Almostgotit.com

Well…It took almost exactly a year, but guess who is now officially billable at approximately 9 (That’s N-I-N-E) times her previous hourly wage as paid by The Institution Which Shall Not Be Named? And guess who is also a little horrified, given all the existential stuff that’s been going on around my house lately, by how much it even MATTERS?  (But. You know what? It DOES.)

I may even forgive my previous employer for dismantling half my portfolio (by taking down the website I’d built for them, one which was getting national attention – the whole unpleasant email discussion about which was then forwarded to me by the webmaster) (A few days before I found out I’d also not been invited to my own retirement party.) (On my birthday.)  (Just as the professional theatre I’d applied to was finally rejecting me after several sets of interviews.) (And not long after someone, who should have known better,  helpfully told me that my previous employer and board all found me “inflammatory”)

(Oh, my God, the woe…..) 

It’s still hardly any hours.  It’s still not a salary.  It may not be what I want to do with the rest of my life.  

But I will so definitely TAKE IT!  Here, have a cigar.  And guess what?  You’re next!

(and, um, that “inflammatory” thing? That’s just me, with my lighter.  And the fattest cigar you’ve ever seen.  Flaming.)

Someone gave me an interesting employment suggestion today, and I must confess I had a bit of what I now call “a Target Moment”  Target is, of course, a cleaner, more uptown version of Walmart.  It’s the place where you always find everything you sort-of-need plus 54% more (it’s amazing, what happens to your bright red shopping cart in that place).  It’s also the place I’ve ended up more than once when I had a vague feeling I badly needed SOMETHING, and hoped Target would help me figure out what that was.  (Target’s marketing strategy is based heavily on existential crises, I think.)

Once, though, I’d not changed out of my gardening clothes before dashing off for something I sort-of-needed at Target.  I drove into the crowded parking lot and suddenly froze inside of my car.  Everything had gone all surface-y and intimidating.  All those people striding so purposely to and from their cars (87% of them SUV’s), efficiently bundling children and bulging bags of things back and forth.  Wearing all their clean, soccer mom outfits. Everyone seemed to know exactly who they were, what they wanted, and what the plan was, in general. What had any of this to do with me?  I wondered, a little stricken. 

Tada! A Target Moment.

Everyone has her own little issues.  I doubt this one is at all unusual, even.  The other night, at a little supper club I belong to, our host for the evening admitted that when we first started our club, she’d been very worried about what to wear to it.  She didn’t know us very well then, and we were only 14% real to each other at that point, so her head made up all sorts of intimidating stories about us.  But on this night, we wore anything from jeans to the formal outfit one of us had worn earlier to her daughter’s prom party.  None of us gave 2% of a rip, either. 

Target Moments are what we have when we forget that everyone else is the same as us, scared to death much of the time and desperately wanting to be loved.  Remembering this is even better than thinking of the audience sitting in their underwear.  Generally speaking, no one really has it together any more than we do, and we’re all just bumbling along best we can.  This includes 100% of those well-dressed, efficient-looking EMPLOYED people, including those who might possibly consider hiring us.

A relative of mine who is a successful physician, while still in school, formulated the “Shmuck Theorem,” which I find very helpful when a Target Moment sneaks up and threatens to derail me from being my most successful self.  It’s very simple:  “If the other schmucks can do it, so can I.”  Amen to that, baby!

The hardest things you’ll ever have to contend with are your own interior critics: They are powerful and noisy, not to mention irrepressible. Anne Lamott calls them her “vinegar-faced ladies;” a friend of mine (who, I should add, NEVER swears) calls them the “FCC”, or “Fucking Critical Committee.” Julia Cameron calls her inner critic “Nigel.” My mother’s voices, when she contemplates putting her paintings in a community exhibit, tell her she’s “showing off.”

My beloved step-aunt-in-law (yes, I really have one of those) calls them her “thugs on a bus.”

You know them perfectly well, don’t you? We all do, these voices that tell us we’re not good enough: the ones that demand, especially if we are women, that we “sit down and shut up.”

I think they are deadly, too, spoken by a thing or things that might even be in league with those immortal terrors that Madeleine L’Engel calls the Echthroi: the shrieking naughts (as in zeroes, or nothings): black holes who want to unname and X the entire cosmos. I call them my “Toad People.”

Most times I try something brave and new (and always when I’m writing,) no matter how freely my hand is moving or how well the work is going, they are always there, cursing in my ears, banging dissonant cymbals in the background, picketing with rude and obscene signs in front of my desk. They perch on the end of my pen and jeer at me. They poke their bony figures in my eyes and jab them at my words even as I’m forming them on the page. “Bad, bad, BAD!” they screech.

While these characters have always been there, recently they’ve been particularly raucous. I think I’ve been making them nervous, carrying on despite their scolding as I never have before. My toad people are well-established after years of residency – apparently, they even have a dental plan and an 80-year mortgage. They seem perfectly confident that they can weather whatever current flight I’m taking, and I must admit I find their confidence deeply disturbing. They have very strong, hairy arms, and seem to believe that if they keep pulling on me hard enough and long enough, I’ll eventually come crashing back down. I worry, sometimes, that they be right!

But then again, here I am, still showing up at the page and still writing. And here is my friend, still looking for a job. There’s my friend recovering from divorce who’s just been accepted as a Ph.D candidate; there’s my mother who’s going to show her paintings anyway. We are all so afraid, and we are all so beautiful. Look at us, though, take a really good look, because here we are. We will not be “X’d”. We keep showing up… not only because it is our God-given right, but because showing up is our God-given obligation.

So: suck a lemon, vinegar ladies. Go jump in a dirty old lake, Nigel. **Note to all toads:** this meeting is adjourned.

Addendum: When I wrote this, I had no idea I had been scooped. Sort of. But it’s an interesting thought that perhaps we’ve both somehow intuited the same archetype: http://www.locksley.com/humor/toad.htm