Category — the crazy stops here

I stood in the middle of the bar and took a long sip from my drink, letting the vodka slip down my throat and start a slow, low fire throughout my stress-ravaged body. Just as I felt a month’s worth of tension start to slip out of my toes and fingertips, the General Manager of my sector at the Borg approached.

Are you okay? I know this was a hard day for you, do you want to talk a little? I’d like to know how you’re doing.

We had just executed a mass-layoff in my office, including most of my staff, and my knowledge of this impending doom preceded theirs by a little over a month. I had cried at the prep meeting, while terminating my Payables clerk, and with some coworkers after they were handed their pink slips. I cried all damn day, and only worried a little about my professional reputation.

I’m okay. I meant what I said earlier- this is the right thing for the business, it’s the right thing for those of us who remain- but that doesn’t make it any easier. I know that I’ve been able to look back on my darkest days six weeks, six months, six years down the road and I’ve had the solace of realizing that if I hadn’t faced that hardship, I wouldn’t be right here, and that’s always been a source of comfort to me. To be able to say of the hardest things that they helped make the best things in my life. I’m sad tonight for the people we let go, but more than anything, I just hope that they can look back later on and see that this ending was the beginning of something better.

A relieved smile spread from his eyes to his cheeks, and we chatted for a few minutes before someone cut in and I excused myself.

A few days shy of my thirty-second birthday, I still believe that. I can’t defend it, I can barely explain it, the best hope I have is to point to nature and say it is evidence to me of a higher order that we have not yet grasped in our knowledge of the universe.

If faith is an innate knowing, then this is mine, and I understand it in my bones.

I don’t know why bad things happen to good people, and I don’t know why some lives end so early or so unexpectedly. I understand that people hurt people because they hurt, but I don’t understand the cosmic value in so much pain. Perhaps there isn’t any at all, and I only seek to ascribe it some value to make peace with it somehow.

Since my earliest years of awareness, I’ve been called an old soul. Certainly, I’ve had a few encounters with strangers that were more recognition than introduction, and have always read between the lines without really realizing it. What that means is beyond any of us to understand, and I won’t do it the injustice of pinning it down. Those kinds of things are still magical to those of us that want to see them, and I suppose my biggest question for my coincidence and science friends is, simply:

Why wouldn’t you want to think that things happen for a reason, even if we don’t understand how or why?

I’m incredibly suspicious of anyone who doesn’t believe in something, one thing, anything that they can’t see.

Last night, I sat in the kitchen nook. The steam from my soup kissed my cheeks, and the faint smell of woodsmoke sat in the back of my throat. My thoughts drifted to my upcoming birthday and the annual reconciling of reality against my visions and dreams.

As always, my life looks nothing like what I ever imagined for myself. The people and experiences that filled the gap between my dreams and my defeats are both precious and priceless in their own right, and I choose to believe that they put me right here, right now, with this particular perspective. Any variation on my history would not have produced this moment, with these people, and my capacity to appreciate them.

You can argue with that all you want to, and I would relish the discussion.

What you can’t argue with is the sense of recognition and belonging that strikes deep and true, past my neurotic brain and my poor schizophrenic heart, straight into the marrow. It produces a warm calmness that whispers above all the noise of doubt and fear.

You belong here.

My life has been a continual exercise in making a silk purse from a pig’s ear. Being among the best of my peers served as my starting line. In some unknown ratio, my fierce drive consists of personality and cruelty I faced in grade school and middle school. If I couldn’t be accepted, I could be superior. That particular flavor of isolation is at least a little pleasing. Still, the drive to succeed and surpass is nestled deep in my marrow.

Unending hunger for proving myself beyond all expectation has served me very well. It’s how an agoraphobic high-school dropout with an algebra allergy, the oldest daughter of a middle-class family, came to hold a key financial position in a sizable organization and earn half a bachelor’s degree by her late twenties- in two inch heels and a wedding ring.

It’s also what held me together through the darkness of that life’s unraveling and the emptiness it left behind.

As one would imagine, a desire for vindication is compelling motivation to survive divorce and a diverging of paths with a corporate conglomerate. My limited research reveals its endurance at roughly eighteen months, just in case you were curious.

The best and worst thing about both divorce and entrepreneurship, simply:

There is no one left to argue with.

Going out into the business or dating world in search of a worthy opponent is generally counterproductive, though it certainly is an all-too-popular approach to either endeavor. The alternative is to internalize the competition- every mistake or miscalculation becomes evidence against your worthiness and success is just the midpoint in a constant cycle of proving your worth again and again and again.

Others sense this preoccupation and rightfully withhold investments of value, lest they lose your attention and favor to some shiny object that promises redemption.

My first attempt to combat this weakness was self-control and lack of expression. I learned how to hide my desire, but the best I’ve ever managed is an vague seething that unseats people more than transparency.

Powerless against its force, I made it my scapegoat and tried to eliminate it. This is what led me to my fondness for the works of Buddhist monks; desire is suffering, and my suffering sure as hell felt proportional to my desire. I found untold comfort and wisdom in their logic, but the seeds of doubt and fear were sown in that soil.

If I ever manage to conquer my desire, who will I become?

Whether you love or hate it, my intensity is an integral part of who I am as a person, a woman, and a writer. Most of the time, I love my passion and drive. Except, you know, when it makes me miserable.

A dear friend and sage advised me not to “taste the carrot”. He was speaking of the tendency we have to place more importance on any particular goal than the effort of striving and the value of desire in the creative process. In contemplating that concept, an unrelated mention of the devil as a symbolic representation of ego fit perfectly as the last piece in the puzzle.

Ego tricks us into thinking we know the inner workings of the universe, that we are capable of divining which friendships will endure, the right place for us in the lives of others, or the role of others in our own lives, which business opportunities will seal our success, or even that we are meant to prevail in an endeavor.

Those failures touch that aching, ancient pain all of us carry in some measure- they prove our worst fears about ourselves. Victory carries its own danger, as I am beginning to understand. Walk on water a few times, and every damn fish pond starts to look like a dance floor.

When determination is fueled by a need to prove superiority in the face of rejection, one starts to see any trace of doubt as a direct challenge. Without consideration for what is healthy, realistic, or even possible; the more impossible it is, the more determined I am to make it happen.

Drive and intensity are my gifts, and they bear some of the sweetest fruit I’ve tasted. Love, success, joy, fulfillment, and contentment- these universal desires motivate us to pursue rich and full lives.

Misery only sets in when my ego attempts to dictate how I receive these things, creating objects of desire and perpetuating the illusion that those broad yearnings rely on any one outcome.

The devil really is in the details, y’all.