(warning: self-pitying really long post ahead. I'll be okay once I'm finished, I think.)
I would really like this to all be over.
I'm tired of the yelling and accusing and name-calling. I'm tired of being told everything is my fault. I'm tired of his blindness, and his idiocy.
I'm tired of feeling like I'm walking on eggshells, just to make this end smoothly.
I'm tired of trying to find a job.
I'm tired of ebay, and trying to please everyone. I'm tired of brown wrapping paper. I've gone through seven rolls in a week, trying to catch up. My shoulder aches. My back aches when I try to lug heavy containers up the stairs.
I'm tired of the suspense. I'm tired of waiting. I'm standing on the edge of that precipice, but something is holding me back. I'm tired of not knowing where I will be in December. Where I will work. Whether or not I will be able to survive.
I'm tired of the garbage in the basement. The idea was to pack everything I want to keep, and then go through the rest, but I'm so tired of sorting things that I'm tempted to send the rest to Goodwill. But then I remember... I need the money. It must be sorted, because I don't have a job yet, and I might regret tossing it later.
I need the money. I'm so tired of needing the money.
I'm tired of ebay. My fingers have tiny cuts from the tape dispenser and look like I've been trying to grate my own flesh. I have dust up my nose and in my hair. If I never see another roll of brown wrapping paper again after this is over, it will be too soon.
I want this to be over and done with. I want to look back and tell myself I did a good job trying to survive this madness. That I didn't screw up too badly while trying to juggle twenty things at once. That I am not an idiot, no matter what he says, and that I did the best I could with the tools I had.
I want to sit down after work and have nothing else to do but write. I want to lie on the living room floor in front of the stove in Bethel and let the heat from the fire put me to sleep. I want this to be over with so badly. So badly.
I want to write. I want to sit here at the computer and not have to worry about money or ebay or whether someone will give me a negative feedback for sending their package late.
If I could curl up in bed and fall asleep until this was over, I would, I think. But what would that help?
Once upon a time, there lived a young girl who wanted to be a writer more than anything else in the world. She dreamed of the day she could support herself on her writing income and not have to work at jobs she didn't particularly like. When she first started writing, she knew the basics; how to string a sentence together. She had a good ear for dialogue from the start. Before she graduated, she wrote ten novels. She entered a couple of contests, and placed fairly high in them, but she never took that last step to submit. Never once.
After she graduated from High School, she got a job at the local library. It was an okay job, for a job. She got a car, had a car payment. Got a credit card. Made weekly trips to the local B. Dalton's, where the staff knew her by name. Before she knew it, she had racked up the credit cards (not hard to do if you only make $9.00 an hour) and had met this guy. It was a blind date.
She went out with this guy for a long time, but in all honesty, they really only talked on the phone a lot. She wanted to be a writer. She made sure he knew this, because it was the most important thing in her life. It was all she ever wanted to be.
But she got distracted by hobbies, and stuff, and life, and work, and other things. She started to think that she'd never get out of her dead-end job; that she'd be there forever. She started to think she wasn't a good writer at all, even though she hadn't really showed her writing to anyone. Even the guy didn't like what she wrote. He told her it was 'juvenile'.
This girl didn't go anywhere, really. She didn't have many friends, and she kept to herself. She went to work, came home, and wrote. Sometimes she helped out around the house, or picked up her sisters from their activities. She was in choir. She taught Kindergarten Sunday School. Other than that, she was content to stay in her room, surrounded by stories.
The guy asked her to marry him. She wasn't so sure, because she'd never thought she'd ever get married, but she said yes. She overlooked the snide remarks about the state of her room, and the fact that she still lived with her parents. They didn't mind; why should she?
She hadn't really thought about the future much, until then. She knew she'd end up being a writer (at least she thought she knew that) but she hadn't really thought about where she would live. After some discussion, she and the guy started looking for a house, near her parents. She really liked one of the houses they looked at, an old farmhouse that cost $60,000.
She had good credit, then. Her finances were stretched a little thin, especially when the guy started asking her for money. Rent, utilities... She really racked up the credit cards then. And she had a wedding to plan. A cheap wedding. But a nice one, even so.
She got a computer somewhere in the middle of that. The guy didn't like the one she picked out. He said it was garbage. But you know what? It never once crashed on the girl. It was a nice computer. (Actually, that was computer #2. Computer #1 was a lemon, and gave illegal operations even when the girl tried to play solitaire. So she took it back and swapped it for the good computer. About a year later, she got a call from an FBI agent in Canada, who had tracked down a truck full of stolen computers. The lemon computer was in the truck, still registered to her.)
She hooked up to the internet in 1997. She found a wealth of information, both good and bad, about being a writer. But her desire, her dream, had not quite reached fruition. She wanted to be a writer, yes, and she had written quite a few novels by then, but she didn't want her dream to crash into ashes if she did not succeed. So she did nothing and let life carry her along.
A couple of months after the guy proposed, he went to visit his friend who was going to school in Columbus. He called the girl after he got back, and announced that he was going to go to school in Columbus. Did she want to postpone the wedding?
Completely floored, the girl didn't know what to say. She had no recourse to respond to actions like this; he had swept the rug from under her feet and she found a hole there instead of the floor. Thinking that she couldn't protest, since he wanted to go to school, she told him she would move to Columbus with him, after the wedding.
And her heart ached in protest, but she couldn't voice her fears.
Little things started to happen. She found out that the guy had a friend in Columbus--a girl--and although he said nothing was going on between them, she didn't know what to believe. She was scared, and unhappy, and stressed, and had no idea who to confide in.
She should have bit the bullet and confessed her fears to her parents, but she didn't. After all, she was supposed to be an adult. And adults were supposed to make their own decisions, right?
So she put on a happy face and tried not to listen to her heart.
Other things... struggling to plan a wedding with an absent fiance was difficult. The girl's mother and father helped a lot there. The guy didn't understand about obligations; he wanted her to come to Columbus every weekend, even though she still taught Sunday School and had to work every other Saturday.
And she had to write, of course. Surely he understood that?
Somehow, she managed to get the wedding plans together, with a lot of help from her family. Everyone said how happy they were, and the girl tried to lie and tell them how happy she was too. She tried to convince herself that this was a big adventure, that moving 2 hours away from the place she considered her home would be... fun.
The wedding came, and passed. It was a nice wedding, as weddings go. It rained. And then, in the blink of an eye, the girl was married.
Shouldn't she feel different? More like an adult? Less like an uncertain child?
She was very homesick on her honeymoon. And when she tried to tell her new husband about the idea for the end of her novel on the way to Disney, he said, "That's nice."
When she got back from her honeymoon, nearly everything still lay piled in her room. None of her clothes were in Columbus. None of her things were there. The guy told her not to bring her computer--she wouldn't need it; they could share. The girl wanted to bring it, because she didn't want to share. She didn't want to fight over the computer when she wanted to write.
She made two trips to get more of her stuff, even though the guy told her not to bring anything back that she didn't have a space for. She was so homesick, she thought having her stuff around her might help, but he didn't understand.
He yelled at her the first time when she didn't have the wedding gifts put away a week after she moved. She had spent the week looking for a job, and trying to make the house seem like a home.
She cried.
She finished her novel a week after she moved to Columbus. When she told her husband the good news, he didn't look up from the TV.
The first time the basement flooded after a hard rain, she ran down to save her things while her husband lay on the couch upstairs, watching TV. She lost two garbage bags of material to mildew, but managed to save everything else.
She got a job, but it was so far away that it took her an hour and a half to get home some nights. When she got home, she was expected to make supper and do the dishes, and clean up the house.
Her husband watched TV.
When she complained that she didn't have any time to write, she was told to shut up and grow up, because she sat on her ass all day long, and he had a hard construction job and didn't have any time for housework.
Sometimes, she didn't get home until 7:30pm.
For obvious reasons, the girl didn't have a very good attendence record at that job. She was still very homesick, and cried every time she had to leave her parents' house. (They don't know this, but she still does.)
So she tried to get a new job. She looked for months. Went to interviews. Even decided going back to a library job would be better than having to drive so far, through construction every day.
Her husband yelled at her for even considering a library job. "You never had time for me before, and now you're not going to have time for me again."
"But I'm not getting home until 7:30 at night! How do I have time for you now?"
There never was enough money, either, but the girl somehow managed to make things limp forward, even though they were in the red when she moved to Columbus. Of course, this was all her fault.
She got a new job. It was a State job, and nice. Different than anything she'd ever done before, but her boss treated her like a human being, and she realized she didn't mind working 10 miles away from home.
Right before that, the guy was laid off from his job. Instead of going to get unemployment, he stayed home for three months and looked for work. Although every time the girl got home from work, he was on the couch watching TV. (And she actually thinks he was fired.)
So the girl was starting a new job with no money in the bank, trying to make ends meet by selling stuff on ebay, and doing everything herself. And the guy had the nerve to yell at her and say it was all her fault.
The girl actually had a novel accepted in February of 2001, and a second one shortly after that. By the end of the year, she had three accepted after some interesting wrinkles, and she felt pretty good about her writing.
Her husband's reaction? "Where's the money? Shouldn't you be rich by now?"
She tried to explain to him, but he wouldn't listen.
And every time she visited Bethel and someone asked her how everything was going, she lied and said everything was okay.
In November 2001, she started this journal. She didn't stop lying until April 2002, when she got a very large raise and finally blew the lid off the mockery of her marriage.
Her family was not surprised.
Since then... since then, I've found a cynical strength inside my heart that has helped me continue on long after it seems things can't get worse. The stress is driving me nuts, but without this journal, I'm not sure I'd be in the same position I am now. I think I'd be much worse off without the help of my friends and my family, without something to write down my thoughts and hopes and dreams and whines and rants.
I picked up a stack of photographs this evening while trying to clear paths through the house. (Okay, it's not that bad, I swear.) They were the photographs from our honeymoon. I looked through them and tried to see through that Jennifer's eyes, but I couldn't. I can't find her anymore.
Too much has happened to me between 1999 and 2002. It's only three years, yes, but three years of Hell, in truth. Not all Hell, of course; I've published three books, met a bunch of other writers, and learned far too much about myself and who I really am. I've discovered the name of my business, found my 'niche' in the dollmaking biz, realized that I'm not a bad writer after all (but my queries and synopses need help), and struggled to organize. I've become an Aunt, gotten a new car... no, not everything has been hell.
But seriously, these past three years have been the most difficult years of my life. Many, many times, I've struggled not to give in to the urge to just give up. Many, many times, I've felt so damned depressed that I haven't wanted to get out of bed in the morning, muchless pack stuff for ebay and try to keep everyone happy. Many, many times I've contemplated declaring bankruptcy and just giving up the financial battle to catch things up and make things work out.
But damn it all, I'm too stubborn to give up. Giving up is tantamount to... I don't know... suicide, I guess, to me. I can no more give up than I can stop being me. Hence the proverb at the top of this page. "Trying again and again is better than stopping halfway..." I really and truly believe that.
I've given up on one thing in those three years: the relationship between Chris and me. I think it was doomed from the start. It was a bad decision to begin with, and one I've wholly regretted.
Sometimes, I feel like Sarah in Labryinth.
Through dangers untold...
(which might not be the right words; I can't quite remember the whole thing.)
My quest is not yet finished, of course. I haven't fought my way free of the forest yet, but I can see a glimmer of light through the trees. I want to sit in the sun and enjoy life without shadows, but even the end of the journey will not be an easy one.
Once upon a time, there lived a young girl who wanted to be a writer more than anything else in the world.
She still does.
It's taken her this long to realize that she already is.
I would really like this to all be over.
I'm tired of the yelling and accusing and name-calling. I'm tired of being told everything is my fault. I'm tired of his blindness, and his idiocy.
I'm tired of feeling like I'm walking on eggshells, just to make this end smoothly.
I'm tired of trying to find a job.
I'm tired of ebay, and trying to please everyone. I'm tired of brown wrapping paper. I've gone through seven rolls in a week, trying to catch up. My shoulder aches. My back aches when I try to lug heavy containers up the stairs.
I'm tired of the suspense. I'm tired of waiting. I'm standing on the edge of that precipice, but something is holding me back. I'm tired of not knowing where I will be in December. Where I will work. Whether or not I will be able to survive.
I'm tired of the garbage in the basement. The idea was to pack everything I want to keep, and then go through the rest, but I'm so tired of sorting things that I'm tempted to send the rest to Goodwill. But then I remember... I need the money. It must be sorted, because I don't have a job yet, and I might regret tossing it later.
I need the money. I'm so tired of needing the money.
I'm tired of ebay. My fingers have tiny cuts from the tape dispenser and look like I've been trying to grate my own flesh. I have dust up my nose and in my hair. If I never see another roll of brown wrapping paper again after this is over, it will be too soon.
I want this to be over and done with. I want to look back and tell myself I did a good job trying to survive this madness. That I didn't screw up too badly while trying to juggle twenty things at once. That I am not an idiot, no matter what he says, and that I did the best I could with the tools I had.
I want to sit down after work and have nothing else to do but write. I want to lie on the living room floor in front of the stove in Bethel and let the heat from the fire put me to sleep. I want this to be over with so badly. So badly.
I want to write. I want to sit here at the computer and not have to worry about money or ebay or whether someone will give me a negative feedback for sending their package late.
If I could curl up in bed and fall asleep until this was over, I would, I think. But what would that help?
Once upon a time, there lived a young girl who wanted to be a writer more than anything else in the world. She dreamed of the day she could support herself on her writing income and not have to work at jobs she didn't particularly like. When she first started writing, she knew the basics; how to string a sentence together. She had a good ear for dialogue from the start. Before she graduated, she wrote ten novels. She entered a couple of contests, and placed fairly high in them, but she never took that last step to submit. Never once.
After she graduated from High School, she got a job at the local library. It was an okay job, for a job. She got a car, had a car payment. Got a credit card. Made weekly trips to the local B. Dalton's, where the staff knew her by name. Before she knew it, she had racked up the credit cards (not hard to do if you only make $9.00 an hour) and had met this guy. It was a blind date.
She went out with this guy for a long time, but in all honesty, they really only talked on the phone a lot. She wanted to be a writer. She made sure he knew this, because it was the most important thing in her life. It was all she ever wanted to be.
But she got distracted by hobbies, and stuff, and life, and work, and other things. She started to think that she'd never get out of her dead-end job; that she'd be there forever. She started to think she wasn't a good writer at all, even though she hadn't really showed her writing to anyone. Even the guy didn't like what she wrote. He told her it was 'juvenile'.
This girl didn't go anywhere, really. She didn't have many friends, and she kept to herself. She went to work, came home, and wrote. Sometimes she helped out around the house, or picked up her sisters from their activities. She was in choir. She taught Kindergarten Sunday School. Other than that, she was content to stay in her room, surrounded by stories.
The guy asked her to marry him. She wasn't so sure, because she'd never thought she'd ever get married, but she said yes. She overlooked the snide remarks about the state of her room, and the fact that she still lived with her parents. They didn't mind; why should she?
She hadn't really thought about the future much, until then. She knew she'd end up being a writer (at least she thought she knew that) but she hadn't really thought about where she would live. After some discussion, she and the guy started looking for a house, near her parents. She really liked one of the houses they looked at, an old farmhouse that cost $60,000.
She had good credit, then. Her finances were stretched a little thin, especially when the guy started asking her for money. Rent, utilities... She really racked up the credit cards then. And she had a wedding to plan. A cheap wedding. But a nice one, even so.
She got a computer somewhere in the middle of that. The guy didn't like the one she picked out. He said it was garbage. But you know what? It never once crashed on the girl. It was a nice computer. (Actually, that was computer #2. Computer #1 was a lemon, and gave illegal operations even when the girl tried to play solitaire. So she took it back and swapped it for the good computer. About a year later, she got a call from an FBI agent in Canada, who had tracked down a truck full of stolen computers. The lemon computer was in the truck, still registered to her.)
She hooked up to the internet in 1997. She found a wealth of information, both good and bad, about being a writer. But her desire, her dream, had not quite reached fruition. She wanted to be a writer, yes, and she had written quite a few novels by then, but she didn't want her dream to crash into ashes if she did not succeed. So she did nothing and let life carry her along.
A couple of months after the guy proposed, he went to visit his friend who was going to school in Columbus. He called the girl after he got back, and announced that he was going to go to school in Columbus. Did she want to postpone the wedding?
Completely floored, the girl didn't know what to say. She had no recourse to respond to actions like this; he had swept the rug from under her feet and she found a hole there instead of the floor. Thinking that she couldn't protest, since he wanted to go to school, she told him she would move to Columbus with him, after the wedding.
And her heart ached in protest, but she couldn't voice her fears.
Little things started to happen. She found out that the guy had a friend in Columbus--a girl--and although he said nothing was going on between them, she didn't know what to believe. She was scared, and unhappy, and stressed, and had no idea who to confide in.
She should have bit the bullet and confessed her fears to her parents, but she didn't. After all, she was supposed to be an adult. And adults were supposed to make their own decisions, right?
So she put on a happy face and tried not to listen to her heart.
Other things... struggling to plan a wedding with an absent fiance was difficult. The girl's mother and father helped a lot there. The guy didn't understand about obligations; he wanted her to come to Columbus every weekend, even though she still taught Sunday School and had to work every other Saturday.
And she had to write, of course. Surely he understood that?
Somehow, she managed to get the wedding plans together, with a lot of help from her family. Everyone said how happy they were, and the girl tried to lie and tell them how happy she was too. She tried to convince herself that this was a big adventure, that moving 2 hours away from the place she considered her home would be... fun.
The wedding came, and passed. It was a nice wedding, as weddings go. It rained. And then, in the blink of an eye, the girl was married.
Shouldn't she feel different? More like an adult? Less like an uncertain child?
She was very homesick on her honeymoon. And when she tried to tell her new husband about the idea for the end of her novel on the way to Disney, he said, "That's nice."
When she got back from her honeymoon, nearly everything still lay piled in her room. None of her clothes were in Columbus. None of her things were there. The guy told her not to bring her computer--she wouldn't need it; they could share. The girl wanted to bring it, because she didn't want to share. She didn't want to fight over the computer when she wanted to write.
She made two trips to get more of her stuff, even though the guy told her not to bring anything back that she didn't have a space for. She was so homesick, she thought having her stuff around her might help, but he didn't understand.
He yelled at her the first time when she didn't have the wedding gifts put away a week after she moved. She had spent the week looking for a job, and trying to make the house seem like a home.
She cried.
She finished her novel a week after she moved to Columbus. When she told her husband the good news, he didn't look up from the TV.
The first time the basement flooded after a hard rain, she ran down to save her things while her husband lay on the couch upstairs, watching TV. She lost two garbage bags of material to mildew, but managed to save everything else.
She got a job, but it was so far away that it took her an hour and a half to get home some nights. When she got home, she was expected to make supper and do the dishes, and clean up the house.
Her husband watched TV.
When she complained that she didn't have any time to write, she was told to shut up and grow up, because she sat on her ass all day long, and he had a hard construction job and didn't have any time for housework.
Sometimes, she didn't get home until 7:30pm.
For obvious reasons, the girl didn't have a very good attendence record at that job. She was still very homesick, and cried every time she had to leave her parents' house. (They don't know this, but she still does.)
So she tried to get a new job. She looked for months. Went to interviews. Even decided going back to a library job would be better than having to drive so far, through construction every day.
Her husband yelled at her for even considering a library job. "You never had time for me before, and now you're not going to have time for me again."
"But I'm not getting home until 7:30 at night! How do I have time for you now?"
There never was enough money, either, but the girl somehow managed to make things limp forward, even though they were in the red when she moved to Columbus. Of course, this was all her fault.
She got a new job. It was a State job, and nice. Different than anything she'd ever done before, but her boss treated her like a human being, and she realized she didn't mind working 10 miles away from home.
Right before that, the guy was laid off from his job. Instead of going to get unemployment, he stayed home for three months and looked for work. Although every time the girl got home from work, he was on the couch watching TV. (And she actually thinks he was fired.)
So the girl was starting a new job with no money in the bank, trying to make ends meet by selling stuff on ebay, and doing everything herself. And the guy had the nerve to yell at her and say it was all her fault.
The girl actually had a novel accepted in February of 2001, and a second one shortly after that. By the end of the year, she had three accepted after some interesting wrinkles, and she felt pretty good about her writing.
Her husband's reaction? "Where's the money? Shouldn't you be rich by now?"
She tried to explain to him, but he wouldn't listen.
And every time she visited Bethel and someone asked her how everything was going, she lied and said everything was okay.
In November 2001, she started this journal. She didn't stop lying until April 2002, when she got a very large raise and finally blew the lid off the mockery of her marriage.
Her family was not surprised.
Since then... since then, I've found a cynical strength inside my heart that has helped me continue on long after it seems things can't get worse. The stress is driving me nuts, but without this journal, I'm not sure I'd be in the same position I am now. I think I'd be much worse off without the help of my friends and my family, without something to write down my thoughts and hopes and dreams and whines and rants.
I picked up a stack of photographs this evening while trying to clear paths through the house. (Okay, it's not that bad, I swear.) They were the photographs from our honeymoon. I looked through them and tried to see through that Jennifer's eyes, but I couldn't. I can't find her anymore.
Too much has happened to me between 1999 and 2002. It's only three years, yes, but three years of Hell, in truth. Not all Hell, of course; I've published three books, met a bunch of other writers, and learned far too much about myself and who I really am. I've discovered the name of my business, found my 'niche' in the dollmaking biz, realized that I'm not a bad writer after all (but my queries and synopses need help), and struggled to organize. I've become an Aunt, gotten a new car... no, not everything has been hell.
But seriously, these past three years have been the most difficult years of my life. Many, many times, I've struggled not to give in to the urge to just give up. Many, many times, I've felt so damned depressed that I haven't wanted to get out of bed in the morning, muchless pack stuff for ebay and try to keep everyone happy. Many, many times I've contemplated declaring bankruptcy and just giving up the financial battle to catch things up and make things work out.
But damn it all, I'm too stubborn to give up. Giving up is tantamount to... I don't know... suicide, I guess, to me. I can no more give up than I can stop being me. Hence the proverb at the top of this page. "Trying again and again is better than stopping halfway..." I really and truly believe that.
I've given up on one thing in those three years: the relationship between Chris and me. I think it was doomed from the start. It was a bad decision to begin with, and one I've wholly regretted.
Sometimes, I feel like Sarah in Labryinth.
Through dangers untold...
(which might not be the right words; I can't quite remember the whole thing.)
My quest is not yet finished, of course. I haven't fought my way free of the forest yet, but I can see a glimmer of light through the trees. I want to sit in the sun and enjoy life without shadows, but even the end of the journey will not be an easy one.
Once upon a time, there lived a young girl who wanted to be a writer more than anything else in the world.
She still does.
It's taken her this long to realize that she already is.
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