Moving past the 1950’s marketing era, we have got lives that are supposed to be lived like 30 second commercials, like sound bytes, like a brief bio. I don’t know how to do that. For a while, I did actually worry about what my bio would read like when (if?) I got my writing published. I am not a young mom living with her husband and young children in Portland, I am not a graduate of Harvard, and I’ve never worked at a major corporation doing something incredibly amazing and prodigious.
So, once again I am at a place in my life where it’s the turning point, the place in between the places that you would want to share with people when asked, what’s going on in your life? There are amazing things going on in my life, but on the career/financial front, everything is in a state of flux. My bio could read: Theresa lives in her tiny one bedroom condo in a neighborhood populated by thirty-somethings with her youngest daughter and no pets. She longs for more room and financial freedom, yet loves the location.
I would leave out the part about just losing my day job, about being told about it months ago, and about how no one announced it, but I kept getting invitations to participate in Lasallian formation, and community conversations about justice. Invitations to watch untold stories about people across the world who were victims of injustice. In between trying to build my practice, and apply for part-time jobs, I researched getting on state supported health insurance, wondered if I could get food stamps? Wracked my brain, sell the condo? Cash in retirement? Will unemployment, if I qualify, get me through until my practice sustains me? People at work coming up congratulating me, the rumors were that I’d left of my own accord, and requested no cake, no goodbye.
All totally untrue. I did not leave of my own accord, my practice is building, but not to the point of sustaining me. Becoming a private practice therapist is an endeavor for those with resources, and I knew this going in, but you know me, always trying to beat the odds. And the truth is, cake had been banned years ago at this place. So, I lived with the strange incongruence which is working for a religious institution. Where we all kinda kept waiting for the action to catch up to the belief. Where in naivety, co-workers asked me to write to the vice-president about the lack of community and safety in the organization. They were sure, since he was a religious man, if he knew, he would do something, you know, change things.
But I know a thing or two about religion and religious folks. I know that they live constantly in a place of polarity. Of good and evil, of black and white, of holy and sinner and they mostly seem really ok with this, and the evil they fight is usually overseas, not over there, across the aisle, across the desk. We have separation of church and state, we have the politics of religion, and the religion of politics, and saving yourself is sometimes the only way to be saved at all. Can I have my cake now?
Looking back, I wonder why I stayed so long? My parents, too, were religious, Catholic, and my job felt at times oddly like my childhood. The values were the same, frugality and fear. And I was caught up in this truth, that there is not enough, and you better be grateful for what you have. As I worked there, my faith evolved, actually, reversed, to the things I believed in my most best childhood moments, that I am safe, that I am loved, that I am valued, that I am valuable, more valuable than anyone there could see. And that there is more than enough for all of us, that there are no untold stories, just colonialism, still rampant.
So, this is what this heathen is doing now, I am throwing up into the air the entire deck of tarot cards, I am letting them lie where they land. I am caught, frozen in my own thirty second frame of colorful, bright, life scenarios, head back and laughing, believing in an abundant universe, in a gentle goddess, in warm summer breezes, amazed at the bright glints of color on card, wondering what it all means, and where am I now, and where am I going?
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