Moving

I'm having a hard time getting my head around moving again. I thought I had a year, and now I'm looking at a month, maybe two. Perhaps it is best this way . . . it forces me to make hard choices and move on emotionally from all the stuff I've been accumulating since my first marriage ended . . . and all the stuff I've carried around since . . . I left home initially. Why can't I let go of stuff? A basic sense of insecurity, I guess. I'm not exactly a hoarder, but I have a lot of stuff!

E and I are both puzzled by the fact that the contents of my one-bedroom apartment filled this house. I mean, that's incredible, if you think about it. I think that apartment had a lot of storage space . . . and of course, I've acquired a lot since . . . but still, a lot of what I have, books, clothes, paper . . . I've had all along, or at least for the past 5 years . . . I didn't have that much stuff before then because I was living in bachelor apartments. What happened?

Expanded expectations with my first marriage, my daughter, and then the crushing blow of everything falling apart and the pressure of having to support my daughter alone.

Now, thankfully, I won't be alone with the weight of the world on my shoulders. I'll have E. I'm so very grateful for that.

I'm also grateful that E is a cleaner . . . he's so domestic. He love to cook and clean, which are not my favourite activities. He's so very efficient at everything he does that I can't hope to keep up to him. I only hope he'll abide me.

I'll have to stop hoarding. Maybe living with him will make me feel less like holding on to everything for dear life. That's how it has felt. I kept anticipating everything disappearing . . . and I suppose that now that the almost worst has happened (my teaching contracts have dried up), I am going to have to learn to deal yet again . . .

I do keep wondering why all this is happening. I can't really see myself, I guess. I guess I've been preoccupied and unhappy, and that can't make me effective as I'd like to be . . . but I also think that maybe I haven't been doing what really makes me happy.

I've stopped writing, for instance, which was a mistake. I'm trying to start again. I'll try to write here everyday, which is something that may help. It is something I used to be able to do . . . before the reality of my life became too upsetting.

Last year, in the midst of doing things I thought would make me happy career-wise, I realized that I wasn't really having any fun. I wasn't enjoying what I thought I would. I was struggling to keep my head above water and I was slipping in again and again. I think that as much as I love teaching, for example, I love teaching through relationships. I can't handle teaching hundreds of people who I can't really relate to making really unreasonable demands . . . like expecting A's for mediocre work. I like my small, year-long classes where there are no grades and no expectations of extrinsic rewards. Okay, so I realize that.

What else? I can't handle too many different teaching environments at once. I like to be part of one organization or unit. Last year, I taught at three. That made it hard because I was trying to meet the expectations of three very different constituencies. So, no more of that . . . I have to try to find one place I like to be.

The problem with that is . . . it is hard to find full-time work.

That's really the problem for me. It has been years since I've even tried . . . but now I'm going to have to.

Maybe this is what the Universe is encouraging me to do. It's time, but I'm scared and I'm tired and I'm insecure. I wonder how to deal with that.