Dusting Myself Off

I'd like to write about something beautiful instead of just feeling poleaxed. I'd like to tell you about the way the wind keeps making the leaves of the small tree opposite turn back, showing white undersides, and flutter like the wings of baby birds. The weird sound of the freezer, somewhere between wind and water, slightly reminiscent of an aquarium. The little dabs of white cloud against a powder blue sky. And I can do it if I try, despite the constant ache in my upper chest, the perpetual urge to cry. I want to reclaim the beauty and the weirdness, to let it in instead of just watching it as if from a distance, as if it were something I dimly remembered.

This poleaxed feeling, this stopped in my tracks, it's all over, how can I go on feeling, I've felt it before. When my Dad killed himself, the world abruptly stopped, and it was my job to find some way to set it in motion again. It took more than 14 years to get just a little momentum - when I amazed myself and got my job with the children's charity I worked for in London. I had felt I couldn't ever get a 'proper' job, though I was working as a therapist in private practice at the time, on a very small scale. But going out into the world seemed beyond me. Irrational from the outside, the internal logic was compelling to me. But then I got the job, and my world changed forever. I became so much more than I thought I could ever be. Coped with so much more than I believed I could cope with. Was good at what I did. Went on to be the manager of the project. Went on to build a career of sorts on those foundations...

Having my job ripped away from me, and this awful feeling that the way back to work is barred to me, seems to have sent me inwardly back to that place where the world is shattered and can not be pieced back together, is unravelled and can never be knitted up again. Walking up the hill the other day, or, actually no, walking down it, I began to get an inkling that this had to do with my father - this devastation that I feel, this dreadful feeling of being unable to do anything, this post-apocalyptic feeling. Trauma reawakens trauma, and then there's the shock to cope with, so here we go now, getting on for 9 months down the road from 'you are suspended on full pay', and I begin dimly to see where I've gone. And this is why I appear to have no perspective on how bad my situation really is, and a limited ability to retain hope of things getting better. Real world factors like the massive cuts in voluntary sector funding are obviously contributory factors, just as Black Monday was a factor in sending my Dad over the edge, but are not objective reasons for feeling that there is no more hope left. It really is hard to get a job at the moment in my sector, just as my Dad really did lose money in the stock market crash. But a different story would see him or me picking ourselves up, dusting ourselves off and starting all over again... As, of course, I will, when I can find a way to do it.