My brilliant husband, in an effort to maintain a positive image of me in the face of what can only be described as a three-week-long temper tantrum, has posited the idea that my problems are mostly hormonal -- the fallout of the reality that my son is now a little person and has entirely lost interested in boobs for at least a decade or so. Which is jarring, because the hormones that turn on the milk also turn off my personal crazy, apparently. And I've become, not just sort of crazy, but actively resentful of every single person walking the planet.
Found a nursing job? I hate your face. Employing and paying me at my current, non-nursing, job? I hate. your face. Employed in any number of non-nursing pursuits, and a holder of the opinion that you have value as a person and your life is worth living? Your face! I can't even, because of the hate I have for it.
I am angry in a way that I have no right, or reason, to be, except that life just didn't work out for me the way I thought it would at nine or nineteen or even twenty-nine, and that I have long maintained the belief that if a thing hasn't happened yet, it never will, and it's all my fault, and also, that Facebook has further blurred the line between "cultural products" and "actual human beings walking around the planet" to the point where an entire generation of people still believe that it's useful to talk about ourselves as a generation rather than to simply be adults, and that no one, anywhere on the planet, is over the age of thirty-five.
In other words: there's absolutely no legitimacy to the angry I feel right now. Life, actually, doesn't have to give you what you want, no matter how high your SAT scores were.
For most of my life, faith has been my corrective to this tendency to see my life in terms of obtaining things I want and believe I should have: jobs, children, more jobs. It's given me a context that allowed me to believe that even if I spend the next decade paying off a degree I cannot use (or, you know, take more than five weeks to find said job, and have to keep directing after school programs into 2014), my life can still have meaning. That even if my individual life is devoid of any meaning beyond "I AM A FAILURE," the universe is still a place I can life in. The fact that my faith has kind of bounced this yuletide season -- like, I woke up and was like, God? What? -- would be another not-a-reason to be angry, if I wasn't just grimly Over It All by this point.
I understand that some people continue to live comfortably in the world without this particular corrective. I don't understand how that works, because underneath every single thing I have experienced or believe, there is the awareness of how insignificant I actually am. On my godfearing days, I see this smallness as part of the human condition, and my inability to accomplish a single thing that I have set out to do every oh my God -- well, that's really more a statement about how people are than the acutely humiliating personal failure I suspect it actually is.
On my less spiritual days, the things I should have done with my life, and didn't, create a sort of existential relativism in which I've failed at everything else, so going to my stupid job that I'm too old to still be at is essentially the same thing as wearing tiger pants and eating pop-tarts out of the box and reading online recaps of Mad Men because I still don't understand how to operate my husband's PS3.
Once upon a time, when I was an adult, I actively resisted a life that is all about me, not so much because I think such a life is inherently lame (though I may, at such time as I once again think and feel things about people other than myself), but because I do not like the person I am and do not believe that person is worth liking. The degree to which this dislike interferes with my ability to enjoy life depends on whether or not I believe I matter in the first place. For me, this is a key selling point of faith, and particularly of the brand of Christian faith with which I grew up.
Anyway, I've been in dire need of some sort of spirit this advent. Call religion a crutch; it's been a long time since I've operated under a belief that I can get through my life without some kind of adaptive device.
It's this sense of my own brokenness that finally lends some sort of meaning to my life, however ambivalent my commitment to that meaning is: maybe, if this program I'm running does a little bit of what it's meant to, it can leave some of these kids valuing themselves more and coping better than I grew up to do. Because while I know this throwing up of hands of whatever character and maturity I once possessed will eventually pass, I had thought it already had, and on the Continuum of Failure currently dominating my schema, "recurrent inability to cope" ranks even more highly than "can't find a nursing job".
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