The Season of Hope

For Christians, we are in the midst of Advent. Our Jewish friends just celebrated Hannukah. And the Pagans among us celebrate Yule today. Whatever your beliefs – be it one of those I’ve listed, or something entirely else – there is magic in this time of year. The very air seems to crackle with anticipation, and children everywhere light up with hope.

A Decorated Palm Tree at Fort Myers Beach

This year, the things that usually symbolize the season for me – cold weather and being with my family – are absent from my immediate surroundings. My mother visited last week for my son’s 2nd birthday, though. When she commented how it was “weird” to hear Christmas music when it was 80-something degrees outside, I couldn’t help but agree. Even still, my husband and I have found our own ways to bring the Season into our surroundings. Despite our limited budget, we found ways to do a little bit of shopping – for presents and also for some inexpensive decorations. We also hand-made some decorations, as well. We’ve recorded a bunch of this year’s Christmas specials on TV, and bought ourselves all some seasonally-themed pajamas; we’ll spend Christmas Day lounging around the house in our PJs and watching the shows we’ve recorded (all child-appropriate, of course).

More importantly, though, this year is all about Hope for us. Both my husband and I are still searching for employment. We’re still living, along with our toddler son, in someone else’s home, waiting to get back on our feet. Hoping, in fact, to get back on our feet. In this season of “Holy Longing,” as my minister said in yesterday’s sermon, we are acutely aware of hope and anticipation. We are eagerly awaiting what comes next.

May the close of this year bring us the things we seek. May it bring new beginnings, and all that which we have been working towards and praying for over the past months.

Waffles Aren’t Just for Breakfast

A couple of weeks ago, right around when we started toying with the DC idea, my husband had a phone interview with a company in CA. A friend of his from HS works there and has been trying to get him to apply there since before he even lost his job back in Rochester. Finally we agreed he might as well see what happens. Well, the first interviewer liked him enough to pass his information further down the line, and now he has a second (phone) interview lined up for later this week. If that goes well too, they’ll be wanting to fly him out there to interview in person either later this month or early next month.

This whole turn of events has led to many late-night, long-drive, dinner-time, and telephone (while I’m on breaks at work) conversations between the two of us, weighing the pros and cons of this possibility from every imaginable angle. They say opportunity doesn’t knock twice, but this is definitely multiple knocks at this point. In the past, we’d ruled it out because O already had a decent job, and then because we didn’t want to move so far away. It always felt like a last-resort option. But even though we have definitely not exhausted all other possibilities, I do have to wonder how long this opportunity will realistically stick around.

As I consider this possibility for our family, I hear the voices of other people in our lives echoing in my head. I hear a lot of “shoulds,” and it’s difficult not to let those potential opinions color my perceptions. On the other hand, is “because I don’t want to!” a solid enough reason to say no, if the job is offered to him in the end?

Theoretically this job would offer us the financial freedom to visit home more often than we can from here, even though CA is further from NY than FL is. But how much more hassle would the flights be, especially when compared to our previous goal of moving to DC (from where we could also drive home relatively easily)?

Even if he is offered the job and we decide that he should take it, it doesn’t have to be forever. But how many times do I really want to uproot my entire life and move out of state, before finally settling someplace for the foreseeable future?

I don’t know. I just don’t know.

How Do You Hold Onto Hope?

I admit it; I’m feeling discouraged.  I am feeling as though nothing ever changes, no matter the amount of effort I expend.  This is true of my weight-loss goals, my job hunt, the quest for health insurance coverage… It feels like life itself is just stagnant, even in the areas in which I seek change.

Bathroom Scale, image from http://www.care2.com/

My weight has been stuck at the same place, give or take no more than 2 pounds, for probably close to a year now.  I’d dropped to about 7 pounds above my pre-pregnancy weight at one point, then gained a few pounds back… and there it stayed.  Since we moved to Florida, I’ve tried calorie-reduction and increased activity, and still it remained.  Whether I’m being “good” or not, the scale doesn’t seem to care.  I’m still going to the gym nearly every day, but recently I’ve stopped religiously counting my calories.  I’ve also stopped weighing myself because what’s the point?  It just leads to more discouragement.  (Of course, not weighing in leaves me with this fear in the back of my mind that I’m steadily gaining now, instead of continuing to plateau.)

Now Hiring, Must Have Clue. photo from http://www.carteworld.com

Obviously I can’t do the same with my job-hunt. I can’t scale it back out of frustration. The only thing I can do is to soldier on in the face of the incoming rejection letters and lack of interviews. The only change I can see making is to slowly reduce my pickiness and increase my desperation. I can look for jobs I don’t really want, jobs that are more likely to leave me miserable and tired at the end of the day, instead of leaving me feeling like I’ve done a good thing with my day. I don’t want to get to that point… but I am losing hope of finding the kind of job I actually want. And it’s not like I’m asking that much – I just want an office job with an area (or, really, anywhere in FL) university.

How, in the face of all of this negativity, do I hold on to my hope? How do I keep myself from drowning in all the rejections and letting it hammer away at my self-worth? I can write, and I can concentrate on the positives. But some days it feels like that is just staving off the inevitable.

I want a job, and I am more than qualified for the kind of job I want.
I want to lose weight, and 10-15 pounds doesn’t seem unreasonable.
I want health insurance I can afford, and everyone deserves that, I believe.
And most of all, I want to feel hope that all of the above can be achieved.

Writing As Therapy

It’s no secret to anyone that things are a little bit stressful here in the SJ household.  We’re in a new location, not even in our own home, and we’re both job hunting.  With so much up in the air, yes, anxiety levels are sometimes a little bit high.

So how am I, a woman with a mild-to-moderate case of GAD, coping with the extra stressors that have been piled on since July?  You know, other than resenting the ever-loving crap out of my husband’s former employer.  There are definitely better, more productive ways to manage my stress.

One such method is something I had started back in the dark, dark days of PPD hell – a focus on the positive.  My therapist at the time urged me to try to find positive things about each day and write them down.  I kept with it for a while, and I did notice a difference.  I’ve done it sporadically since then, when things felt particularly bleak, but it never became a real, solid routine.

A week and a half ago, though, one of my dearest friends started posting Daily Positives in her journal, and urged her readers to do the same for a period of eight days.  I latched right on to that bait, and immediately started to notice a difference.  In so doing, I determined that it was something I should keep doing.  Not just for eight days, but for as long as it feels right.  I’m starting with a month (today is day #11), but it may well continue after that as well.

In this time of recession, job loss, and personal turmoil, it is really easy to get lost in negatives.  Every day is NOT all sunshine and roses, even here in tropical Florida, where it’s hard to even remember that it’s autumn.  But every day does have at least a few rays of hope.  No, those rays don’t take away the worries.  They don’t stop my brain from obsessing about finding work, missing loved ones, or trivialities like Christmas plans or something someone said to me in passing.  But remembering the positives forces me to shift my focus, at least for the length of the journal entry (and usually quite a while beyond), onto something good and away from anything negative.  That can only be a good thing, as far as I’m concerned.

The Fruits of Our Labors

Like many people, I’ve never given a whole lot of thought to what Labor Day actually means. It’s been a day off from school or work, the unofficial end of summer, and sometimes a day for picnics and barbecues with loved ones. But what does it really mean?

This year, though, the true meaning is particularly salient for me. This year, not only are my husband and I each seeking work ourselves, but it seems like the whole country is re-evaluating what it means to be employed. People retire from a life-long career, then end up taking on part- or even full-time work anyway because they can’t afford to make ends meet. Job security in the majority of fields is wavering, with the dark cloud of downsizing always threatening. And people are stuck in dead-end, miserable occupations because they can’t afford to quit.

It sounds bleak, doesn’t it? Not much of a thing to celebrate on this first Monday in September. To be honest, being in a brand new area without friends or family to picnic with, we likely won’t be doing much celebrating, ourselves. But if we were, it would be as a tribute to those who are striving to improve the state of the economy. No one can deny that the country has hit some fairly dire straits in recent years. But we will bounce back. However long it takes, whatever path we follow, things will improve.

Keep that thought in your mind, particularly if you are one of those who is either unemployed or stuck in a job that leaves you feeling unfulfilled. Sit back, crack open a beer, throw some burgers on the grill, and enjoy this break from mundania.

This post was inspired by the sermon at The Unitarian Universalist Church of Ft Myers on Sunday, September 6, 2009.

Nothing to Lose, Much to Gain

My husband received some devastating news on Wednesday – he was let go from his job. The end-result of this is that we are no longer buying our house. We spent several tear-filled hours that afternoon, and spent much of Thursday in a post-stress daze punctuated by many comforting hugs and cuddles before piling into the car on Friday to get away from it all for the weekend (visiting my family). On Monday, we jump headlong into Planning The Future.

We’re very much trying to look at this experience as an opportunity instead of a loss. Back in February, just after returning from a visit with my in-laws in Florida, we were lamenting the northeastern US winters, but we decided to stick around because of O’s job. In today’s economy, one doesn’t just walk away from steady, seemingly stable employment.

However, when that employment instead walks away from you… you become suddenly free to go wherever you want, or wherever the Fates may take you. I don’t necessarily agree with Janis’ definition of “freedom,” but we definitely hope for plenty to gain.

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