1 post tagged “vox”
A retrospective perusal of this blog (or, in fact, any of my previous blogs on the web) will reveal that I don't tend to post my innermost thoughts and feelings for all to read. It happens sometimes, to be sure, but it has not been my primary reason for blogging.
On March 15 I entered into a prolonged period of fairly uninteresting self-absorption; I was laid off from my job of 19 years and four months.
As misfortunes go mine was pretty mild. I was pretty certain that I would get a new job and, indeed, was in that new job by mid-May. I took a large cut in pay, in vacation time and in seniority but otherwise fared pretty well. We have had to do some belt-tightening around my house but that is hardly a tragedy.
At a time when people die every day due to starvation and malnutrition, due to disease, to floods and to improvised explosive devices, when people are pushed around their governments in , for example, Pakistan and Myanmar, and detained and abused indefinitely by the U.S. government on grounds so shaky that they threaten to forever warp our legal system -- my troubles just cannot seem very important.
The nervous system, however, is not at its base a very just measuring tool. It almost always judges the self as paramount and evaluates everything else in relation to the self. It is only with the accretion of many layers of neural complexity, I think, (unless you believe certain evolutionary psychologists) that one adds sophisticated senses of "justice" and "altruism" to one's world view. When stress is placed on that world view, when the organism is shocked, those sophistications may be rendered temporarily unavailable.
I went into a kind of shock for a few months although I didn't quite realize it at the time. Losing my job, mulling over the experience for over a month, plunging into a new job in an unfamilar setting with very different rules and a much more chaotic environment...all of this dazed me. I managed to function both in my job and with my family but I "turned off" everywhere else. I went blank. I seemed to spend every spare minute just wildly processing everything that had happened and was happening to me, trying to figure it all out. Trying to figure myself out.
I am trying to figure myself out.
I would not call it a mid-life crisis, exactly, but I am re-evaluating what makes me tick. I find I don't fully know who I am or what I like. I don't know what motivates me these days. I don't quite know what I want to be when I grow up. I'm 55 years old.
I haven't posted to Vox most of this time, though I've checked in to see what's been going on. I don't know what all of this means with respect to my future involvement. I don't know if anyone will even read this and, if they do, if anyone will care.
What kind of conversation do I want to conduct with the world? What kind of conversation does the world want to conduct with me, if any? Is this the place to do it? I don't know, we'll see.
