Temporary

Having my belongings packed into moving boxes indicates to me a temporary state, a state where I know I'm going to move again. I have lived out of boxes since 1991 when my now-ex-boyfriend and I moved into a house that turned out to be dirty and too uncomfortable to live in. In our next apartment, we kept boxes packed in the second bedroom, even tho' the apartment was more than comfortable. If I had lived there alone I might have kept it. But I left it when I left him. Perhaps we knew the relationship was, by that time, temporary.

When I bought my first house, I left a roomful of boxes packed, taking up the space in my second bedroom for far too long. Then I moved them upstairs so I could at least inhabit that bedroom as an office and a comfy place to hang out, with a twin bed in the corner where I could look outside into my back yard. I lived there for eight years — hardly temporary. When I moved almost 300 miles away because everything had changed, all I cared to take with me permanently was that house, something I long for even now 10 years later.

I didn't bother to unpack in the house I rented when I first moved there because it was small and it was temporary until I could buy a house. When I bought my house and moved into it, I kept many boxes packed because I was remodeling the house, which had been trashed by previous owners and by incorrect earlier remodeling. It took me too long to put in the flooring, and I became used to having packed boxes. Thus when I got ready to move from that house, thinking to get out from under too much mortgage and getting ready to move away from the small town to a future,  possibly a job inland, I moved boxes into storage. I didn't unpack the huge amount of boxes I moved into my tiny apartment. I lived in a rat maze for a year, knowing it was temporary, knowing I was going to do something different. Something great. And while I sold many things, I was still left with two — temporary — storage units full of boxes. The units have been temporary for over two years now.

In my current home, I am still feeling temporary. I fear that I will have to move back to the NW because I will not find work and not have the funds to stay. I could have found work by now, if I had put all my energy into looking, into more networking, into building my own business. Coulda woulda shoulda. Story of my life. Never pass by a regret if I can help it. Never give things a single thought — second guess myself as often as possible. Doing so makes me afraid to commit, afraid that I will make the wrong choice. As if committing is so permanent I will never be able to change my mind.

But I committed to the last place I lived. And it was okay, if difficult, to change my mind about living there after several years. I committed to buying two different houses. But people do move; it's no sin to not live in one place forever.

In spite of all my moving and changing, I have wanted to live in one place forever. I have wanted to have deep roots and deep commitment. I have wanted permanence, not temporariness, in my life. Still I move, still I fear to commit. I even feel my skin crawl every time I have to sign a 6-month lease.

I could commit to staying here. Yes, I have some extreme costs that drive my income needs: my health insurance here is more than my rent, and it doesn't fully cover one of my meds. My life is expensive. I cannot live on minimum wage, or even close. A minimum wage job won't pay for my healthcare costs, which if it did would allow me to live on almost minimum wage.

I have never had to work this hard to find work. I have to do things, now, that scare me even more than commitment scares me. I have to call strangers and talk to them, ask them for more contact names, and I have to call those contacts. I have to do this networking thing, developing an ever greater network until I find work (and this networking thing is supposed to be what will find me my job), and I have to keep networking and keep staying in touch with my existing network. Do you know how hard that is for me?  As hard as, or harder than, committing.

It's all about fear. Fear of making the wrong choice, fear of being rejected, fear of making a fool of myself, fear of having to change things yet again. Perhaps the fear of commitment has been what has made moving, giving up my existing life for a chance at a brand new as-yet-unknown life, easier for me than for some people. I know that everything changes, everything ends, because that is how it has always been in my life — I hate that.

I envy people who are committed — to their spouse, to their home, to their job, to their life. They have a completely different perspective on life than I have. They would find it impossible to give it all up and move on as I have. But then, for me, there has really been nothing to give up. I guess that is why I have felt rootless for so long. Everything I had to commit to, virtually every root I had or thought I had, went away, disappeared, let me go, or was taken from me. Life is temporary. Love is temporary. So maybe I just cannot commit, knowing that what I might commit to will end and I will hurt, almost to the breaking point. And isn't that just stupid? So ridiculous. Because commitment is what grounds you. Commitment gives you a place to hang your hat. Without commitment, what is the point of it all, because it all does change and end and one would be left with nothing meaningful. Kind of like me. Nothing meaningful. Nothing important. Only fear and a very deep realization of how alone I am. Too much alone. Too rootless. My existence barely impinging on this life.

There are really only two choices: push through and win out over my fear and do the scary things and commit, or continue to float along having less and less in my life until I'm living out of my car or in someone's basement out of sheer patheticness and I become smaller and smaller until I have no more meaning than a stray thought or a faded memory.

Damn, it's so hard to choose.