Striving Against My Humanity

“You’re human,” he said.

“I don’t want to be!”

I hope we both knew what I meant. I have spent my life striving to be made of finer stuff than I am, repulsed by my frailties and shortcomings. Always smart but not smart enough, pretty in a world filled with beautiful, a good writer striving to be great, a good, but not exceptional singer.

No matter what I attempt there is always someone better, someone more gifted. The one thing I had, I thought, is moral character. I have a relatively placid temperament, without great rollercoaster dips and heights of emotions, no wild swings for me.

Although of a melancholy bent, I have learned how to be happy.

What my anger is revealing is how much I have been striving to be spiritual, striving to be saintly, without being either. I’ve been striving in my own efforts, I wasn’t aware of how desperately I need to be saved from myself.

I want to be like St. Seraphim without the years sleeping on rocks; St. Mary of Egypt without the desolate desert years.

I am meeting myself—the snide, sarcastic, mean, bitter, horrible inner me. This is the me I’ve been keeping a tight reign on, thinking that I was defeating her by doing so. You can’t defeat cancer by ignoring it. My sinful self is a cancer on the soul. It needs excising and I cannot perform the operation myself.

I need the great healer for that, the physician of my soul. I need to want the cancer gone. I need to want it. At this point, something in me clings to the cancerous inner self. Remove that and who will I be? Who am I?

I want to want to be rid of this. Like Frodo who carried the ring all the way to the fires of Mt. Doom yet could not release his burden without help, I stand near the precipice. Help me to want to let go, O Lord. Help.

A Single Point in Time

At 9:19pm, Sunday, October 18th, 2020, I was little different from any other 56-year-old woman. By 9:20pm everything changed. But I did not know that yet.

January 24, 2020, I was informed that my company had eliminated my position (of course renaming my position and filling it with someone younger.) After over 20 years of administrative positions, I was looking for work in an environment increasingly hostile to older workers, then COVID hit and jobs grew scarce for everyone, most especially for the over-50 crowd.

For months I applied. And applied. And applied some more, my spirits dipping and rising as I fought discouragement, winning and losing. Underneath it all a well of fear and anger deepened, and the Magna Sum Laude mocked me from my college diploma.

This was supposed to be the thing that pushed me to the next level of employment. That is the advice I’d been given along the way, “Employers want to know you finished.” Apparently employers now thought I was finished. Me! I had never planned to retire, and yet the work world seemed finished with me.

I was not finished. I’m not finished. But I wasn’t sure what kind of job was out there for me. One day while shopping at a large retailer I realized that a lot of the cashiers were my age or even older! “They like us older women. We show up and can pass the drug test.” After eight months of perpetual disappointment, I decided it was worth a shot.

It was a challenge getting used to a physical job after years of butt in front of the computer work, but I was beginning to increase my stamina and was proud of myself for doing whatever it takes.

At 9:20 pm, I saw the headlights heading toward me as I waited for the turn signal to go green. Before it fully registered, I was hit. At the last moment he managed to avoid a full-on direct hit, instead plowing into the driver’s side headlight then bouncing down the side of my car with a shower of sparks and driving off.

It took seven months of doctors, tests, scans, PT, chiropractic, injections, and becoming brace and cane dependent to realize I will never be the same. That realization hit with devastating clarity yesterday.

In a moment, a young man made one more in a series of bad choices. He had not insured his car. He got drunk. Then the very worst of all, he could have chosen a Lyft or an Uber, spent $20 and spared me. His choice limits my options, and now it appears that there will not be enough of a settlement to cover the surgeries I need to be made close to whole.

I drove by that same intersection this evening. Police lights were everywhere. My turn was blocked. A silver sedan had the entire drivers side smashed in. Heart pounding, adrenaline flooding, stomach churning, I was sick, not just for myself, but hoping the driver wasn’t hurt too badly. Did they run a red? Did they see it coming? Did lives change in a moment?

There have been lots of tears over the last couple of days. Lots of anger, too. The frustration which I once would have dealt with through a brisk walk, a hike, or some other physical activity has no outlet. I’m not a screamer, so that internal sound has no out. It pushes its way through random cracks in unwelcome and unintended profanity. It leaks down my face, tears of inchoate rage mingled with sorrow.

Keiichiro Hirano in “The End of the Matinee” reflects that a moment changes time backward. A woman who has been happily married suddenly sees the moments of her marriage differently when she discovers her husband has been having an affair with her sister. Memories are now changed because the new knowledge has repainted the past. Such are the struggles of the last several months been changed from brave to futile. The curative treatments are now merely diagnostic. a diagnosis providing little hope. Hope turned to hopelessness, courage to futility. I now see the wasted time and money spent with physical therapists.

There is no way to know if any of that was wasted, not really. They provided the comfort needed to be able to recover, slow as it has been. I can stand upright now, when I could not before. I have gone from Yoda crumpled over, his cane an ever- present necessity, to a mostly upright woman mimicking spritely a couple of times each day.

I hobbled up the hill in our back yard yesterday, checking to see which plants made it through the winter. It was a small reminder of my fragility. But if my world is being reduced, at least there is the delights of seeing the delphinium pushing new life through the soil, seeing the apple tree burst forth in a luxury of blooms, and a radiant western tanager visiting.

I don’t know how to deal with this unexpected rage, this over abundance of emotions in one so ordinarily even-tempered. The mortification of the flesh may work out my salvation, but I fear I’m failing the test. A single moment may have ushered in the greatest test. I passed the pre-test. No problem. In the haze of denial and ignorance I sailed into the middle of the monster. Will my ship survive? Will my soul cling to the Savior in the midst of great waves that would devour me? If one moment changed everything, the moment of rescue, of the storm passing, must find me at the wheel, heart full of prayer.