Or is it?
I finally got an interview for a non-legal job. It was at a grocery chain, I won’t say which one just in case this baby blog does get big one day and they decide to sue for defamation.
The interview was less than three minutes long and consisted of two questions: why do you want to work in a grocery store, and do you have any questions for me? I went in knowing that the job didn’t pay a living wage, so one of my questions was “will I have a set schedule so I can get a second job?”

The hiring manager proceeds to tell me that “full time” is 30 hours a week (because health insurance kicks in at 32 hours a week) and that the schedule will vary from week to week. The store will not accommodate additional employment and expects all “full time” employees to be available from 6:30 a.m. to 11 p.m. seven days a week. Store hours are from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. but they don’t hire people for specific jobs so everyone must be available to perform any role at a moment’s notice.
Basically, they won’t give me enough hours to qualify for group health insurance, nor will they pay me enough money to live off of even if I forego health insurance, but they fully expect to be my one and only priority on this planet.
Seriously people. THIS IS THE APOCALYPSE. The United States isn’t even pretending there is any possibility of upward mobility any longer. We all belong to the corporate overlords. Full stop.
Oh, did I mention there will be a full background check, a credit check, and drug testing? To work in a grocery store. You have to have good credit to be allowed to put cans on a shelf. At least in Huxley’s Brave New World they encouraged the use of drugs. I could really use me a weekend’s worth of soma right about now.

I’m actually not too upset about it, though. The look on the hiring manager’s face when I handed her my resume made it pretty darn clear I will not be getting a callback.
“You’re a lawyer?”
“Used to be, yeah. I’m looking for something a little easier on the soul.”
“Right, okay.”
I will never hear from those people again.
This morning, I put together a new resume that isn’t exactly true but doesn’t quite lie, either. I used jobs that I have actually held, I just left a few out and tweaked the years of the other ones to make it look like the whole “lawyer” thing was just a passing fancy rather than the thing that defined the last fifteen years of my life.
Then I applied for ten jobs at the local casino. Yes, ten. Every single one I even remotely qualified for. There were sixteen open positions and the only ones I didn’t put in for were the four security positions (had to have formal law enforcement training) the marketing manager (had to have a bachelor’s in marketing and three years of experience) and the head chef position (I can’t cook for beans).

I’ve started marking “yes, I have a disability” on every application I fill out. When I created my employment profile for the casino, I straight up said that I had to leave the law because of PTSD stemming from childhood abuse. There are federal programs that pay an incentive to companies for hiring disabled workers. Civilian PTSD is a qualifying disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act. You bet your sweet ass I checked. And my shrink will happily write me a letter if I need one.
I have no idea if this new tack will work. If it doesn’t, I’ll find a different one.
I think I might have given up on giving up.
Yesterday was an odd day. I got several more rejection emails and for a while it seemed like it was going to be another one of those days where all I did was sit around panicking and crying and feeling guilty for destroying my own life as well as those of my children and an innocent bystander or two.
I carry a lot of guilt that is either not mine or not earned or both. I’m not saying I’ve been a blameless angel all my life, but I definitely give myself a massive amount of undeserved shit.
I had to launch a hotspot because the wifi wasn’t reaching my shed very well (yes, I live in a shed, what part of ruined life is not clear?) and all of a sudden, my brain was transported back to that month that we spent evacuated after hurricane Ida.

I recently read a book called Midnight on Beacon Street by Emily Ruth Verona. It’s her first full-length horror novel. The book is incredibly unoriginal by design, meant to be an homage to all the great dead babysitter horror movies of the 1980’s and ‘90’s. She absolutely nailed it. The book is a masterpiece of horror nostalgia, yet bears her own personal interpretation that I found clever and haunting. Five stars.
Midnight on Beacon Street has the best descriptions of anxiety and panic attacks that I have ever read, anywhere. And I’ve read a LOT of shit. Six-year-old Ben has no words for the anxiety and PTSD left behind when his mother fled her abusive relationship with her two children. He simply calls it The Fear.
The seventeen-year-old babysitter, Amy, cannot articulate the source of her panic disorder. It has simply always been there, for as long as she can remember. She observes that “Sometimes it felt like her anxiety came and went in waves, sweeping her out to sea only to throw her back into the sand. Breathless but safe.”
Both of these descriptions resonate with me.
After hurricane Ida, I spent a month living in a two-bedroom house in Natchez with Norman, our two kids, and his mother. I was working remotely full-time as an assistant federal public defender while trying to manage the insurance claims for both my household and Mrs. Bates’, while living in a crowded little house that didn’t even have a full-sized fridge or sufficient kitchen supplies to cook a proper meal. The children were constantly on edge, asking every day when we could go home, and even though there were two other adults in the household, it felt like the weight of everything was falling on my shoulders alone.

The house didn’t have an internet connection, so every morning I would have to launch a hotspot so the kids could watch cartoons.
Launching a hotspot is such a mundane thing in this day and age, but as soon as I pressed the button, I was thrown back into that sea of remembered anxiety, being beaten by wave after wave of guilt and shame for not handling the situation better.
In reality, I handled the situation incredibly well. I spent the entirety of the initial evacuation battling panic attack after panic attack as I was bombarded with flashbacks from my Katrina evacuation, but I did my best to hide my panic from my children and make the fiasco an adventure for them.
It has come to my attention recently that Thing1 has a wee bit of his own PTSD from that month we spent as refugees, which is undoubtedly why I’m suddenly bombarded with self-loathing over my handling of the Ida situation. But yesterday it occurred to me that the burden of shielding him from the trauma didn’t fall on my shoulders alone. There were two other adults in that house, and I was the only one working AND I was the one dealing with the insurance companies.
Thing1’s PTSD is not entirely my fault.

Just as the panic attack was really getting going, my blood pressure rising, the screaming in my head getting louder and louder, the whole process was interrupted by the thought: now he knows what it felt like.
Norman has spent the past eight months solely responsible for the household finances. This has most certainly been a horrible learning experience for him, because no matter how many times I tried to involve him in the finances during our marriage he refused to have anything to do with it, deciding instead to lay it all on my shoulders.
Now he and his mother are having to take care of the children and run the household without any help from me. They went from having to do nothing more but cook a few meals and play with the children when they weren’t in school to having to do everything.
I’m not going to say they are finally realizing how much I contributed to the family and household operations. I think they’ve always known that I did the bulk of…well, all of it. That’s why he got so mean when I started trying to redefine our roles.
The first time his mother told me she loved me was the day I left him for the first time. She knew what they would lose if I didn’t come back. Yet when I did come back, she made no attempt to be civil, much less kind. Which is a large part of why I left again.
When I ran out of money and stopped paying all the bills last November, I fully expected them to lose the house by May. I have absolutely no idea how they’re staying afloat, because Norman doesn’t speak to me except to call me crazy, accuse me of ruining his life, and tell me I deserve all the bad things that have ever happened to me.
He’s not a nice man. I think I might have always known that, and just been unwilling to admit it.
But he has managed to keep the household together and he resisted my attempts to have the children relocated back to Louisiana. And for all these months I have felt horribly guilty about not helping him.

Not anymore.
When the thought popped into my head yesterday that now it’s his turn to bear the weight of the world for a while and my turn to put myself first for a bit, a feeling of calm fell over me like a warm, gentle wave.
He should have taken care of me when I started having problems. He should not have gone out of his way to make them worse. But he made those choices, not me, and the consequence of those choices is that my illness got worse instead of better. That’s on him. His life is currently more difficult than it needed to be because he chose to make my life more difficult than it needed to be.
I don’t need to be maximizing my income right now. I need to be learning to process all the trauma and pain I have experienced over the last four decades.
I’m not going to pretend that this realization magically healed me. The panic still washed over me in waves several times yesterday and last night, but instead of letting myself get lost in guilt over the past and fear for the future, I stopped and asked myself why I was feeling what I was feeling and tried to listen to myself instead of fighting the pain.
I realized that the majority of the decisions I have made in my life have been a result of fear for the future. I have spent my entire life looking forward, trying to anticipate and prepare for the next catastrophe, with the result that I am never calm, even when there is nothing terrible actively happening to me. As my therapist so wisely pointed out, this system of behavior didn’t prevent any pain, it simply ensured that I felt it all twice.
Three times, really, because the memories of the events haunt me and cause me just as much suffering as the anticipation and the experience.
People have been telling me over and over again this past year that I need to learn to give myself some grace. Like, a LOT of people. It’s weird because they all use that phrase exactly: “learn to give yourself some grace.”
I think I’m finally figuring out what that means.

Yesterday I wrote a new scene in the script I want to use for my film school application. I wrote it long hand, because that is how I think best, and when I started to berate myself for falling behind in entering the scenes into the computer with the proper formatting I stopped, and reminded myself that the application isn’t due until March. The important part is getting it written. Typing the damn thing won’t take more than a day or two.
I started making plans for blog content that isn’t about my mental breakdown and my shitty marriage. I have so much more to say, and it’s time I worked out how to say it.
I started working on some ideas for youtube/Instagram videos I can create, because it’s 2024 and a blog is all well and good but everybody really loves an audio/visual component.
I stopped focusing on what I should have done and started focusing on what I want to do. Because that is where the healing lies.

My children don’t need me to make them a lot of money right now. If their father fails at his task and is unable to support them, then I can burden myself with a return to the law. But so far, he’s managed to step up, which actually makes me respect him a little bit.
He’s still an asshole. He’s just not entirely useless anymore.
What I need to be doing, for myself and for my kids, is focusing on healing and finding my true self under all the fear and pain and shame.
And if that process burdens Norman, too fucking bad. He made his choices. It’s time for him to live with the consequences.
Right now, I’m taking care of me.
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Lonely No More
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