Magma

I'm searching a wide open arid plain - a sort of flat and featureless desert landscape. The sky is wide and grey, and I can taste fine dust in the air. Thirsty, so thirsty. No landmarks, no paths, no sense of direction, no compass.

I'm on a plane that is preparing to take off, and L is not there and I can't make my phone work to find out where she is.

I regularly think, right, now it's time to roll my sleeves up and make a fresh start. To get organised, impose some structure, order, self-discipline. To start writing in some regular way, to do some exploratory writing to help myself out of the desolate plain, to take charge.

This thing that has happened to me is a bend in the road I never saw coming.

It could be an opportunity. Sometimes I have had flashes of that. Sometimes I sense the grace of trusting that 'all shall be well'. Mostly I keep fighting with the terrors of the unknown. Mostly I keep fighting with what happened back at the beginning of the bend, when I slammed on the brakes, and steered for dear life the best way I could so as not to crash.

What I'm searching for is a way to turn the anger out. The day I learned that my colleague had been sitting beside me in the office for a year, friendly, professional and nice as you please, and all the time ('out of nosiness') reading my blog on the quiet, I walked through Manchester on legs of molten rock, so fast and furious, I imagined I left a trail of knocked down pedestrians flailing in my wake. Incandescent. I was incandescent. I could not remember ever being that angry before, or maybe just never so entirely righteously. I felt so wronged, so betrayed, so utterly deceived, and so completely incomprehending of the motivation behind the complaint she made after a year reading the blog. A complaint that she knew without doubt would (certainly could) lose me my job. Why? Why would anyone hate me that much?

I'm still so angry with her, with the other team member who started the meltdown of confidence in my team, and possibly most of all, with the supposedly 'senior' people in the organisation, the supposed 'adults', who so signally failed to deal with what was going on in the team, in the project, in the desolate and desperate place where we found ourselves trying to work without the support we truly needed. Who betrayed me utterly in the name of 'risk management', in the name of corporate HR values, who could not forgive a naive, an entirely innocent mistake. Who were more worried about protecting themselves from the poison that might be spread about the organisation as a result of my mistake by a mad woman who was already on the warpath, than protecting a (supposedly) valued member of staff, who was close to the edge of what she could cope with, and consequently made a horrible error of judgement.

A wise adult knows that there is more to telling tales than the tale that is being told. When the adults descend to the level of vindictive children, there is no protection.

Maybe there is a metaphor here, maybe an old feeling of not being helped, of being abandoned in my darkest hour. This doesn't explain away the crap behaviour of the senior management of a respected national charity, but might help me get to the heart of my enduring sense of aggrievedness.

So, I had the idea that what I was looking for on the plain was water, but it's also fire. Water as renewal, refreshment, life, and also the fiery energy and aliveness of my outrage at being so treated, a fire that can burn away the dead wood, that can refuse to take any more crap, that can look for something better, look for renewal and new growth.

Rising from the ashes takes time.