Today my wife is going to serve two weeks notice that she's resigning from her job. After being jerked around too long and too often by her employers, she's had enough, and I don't blame her. So for now, we'll have to make do with my meager income from my shaky job and with our ever-dwindling savings and pay out-of-pocket for COBRA health insurance coverage that, despite its exorbitant cost, we can't afford to be without.
I feel like my wife and I are locked into a runaway train that we know is bound for disaster, but we can't get off, and our only choice, if we can even exercise choice over such a thing, is whether to relax and calmly enjoy what's left of our ride before the inevitable cataclysm or go to our doom in terror.
Actually, my wife has another choice. She can jump off the train before it crashes. She'd be injured by the fall, but at least she'd survive. But there's no escape for me. My only choice seems to be whether to throw my wife from the train before it crashes or let her stay with me till the bitter end.
This is how I feel today. It's actually how I've felt for a long time. But now I feel it more acutely than ever. Maybe I'll feel different in time. Maybe I'll find reason for hope that I just don't see now.
Yes, I could do as Cousin Dupree suggested and see my doctor about getting a prescription for an anti-depressant. But I think all that would accomplish is to possibly make it easier for me to choose my first option and meet my (and my poor wife's) doom with a little less despair.
4 comments:
It is possible -- and an anti-depressant may be instrumental for this -- for you to approach your life's challenges more hopefully.
Seek every source for aid. Judge a day when you and your wife have make pro-active efforts to improve your lives a success.
Try to take one step that is difficult every day. Root for yourself and the success of you and your wife. Be hopeful.
I know what I've written sounds like crap, but you really can approach things with a more-favorable attitude ... and it makes all the difference.
In an open questionaire at Danny Fisher's blog, one question and my answer was this:
Q: What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
A: When there's no way out.
I understand your torment. But as corny as it sounds, being hopeful and pro-active by itself is a way out, and should you succeed in finding opportunities from this new, better attitude the exit door to the worst of your troubles may be found.
I'll step off the soapbox now. Go to Danny's blog and take the test for yourself, Steve.
Meantime, you'll hear from me if I win the lotto.
Opening lines of Dante's Inferno, lifted from a post by WH of Integral Options Cafe ...
In the middle of our life's way
I found myself in a wood so dark
That I couldn't tell where the straight path lay.
Oh how hard a thing it is to embark
Upon the story of that savage wood,
For the memory shudders me with fear so stark
That death itself is hardly a more bitter food;
Yet whatever I observed there I'll convey,
In order to tell what I found that was good.
You'll find your way out of the wood, Steve. But while you're there be cognizant of what is good and tell us of that, too -- as you have been.
Dear Tom,
I'm doing as you suggest and seeking help wherever I can find it and then trying to make the most of that help by way of my efforts to improve my situation and to view it all in a positive light. And I'll continue to share with you here the results of it all.
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