Get busy livin' or get busy dyin'

Moving forward. Act II. Letting go of the past. Yeah, yeah, yeah…it all sound good. That’s why the American public slurps up Dr. Phil and Oprah like a St. Bernard slurps up spilled vanilla ice cream.

I made a step yesterday in moving forward. I signed onto something that may very well become my next vocation.

“What?” you ask. “You mean being a salesgirl at Caroline’s isn’t your lifelong vocation and calling?” 

“Um…no.”

This thing I’m signing up for is a 60 hour intensive Friday, Saturday, Sunday class that will allow me to work with Burning Bed--a domestic abuse center that offers everything from literal shelter to legal help to a shoulder to cry on.

I think…and this makes me nervous putting it out there in the universe lest I jinx it…I think they would hire me if they had the state funds, which they don’t at the moment. But, I have to take this class first anyway. And, it’s not watching videos from 1984 and discussing how if Tina’s boyfriend hits her, she should tell an adult. This course is comprehensive college level stuff.

I feel like I already have my certificate in Domestic Abuse—a couple of times over. I’ve been blessed to avoid sexual violence. Although, and you can’t compare, I know what it’s like to just “lie there” and then cry afterward.

This whole endeavor—this step I took yesterday—could lead to a 40 hour a week job with benefits. That would mean, like I wouldn’t need my disability.

SCARY!

That means entering the world again and being a functioning adult the way I was for years as a teacher (even though at the time, I thought I was a fraud). Not just anybody can control and teacher a room of juniors and seniors in a financially depressed school district. In that position, Boss Lady would break her mugs and uses them as weapons. And my mom’s friend, Monet, has a son Dr. Rock—who teaches for the love of teaching at an Ivy college, not for the money—would soil his Calvins. (Having a three million dollar trust fund kinda gives a person more leeway to follow one’s passion and not so much worry about the mortgage.)

I digress.

Martha, therapist, says I do that when I get close to something really true and honest in my guts. So, I will try to just be sincere.

I’m scared to enter the real world again. It’s not safe out there. It’s easier to stay home. Period. It’s easier to stay home.

I have made some major life changes: left someone whom I thought I’d marry, quit the only job I ever had as an adult, and moved 850 miles from home.

I dreamt about the room last night—I haven’t dreamt of that in a long time. But I’m in this house that’s mine and I discover a whole new room I didn’t know was there and it’s all mine. I feel such joy.

The step I’m taking could have major implications like me having a life out here in the Mid-West. What happens to the New York house I have held onto with a death grip? I will really be leaving my parents. It’s not like I am in some strange land. I am with my grandfather and Aunt in a house the I’ve been to since I was a baby. I know the Holy City, even though, aside from Gabe’s iced coffee, I prefer the East Coast.

Fitzgerald knew it. The Mid-West is different that the East Coast. “Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all [Mid-] Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.”

I’m digressing again. What if like Blanche in Steetcar I have some deficiency in common that makes me unadaptable to life in the real world?

I had all this before—the job, the house, the husband and it went to shit. It’s better to stay inside and risk nothing—then I can’t get gutted again.

But...and this is a huge BUT…but what if I find my real calling? A job that: I don’t hate; doesn’t strike fear into my heart; doesn’t have me counting hours; make me cry; or make me physically sick?

What if the Burning Bed is what I’m supposed to do?

Well, fuck. That doesn’t fit into any of my plans at all. But then those plans drowned in my sister’s whiskey bottle over Christmas. The first set of plans blew apart in June of 2012 when I filed for divorce. See the pattern? Plans just going hither and yon?

Nana used to say in her snotty-soul-crushing voice. "Man proposes and God disposes." This is the same woman who said that God "killed" Mother Theresa, because there was too much focus on Princess Diana's death. She also told me, when I five, that the communists would come and ask me if I believed in Christ and if I said yes, they'd shoot me. But that's what I should say. Oh, and she also told me as an eight-year-old that my dad was dead on the side of the road when he went to the movies in inclement weather. Fuck you, Nana. RIP or not. Fuck you. I digress.

My plans--what I think are the "right" one--don't work out so much. Is that because they are mine and not God's?

“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” Jeremiah 29:11.

Are these them, Lord?

Smoke ‘em if ya’ got ‘em. God Bless

In the name of The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; Mother Mary, Saint Brigid; Saint Jude; Saint Therese Lisieux; Archangel Michael, and my Guardian Angel.

PS: Cinderella—you keep on waiting for the “the one.” My first kiss…well, a Saint Bernard would have an improvement.

PPS: Off to inventory the corn with G-Pa.

PPPS: Martha: I’m scared. I’m scared to live again. That’s the-honest-to-God-no digression-truth. I am scared to live again.

“Get busy livin’ or get busy dyin’” Shawshank Redemption Stephen King