I'm not ready for. It's a shortcoming, I get it. And I've tried very hard to come to terms with this fact about myself. I think I've made some progress, too. I've been handed some very difficult changes to my life recently, and no one asked me if I was ready for them, or if it's what I wanted it, or if I was ok with it. It just happened. Yes, part of this has to do with my inability to find full-time work or afford permanent housing. There's more to it than that, but again I'm not going to just come right out and say it. And I'm learning, in a more direct way than I had imagined I would, that that is the way of the world. Sometimes really crappy things happen, and you just have to roll with it. And sometimes rolling with it is the hardest thing you will ever do, but your choices are to move on and grow or to wither and die (at least on the inside). That loss of control over my own life has been particularly jarring for me. I consider myself to be in control of my life, and I really value my own self-control, but I guess this is like that old joke, "If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans."

So I think I'm better at dealing with other people's problems than I am at dealing with my own. One of my favorite things about myself is that in a crisis, I stay calm and level-headed, and my natural leadership qualities assert themselves. When the chips are down, I am ready to step up and pick them back up (did I completely mangle that metaphor?) However, it seems that in a personal crisis, of late I've just been going to pieces, in a way. And that's hard. Someone very wise helped me to see the other day that there are really 3 key factors in a person's life that define their "status" at any given moment: their home, their job, and their relationships. And these things can shift, sometimes without warning. Most of the time, nobody has to deal with a change in more than one of these stati, and only rarely do they have to deal with a change in two of them. I am currently reeling from a sudden and rapid tectonic lurch of all three. And I'll admit readily that I was not prepared to deal with it.

Maybe I should have been. It's possible that these "changes" have been coming down the pike for a while and I was just in la-la land. I am willing to accept that as a possibility. However, it's kind of irrelevant now, whether or not I should have been prepared. The fact is that I was not. Control of my life was wrested way from me, and it's been an uphill battle to take it back. A battle that I have not nearly won yet.

I love my friends, and many of them have been incredibly supportive of me during this rough patch that I'm going through, with lots of sage advice and sympathetic commiseration. However I believe that it is a truism (another thing that I've learned about life this summer) that your problems are never as serious to anyone else as they are to you. And how could they be? I mean, even the most connected person in the world can never truly know what's going on in the head of the person that they're closest to, so how can the rest of us even hope to comprehend the depth and variety of emotion going through someone else? And even if we do understand intellectually, someone else's problems just aren't as big a deal to someone that doesn't have to deal with them. There's nothing at all wrong with that, but it's just the truth. So for someone that has done a fair amount of wallowing lately, it was a startling shock to realize that even the people who love me the most can't get inside my head and see what I'm dealing with, and that I would always have to go that last mile alone inside my head (which is sometimes the loneliest place in the universe).

There's a fair amount of bootstrapping that has to go along with any kind of personal crisis. I get that, and I'm prepared to do it. In fact, I am doing it, every day. Something that I think will always make me proud is the fact that in this tough time, no matter how badly I've felt, I did not shut down entirely (at least not for long). I've managed to get quite a lot accomplished during this time of trial, and most of it has been completely unaffected by my personal life. So there's that.

I guess it's all made a little harder when the bootstrapping that needs to be done, you don't want to have to do. Like my little witticism in the title, sometimes you just don't want to have to do what is obviously the thing to be done. Even if you intellectually comprehend the wisdom of making lemonade from your life-lemons, that doesn't mean that it in any way lessens your emotional desire for orange juice. Your lemonade, while it will satisfy your physical thirst, cannot hope to slake your desire for that which you were not given (or no longer have). [On a side note, this metaphorical exercise makes me chuckle a little because I like lemonade infinitely better than I like orange juice.] And that is a truth about life that I think is hard to wrap your head around unless you have currently been handed some lemons while you had your eye on the oranges. It's easy to overlook the internal struggle that can engulf a person as they try to reconcile cold, hard, practical logic with the heady and heated swirl of emotions that accompany this (or any) kind of loss or change.

Honestly, this makes me feel guilty. I feel like I'm whining, because at the end of the day there are billions - literally billions - of people in the world who worry if they'll be able to feed themselves or their children, and here I am spewing all this existential crap about my feelings, when I have never once experience true hunger or homelessness or anything like that. I have led a privileged life, available only to a small percentage of the population of the world fortunate enough to be born into the upper-middle class of a western superpower, exemplified by the fact that I am free to choose to devote my life to working in the arts, something that seems exceedingly frivolous when you think about the people who have no choice but to work for 16 hours a day manufacturing crappy toasters just to be able to barely begin to satisfy the basic Maslovian needs.

But while every first-worlder has probably had that feeling of guilt over their station in life, at the end of the day we're all humans and all we can really worry about is our own problems. And our own problems can be fully humiliating and terrifying, even if they have nothing to do with basic survival.

So I guess the point I'm trying to make, if there is one, is that for all of you who read this blog and actually know me well, I want you to know that I'm struggling, but that I'm handling it. It will take me a long time to clear the rubble from my personal collapses, but I've got the shovel in my hands and I'm going to work. Something I learned from summers spent shoveling mulch in the alley behind our old house is that the pile doesn't seem to get any smaller until it's almost gone. And something else I've learned is that I should probably steer clear of these folksy stories about my past, because it makes me sound like the worst kind of disingenuous politician (though it's still true).

Thank you for indulging me in this rambly, meandering blog post. Sometimes a guy just needs to get this kind of stuff off his chest, and you a very sympathetic, if captive audience. Please don't worry too much for my well-being, because I am generally stable and basically happy most of the time, and I'm handling things in a way that can only be described as slow but steady. If you have no idea what in the world could have brought on this post, then please don't trouble yourself wondering about it too much. If you're really interested you can ask, but as I said, this will always be more my problem than anyone else's, so I don't expect you to.

Ok, I'm done now. Until next time...

Keep calm and carry on.