December 23 - Going Nowhere

Tuesday, December 23, 2014

I am struggling to maintain a positive attitude lately.  I am sure my friends clearly see this.  Some of my struggle is connected to the holiday season.  This season will definitively mark my first one without a clinically diagnosable case of PTSD.  It also will be the first one in which I interact with neither my father nor his living siblings.  I have had a lifetime fill of the hypocrisy of my paternal family of origin.

Dealing with the sadness and grief I feel about this aspect of my life is difficult enough.  But I have more burdens to deal with.  My career seems to be going nowhere.  I made a promise to myself when I reentered the workforce this year that I would strive to find my way into a career that actually fulfills me.  I wish to waste no more time in my life.  I have experienced enough devastating loss to last a lifetime as well.

And yet despite my best intentions and best efforts my career seems to be stuck in neutral.  I received yet another job application rejection today.  This rejection was especially stinging; I had applied for a legislative and policy analyst position with the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy.  I didn’t even manage to get an interview.  How someone with my range of skills and experience can fail to even be called for an interview is beyond my capacity for comprehension.  But then again much of the quality of my life these days is beyond my capacity for comprehension.  How a talented, attractive, determined and still relatively young individual like myself can be merely existing on a meager income just doesn’t make sense to me.  The world at large hasn’t been comprehensible to me for quite a while.

I suppose my therapy session today was productive.  I spent much of the time venting my frustrations with my life.  Something has to change for me soon.  I cannot continue to go on living as I have been recently.  I have invested the last eighteen months of my life in the process of truly, deeply and decisively healing the trauma of my early life history.    I have approximately ten years of higher education.  I have a professional history that spans some twenty years.  I have offered my skills in volunteer capacities at numerous times in my life.  I have been a generous, kind and compassionate person despite my early life experiences in which multiple institutions failed to fulfill their most basic responsibilities in a satisfactory way.

I want a change in my life.  I need a breakthrough.  I have been working hard a long while to create a new life.  So why do the same patterns keep playing out over and over?

……

There is perhaps one noteworthy glimmer of hope I can remark on that happened since my last therapy session.  I had an interesting dream in the last week.  I dreamt that I was having a conversation with actor David Duchovny.  I had something of a serious crush on him during his tenure as Fox Mulder on ‘The X-Files’.  In my dream he told me that he was getting married.  He was planning to get married to an actress whose work I have also admired.  That actress is Maura Tierney.  Tierney is perhaps best known for her long running role on the NBC series ‘ER’ in which she played a nurse who went on to become a medical doctor.  I was especially inspired by her performance because her character had overcome some serious obstacles.  Her mother (played by Sally Fields) was bipolar.  She had a chaotic childhood (much like my own).  She struggled with alcoholism.

I find the marriage of these two actors especially unusual considering they have had no on-screen interactions at any point in their careers.  For all I know they have never even met.  In the dream Duchovny allowed me to hug him after I asked if I could.  I see this marriage of these two people as a metaphor for the synergistic union of a strong male and strong female.  In some strange way I believe the dream may mean that a time is coming (or has perhaps already arrived) in which my own internal male and female aspects will come into a harmony that will allow for a more productive and rewarding future.  I would certainly like to believe this is coming to fruition.  I feel very weary of how long I have been working to create a new and better life for myself.

When I have moments in which I feel really down and hopeless and seem to get stuck in negative thoughts I try any number of things to get myself out of such a funk.  One thing I do is remind myself that appearances do not always accurately represent realities.  My life may seem to be stuck.  But the reality may be that a major breakthrough is about to take place.  So I try to maintain my faith in better days coming in the future.