Everything has changed.
If you read the previous post, you will
be aware that life took an unexpected and terrible turn for me and my
family this year... and that's why I've been silent.
I've been step-by-stepping it and just
staying sane. It was only recently that I realised that I could even
live through my daughter's death. It wasn't that I was suicidal, it
was simply that profound grief and mourning hits you in a way where
everything beyond a certain point becomes opaque and that point is very near. I had no vision for
what happens next. Not even lunch.
It's weird. You (assuming you aren't
suffering the same thing and I fervently hope you aren't) are right
now, aware of what you have 'going on'. You have several plans in
your mind, some things that need to get done. You also have longer
range stuff that you need to think more specifically about and you
make time to think about them because they are a forward narrative
that gives your life shape and meaning. There was a T-shirt slogan
that went something like “life is what happens while you're making
plans.” Well, I don't believe that is true at all. A lot of life is
driven by making those plans, even if it doesn't go the way it was
designed, it is at least still going.
Grief robs you of that. In among the
many horrid things it is, it is a profound state of
motivationlessness. You get stuck in some very tight thinking that
spirals in on itself, revolving around one certain fact and one
certain event. Everything outside that gets obliterated. But, as the
spiral starts to loosen, you become able to come back to some larger
idea of yourself. That's when you can actually picture living again.
In May, I went back to my corporate
gig, shortly after the funeral and found that not only was the effort
of being motivated and energetic about driving the project utterly
beyond me, the mental agility required was gone, as well. I was
anxious and agoraphobic, sleep deprived and jittery and just plain
sad beyond description. I couldn't even reliably count coins to make
change at the shops, let alone lead people in a competitive, business
environment. I'd been on parental leave with her before it happened and coming back to
3,000 emails is one thing, coming back to 3,000 emails when all your
priorities have been blown out of the water is quite something else.
You couldn't find the amount of care I had with a tunnelling electron
microscope.
So, I quit. It wasn't even a decision.
It was simply a matter of survival.
I took the period that would've been my
long-service leave just to 'be'. To be with my broken little family
and keep breathing.
That period has finished and the vision
and idea of what I will now become, has to sharpen up. A mortgage in
Sydney guarantees that I can't be a house-husband forever. I have
taken the first, tentative steps back out into the world and that's
why I'm firing up the blog again.
I think it's potentially amusing and
that was the point of A Grey Area to start with. I'd never promised
to always be light-hearted and my moral compass always tells me to at
least acknowledge the complexity of life, but I do actually live for
a giggle and my new gig is an amusing turn in life.
I'm delivering organic fruit and veg to
people's houses, for a family run company, a few days a week. Never, in
the field of human digestion, has one man been paid so little, for
delivering so much.
In the 80s, I was at a Steiner school.
Since then, in a varied work life, I've been a cabbie and a
bus-driver, driven trucks and delivery vehicles.
I've gone back to my roots.
I've gone back to my roots.
The road and god-damn hippies.
