In which I troll my own archives, as I am wont to do, and bring y’all up to date on my latest neurosis deep self-reflective musings.

Uterus
Two years ago yesterday I underwent a surgery consisting of hydroscopy and rollerball ablation. The results were fantastic; I no longer think I’m on the verge of bleeding to death when I’m on my period. Even though I was uninsured at the time my Uterine Monster¹ was discovered, I’ve completely paid off the surgery in full and my uterus is once again mortgage-free.

Divorce
I still haven’t finished the debt reduction program I started not long after the surgery, but I can’t be too far from having most of the debts of my marriage paid off. I still need to do some research into the few debts my program isn’t handling, and the bills The Ex isn’t paying–two different cellular bills and his fucking satellite TV–and get those cleared up; that will probably take another year or so. (I expect to die before I pay off my student loans, but that’s no one’s fault but my own.)

I find myself wishing that The Ex would finish the remodel and sell the farm, and then – as he’s promised to do should he ever sell the property – send me a check for $40k. That would really solve a bunch of problems for me. I’m not holding my breath, because apparently he’s not even living there any more; he’s shacking up in town with AmmZon². And, since the person who owns the paper on the farm is (probably) too nice to get all medieval on his ass, he probably doesn’t feel at all compelled to get his shit together. I expect that the place will just sit there and rot until someone buys it out from under him for his unpaid property taxes³.

Fucker. Why can’t he just work a job and pay his debts? Why the fuck do I have to do it? Why won’t he do the few things I’ve asked⁴ for? What the fuck is wrong with him? It’s been over three years, for fuck’s sake.

Oh, wait. That’s exactly why I left him. I remember.

I have heard that he no longer wants to keep the farm, and that he’s nearly finished remodeling the kitchen. So we’ll see. Maybe I’ll get reimbursed someday.

The Problem
In this post from August 2007, I said something that really resonates with me-of-today: “I’m verging on being well again, being the active and life-loving and positive person I used to be, and this little nest I’ve made for myself is starting to feel less like safe and nurturing and more like lazy and cowardly.”

So I left Iowa and got to Walla Walla and had surgery. Yay! And I got a job and threw a bunch of money into a hole. Yay! Today I’m no longer bleeding to death and I carry less (but still too much) debt.

I’m also working a simple, easy job that doesn’t pay that much, in an industry I’ve been coasting along in for give-or-take a decade, and I’m living in my grandmother’s attic. I don’t gig much. I’ve never yet had a work schedule that would allow me to do a play or a musical. I haven’t been able to find a yoga studio or a satsang or a temple or a co-op.

I still don’t have friends who know me well enough to hunt me down when I’m in need of them. When I get off work at night, I have nowhere to go but home or to a pub. The most meaningful conversations I’ve had in the past two years have been either fueled by booze and therefore false, online and therefore subject to subjective interpretation more than usual, or real but very few and far between (meaning the first few months with Teh Now Ex-BF, a rare phone call or two, and those I had with Deboka in Brooklyn two weeks ago).

I’m lonely.

When I was living in AmmZon’s spare room, at least I was surrounded by real friends. Out here, I’m doing the same shit⁵ I was doing in the bubble only I have a job and I feel like no one really knows me. Both places offered safety, comfort, and ease – I just couldn’t figure out how to feel engaged.

Posited: Wherever I go, there I am. The problem must be me.

Lifeplan
I have no clue what I need. I don’t even know who to ask.

I don’t know how to make friends. I’ve always just done it. You go places, you’re an extrovert, you meet people. You make a very modest effort, and the next thing you know you have a friend or three or twelve. Of them, one or two are really meaningful relationships. You communicate in a deep and nourishing way. It’s awesome.

I’m still an extrovert, but either my standards have really changed or there’s no one here with my name on them. Even the people I consider my friends, the people whose numbers I actually have in my phone, provide only the slightest ease of my needs for intimacy. I haven’t known them for years, they haven’t known me, I don’t know their back stories, and they sure as hell don’t grok mine.

I’ve taken to prefacing half of my stories with, “Back when I belonged to the cult…” just to let people know that they probably aren’t going to understand about twenty of the words I’m going to use or really grasp the subtext. There’s a bunch of shit I just can’t express in a meaningful way because I can’t find people who know the vocabulary.

(Which is probably why hanging out with Deboka made me cry. She never did the Movement thing, but I didn’t have to define “muscle testing” or “Vata deranged” to her; I could speak entire paragraphs without stopping to take a hard left into dictionaryville.)

Okay, it’s not even vocabulary. It’s path. People end up places together because they have something in common, the thing that drove them there. It seems that what I have in common with the local population is merely surface stuff: dialect, genes, certain shared-but-not-particularly-formative childhood memories. The folks around here don’t seem to be into Eastern philosophy (not that Eastern philosophy is the be-all end-all, but it does tend to be the framework in which I think); the spiritual people I know are all Christian and can only speak in that framework (and most of them are Christian via time spent in AA, which is even more linear). I have nothing against Christians or the Bible or even The Big Book per se, but it’s really a very small slice of world philosophy: there’s an awful lot of transformative shit out there, if you just get out of America’s über-weird Puritan version of “religion.”

But that’s not their path. Which makes me the outsider. I’m the one who moved to fucking Iowa for fifteen years to be in a cult⁶. I’m the one with that particular drive, not them.

So I find my daily activities to be meaningless and unsatisfying, and my lack of meaningful human interaction even more so. I should be volunteering at a shelter but instead I’m whining. I feel like I’m copping out, I guess. I’m achingly lonely. I think I’m depressed. I’m considering entering some form of therapy to deal with how pissed off I am about the marriage, the left coast’s failure to befriend me and keep me occupied, and being a 41-year-old woman who doesn’t own a set of goddamned sheets.

I’m really good at finding meaning – and as a byproduct, happiness – in crisis and flux. I’m really bad at finding any happiness at all in a comfortable Western life.

I have a job, I’m paying my bills. My living situation couldn’t be more comfy if I had a freakin’ body servant at my beck and call. I have access to a vehicle whenever I need one. I can walk into various establishments and be addressed by name. I’ve been hugged in the grocery store by fans of my music. My uterus is fine. I have freedom and comfort and time. So why am I miserable?

Maybe it’s time to suck it up and go live in Mother’s ashram⁷ for a year. Except I don’t even meditate regularly when I have plenty of time to do so. I give my spiritual practice an awful lot of lip service, but I often go months without doing any practice at all.

I don’t seem to have whatever discipline it takes to maintain personal evolution without some form of suffering in the relative. I think I want to move somewhere else and start all over yet again; the excitement of moving will keep me feeling deep and engaged. The people there will be more like me, yes? I’ll find friends there!

Except maybe it’s not the people. Maybe I’m not building meaningful relationships because I’m not really living here. The last time I tried really hard to live somewhere it broke my fucking heart and all I wanted to do was leave. I’ve done the geographical relocation, but maybe I haven’t processed leaving internally yet.

It’s hard to tell. Maybe I’m just batshit crazy.

I’ll keep you posted.

—
¹ I had a prolapsed fibroid cyst. It, along with a very thick uterine lining, caused nearly life-threateningly heavy bleeding (and probably my infertility as well).
² AmmZon is the very good friend I moved in with after I dumped The Ex. She was dating Joesus at the time and I lived with the two of them. Now they’re broken up, Joesus is with someone else, AmmZon’s with The Ex, and I live in my grandmother’s attic and haven’t been laid in months.
³ I haven’t checked it out for myself, but I’ve heard that my old 27-acre farm property was listed in the local paper as carrying outstanding back taxes. Not paying property tax is a good way to lose one’s property. The tax is about $1200 a year, so The Ex must not be working much if he’s leaving them unpaid.
⁴ I’ve been asking for almost two years for The Ex to (1) send me my Brownie camera, (2) pay his Cingular, US Cellular, and DirecTV bills, and (3) fucking divorce me.
⁵ “The same shit” being living a fairly disengaged life, eating too much Mexican food at regular intervals, reading a bunch of meaningless crap, and drinking and sleeping a lot.
⁶ TM isn’t really a cult in the horrible-awful sense of the word. It’s just it’s own thing, and far enough outside the mainstream that it might as well be one.
⁷ One doesn’t just go. One asks Mother if they can go and stay at the ashram; sometimes She says no. Then what? Plus what if She says yes and it’s just another geographical and I’m still stuck with myself? Argh!