Do-Over

Starting over is never easy, and rarely sought after but it’s a reality of the world. Starting over at forty-four was not what I was hoping to do at this point in my life. Not to say that I ever had some grand plan for things.

I tend to build with the blocks  from where they fall, making it work instead of obsessing over why it doesn’t.

Sometimes it is what it is.

In all my years I can’t say I have been fired. I was let go when a place I worked for was closing and I had a lady I did yard work for as a kid decide she didn’t need me any longer but never had I been fired.

It was weird.

It is weird.

I am not going to dive into it other than to say how weird it is and how similar to a romantic break up it was. How the friendship, the connection, and that bond dissolves before your eyes and then it is what it is.

I haven’t been unemployed for a long time. I have been working since I was fifteen and have faced times when I was out of work or was barely working but had never been let go like this. I am still reeling from it because it’s hard to process, like a break up, and hard to come to terms with how A lead to D, even when I know that the path was there, was clear enough for me to clear out my stuff before the act because I could read the way the road was being layed out before me.

But it still stings.

I haven’t been outta work in a while.

A lot is the same – just a little different.

You still register with the unemployment agency. I still had to go into MichWorks to register and to put my information into the system. It was fast, it was easy, and the system seems to have evolved since the last time I went in. I can register online every two weeks instead of calling a phone number.

The feeling of shame is still there, of having to turn to unemployment when I should still have a job.

The fear of What Next. That remains.

What Next?

As I look for a path forward, for signs in the sky and for a trail in the wilds.

But there’s a tomorrow. And a hundred tomorrows after that.

There’s a future with hope and a new beginning.

Things are just a little overcast right now but the sun remains.

I just need to keep moving forward until it re-emerges.

…c…