The Reluctant Writer

Job update – still unemployed but getting some assistance

 

Since I was laid off two months ago, I have been dealing with lots of paperwork. Unemployment papers, stuff from when I was working, stuff since I was working, my deceased mother’s papers and paper and papers. The estate was supposed to settle in June, but hasn’t yet, so I still have all that stuff lingering too. 

 

Anyway, I have been intermittently lax in filing all this crap and now need to find the paperwork for rolling my 401 K over from my employer to a new account. I don’t want to leave it where it was because I don’t want my former employer to have anything to do with it, so there is some urgency. Or was. I have another month to procrastinate before it’s truly a crisis. But I couldn’t find the packet from the financial firm.  So a frantic search ensued this week to find and file all the crap I should have been keeping up with, some of which I had thought I lost.

 

I looked for about two hours today, and guess what. I found all the retirement crap in a labeled file right on the counter. Between intermittent periods of laxness, I had a period of organization and actually took care of it. And then forgot I did it. (It’s Sometimers Disease. . . sometimes I remember, sometimes I don’t.)

 

In the meantime today I looked through about five lingering piles o’ crap in the office and got them sorted out. SCORE! Now they are in crap files labeled . . . “Sorta Not Crap,” “Obviously Not Crap,” “Not Obvious Crap,” and “Crap I Can’t Part With Yet.”  The miscellaneous file is labeled “Oh Crap.” A very large portion of the crap went in the paper recycling box, named . . . you guessed it . . . “Pure Crap.”

 

I hate filing.

 

In the meantime I’m trying to sort out a lot of mental crap as well. Trying to figure out what has brought me to this point in life and accessing the resources at hand to do it. One of the first resources I accessed was a couple of recordings I bought from Joan Sotkin at Prosperity Place (website) earlier this year called “How your Wounded Child is Keeping You Broke,” and “Core Money Issues,” and an e-book she wrote called “Building Your Money Muscles.” All good stuff.  I have learned a lot about how attitudes formed in childhood have remained in latent control and have kept me not only broke (at times, not always) but underemployed and underpaid. And since I never want to have a G.D. mind-sucking, soul-killing (*$(*^&$#(*&%&#Q(*&) shit desk job again, this is valuable understanding to gain. I recommend her site to anyone with money issues. She’s been through it, understands it, teaches financial healing, and does damn fine work. I recently emailed her my electronic applause and got a prompt reply back. She’s good.

 

Another resource has been a great book called “12 Bad Habits That Hold Good People Back.” It was written by two Harvard guys who consult with companies with problem employees they want to rehabilitate and keep.  Sometimes it doesn’t work, but these guys really know how to present personnel work issues in a relevant way and show how to approach correcting them realistically. My issues seem to be a mix of either “I’m not good enough for the job (I want to do),” and “The job I have isn’t good enough.” Both seem to hinge on a strong sense of shame that developed in childhood as well. See the hookup with Sotkin’s Wounded Child? 

 

These two resources have help me sort out Lots O’ Crap in my head and see how certain patterns of underemployment and under self-appreciation affected many aspects of my adult life. My thing seems to be shame rather than guilt, both of which are useless negative mental attitudes we learn as good little boys and girls, especially if we went to church.  I have abandoned the church thing, but struggle with the lingering mental turds it left behind. My father was also slightly abusive when I was really young. We resolved most of it before he died, but some of that lingers too. This is all fodder for self-image problems accompanied by shame.

 

The last two months has been all about change. I’ve been shifting into retro introspection like crazy to try to understand the patterns in my behavior that have brought me to this point and have found good resources. But how to change the patterns imbedded in my brain? Holosync Solutions. It’s a technology of sound waves that are slightly off synchrony that challenge the brain to accept a higher degree of stress or mental dissonance. The result is to bring the threshold of tolerance to stress and disharmony up. The crap in a person’s life may not change, but the degree to which a person can handle and resolve it goes higher. The website has loads of information about it. I watched, looked, and listened for about a year before I tried it, and I have liked it so far.

 

Yeah, yeah, I know. More crap. I don’t think this is crap. I think it’s really helping. This all began about a month before I was laid off when I sent a huge message to the Universe, “I am SO ready for change. I want to grow and progress. I am SO ready for change and TO change.” Then I got laid off.  Thus began the intensive inward searching and putting the findings together. Other things are changing too, but these are the big ones. These are the ones that affect all the others.

 

One of the places I go is a monthly women’s group involved in Integral Life Practice led by Diane Musho Hamilton. She is one of the teachers at the Kanzeon Zen Center in Salt Lake where I attend meditation. Integral Life Practice is headed by Ken Wilber and you can learn more on his website. This month one of our exercises was to complete sentences like “When I was a child I was most secure when . . .” or “when I was a child I was frightened by . . .  The most important statement for me was “I made the transition from child to adult . . . “  I realized that I have never felt fully adult. A part of me has always felt like a child and has kept me from feeling completely mature, especially when I really needed to. This has rippled through my remembrance of the past (Wounded Child) and is beginning to push forward into the future for me now. (Integrated Adult)

 

Remember when I said I had already filed the retirement paper? That’s the kind of stuff that’s been happening. I’m actually getting organized in a meaningful way, and feeling like my Wounded Child isn’t running my life. She still gets out once in a while, but she’s feeling a lot less out of control or destructive when she does. She’s being heard, understood, recognized and acknowledged for the first time. She’s beginning to heal.

 

Maybe she’ll even learn to dress herself.

 

Maybe she’ll even end up working again soon. With something she likes.

 

Maybe that would be nice.

 

I’m glad I’ve had the time to sort this out. This is why getting laid off has been such a gift. The Universe gave me what I needed in response to my request for change, and gave it in tremendous and at times almost overwhelming abundance in ways I could not have imagined.

 

More on the changes in future entries. ‘Til then, I wonder . . .

 

What’s next?