I am, for all intents and purposes, finished working. The VA retired me in 2016 at the tender age of 45.
Now a lot of you out there might think that sounds awesome and think it is the goal that everyone is working towards. But being retired is not something you should be if you can’t structure your time properly. It can be as cruel a hell as working at a job you can’t stand. Filling up a day with activity can be very hard, it turns out. You can avoid forward motion quite easily.
I’m in a rut right now. I got into a fender bender a few weeks ago and it shook me up a little. I’m doing more “hiding”, something I have done before. When I was deployed to Korea in 2005, the stress of that tour made me into a pathetic recluse and I would keep the lights off so no one would know I was in my room. I would turn up the heat so high you could probably feel it wafting from under the door. I don’t know what I was really doing, maybe recreating the feeling of the womb or something. Now the urge to hide is back again. I can’t get out of bed in the morning and when everyone has left to do their day at school or work, I beeline for the couch and hunker under a blanket and nap for three hours or more. I got off Clozapine so I could wake up so this behavior is unacceptable bullshit. There’s a difference now- I can get up easily, I just won’t. Back in the Clozapine days there was no won’t…just can’t. So basically I have no excuses for what I am doing.
I have plenty of things I can do but I can’t seem to motivate myself. I’m writing this, so it augurs something positive. You may have noticed the posts are few and far between, occasional reader. I damn near quit writing a few weeks ago. It may take some time to tell stories and share news again, but I’ll get back there and damn it all to hell if I don’t. I’m gonna pick up the freaking guitar and work on my scales until my fingers just know where to go without me thinking about it. I have a house to keep up too.
Dying takes on many forms and indeed, people die more than one death in a figurative sense. We are often changed forever by the things that happen to us or the things we do or don’t do. Sometimes you die a little from that, but the same mechanism allows us to be reborn anew. And that’s what I’m banking on.