Today I was lead to write with a pencil and paper on a topic I would rather speed type through, more than likely breathlessly, carefully watching the mounting word count and thinking “just get through it, skim the surface, almost to the number of words prescribed… you can do this, you can do this… you can do….
And I can’t do that with pencil and paper, which is perhaps why I write with pencil and paper.
I almost retreated from the retyping what I wrote with pencil and paper. Easier, my subconscious says. Easier. Forgettable, brushawayable, ignorable.
I roll my eyes and keep typing.
I am immersed in a blue Ford Mustang, ‘65, V-8 engine revving. Mom is driving. I am, as is rarely the case, in the front seat. I am rarely in the front seat of anything as the fourth child, I am stuffed into nooks and crannies more often than not, never wanting to cause a stir or be trouble because that might be more trouble and we all know what more trouble means.
My brothers sometimes made a spot of taunting me to tears and Mom was talking to me about it. She didn’t protect me from their taunts, she said,
“You’ve got to toughen up, Julie.”
It is the first time I remember getting the message, “Don’t feel what you feel.”
To this day, I will stop crying on cue. If the right authority person says, “Stop crying” my tears dry instantly and I am laughing and smiling, like a puppet, on cue. It is eerie and a bit frightening but it makes everyone else more comfortable.
I never tell my children not to cry.
Even indulgent crying has transformative powers. To say “don’t cry” from my vantage point is akin to saying “don’t breathe.”
Instead of promoting “toughen up” for the little version of me, I might have said, “Be strong even when your heart hurts,” or “Wear boldness for protection when your feet itch to run.” Fear isn’t a bad thing, as Bindu Wiles says, “Fear is not the enemy” and “Healing your individual past is a way to world peace.”
My pencil kept scratching on the paper. No word counts on paper, I just kept going.
What if fear was one room in the party Divinity threw for me? What if fear was like musical chairs or hot potato or pin the tail on the donkey or bingo?
Before I quit my last job, I spent time in therapy dealing with my response to the death threats I received. My assignment was to write a list of my fears. “What are you most afraid of, Julie?” my therapist asked.
On the top of my list? Losing my job.
I was petrified about losing that which caused the most pain, the most fear, the most sadness, the most discomfort in my life. My job brought me hives, nightmares and sleeplessness yet I was most afraid of losing it?
When I take the time to look at that fear, really search around underneath it, what I find is I was actually afraid of having no money, about my income being lost. I was scared frozen at the thought of being jobless and not contributing to my family. I had worked since I was 11 years old with only minimal breaks for babies. I was a worker. That was what was expected of me. Work, paycheck. Work for employer, paycheck.
The words that just rumbled in my ear, sort of through my paper, pencil and finally fingers on the keyboard are, “For God’s sake, Julie, just be normal!” or worse yet, “You are so embarrassing!”
Those last two jabs actually stopped my typing so here I am, 200 words short of the goal, and I am right back in that revving Ford Mustang on a gorgeous Summer day with my Mom younger than I am now intoning, “You’ve got to toughen up.” when a member of my family jabs me, hard.
Losing my job was like losing my family to me as I feared losing approval.
I was afraid I would make the people I love mad at me.
I was afraid of being labeled “afraid” or “selfish” or “unable to give her kids what they want/need” I was afraid my loved ones would desert me if I left this job with great benefits, decent wages, and protected me and my family from being financially destitute but which didn’t protect me from being heart destitute.
The primary fear was not losing my job, it was losing those whose love I valued the most. The umbrella fear wasn’t loss of financial well-being, it was loss of heart well-being.
The primary fear of all my fears.
And you know what is most ironic of all?
I left my job in 1999. Going on eleven years. My husband left in January, 2000, the day before my birthday. My family slowly dropped away from me. I don’t even have phone numbers for two of my brothers and my sister. I can’t remember the last time any of them called me. The occasional facebook comment, sort of like other characters from my childhood.
They are on the same level as all those other people who might have seen me sitting in that Navy blue Ford Mustang, revving at the corner of Washington and Ridgewood. “You’ve got to toughen up, Julie.”
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