Staring A Hole In A Blank World
Sep. 6th, 2010 03:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
frustratedpilotThe problem with trying to tell this is the fact that some of it is TMI, and some of it is personal to other people, and some of it is just plain downer, and I don't know how you'll receive it. And we have to start in the middle.
My sister visited us Saturday afternoon. At that time, Mum had found, in an old school text of hers, a favorite Keats poem. She had come back to it because of her own anxiety about the possibility of losing her creativity and creative energy over the course of chemotherapy later this fall. The rest of us (myself, my sister, my father/her husband) understood this and vowed that we would back whatever decision she made about her treatment. We agreed that robbing her of what made life worth living to her, just to keep her alive, wasn't what she wanted and we would do what we could to keep her quality of life and functionality as high as possible.
But what made me uneasy was when my sister also vowed to help me through my own troubles and get me going towards what I want out of life.
I'm grateful for her.
But I've been "this way" so long it's as if I've given up on wanting anything out of life. The next day I'd listened to the radio and heard a program talking about a situation in which the parties involved had deliberately set low hopes on the outcome of their efforts, because "anything better than nothing is still positive progress". I surrendered all my career ambitions when my parents decided to move here and I couldn't afford to stay in Florida or go anyplace else to find meaningful employment in my field. That was in 1996. My world was wiped blank for the duration, and my lack of career success since then has added nothing to it.
Conventional thinking might indicate that my going back to school will get me back towards where I've wanted to go all along. The problem is that the goal posts have moved so far I'm not sure if they're still in the stadium. They're stealing the freakin' mountains and all I can do is watch.
My sister visited us Saturday afternoon. At that time, Mum had found, in an old school text of hers, a favorite Keats poem. She had come back to it because of her own anxiety about the possibility of losing her creativity and creative energy over the course of chemotherapy later this fall. The rest of us (myself, my sister, my father/her husband) understood this and vowed that we would back whatever decision she made about her treatment. We agreed that robbing her of what made life worth living to her, just to keep her alive, wasn't what she wanted and we would do what we could to keep her quality of life and functionality as high as possible.
But what made me uneasy was when my sister also vowed to help me through my own troubles and get me going towards what I want out of life.
I'm grateful for her.
But I've been "this way" so long it's as if I've given up on wanting anything out of life. The next day I'd listened to the radio and heard a program talking about a situation in which the parties involved had deliberately set low hopes on the outcome of their efforts, because "anything better than nothing is still positive progress". I surrendered all my career ambitions when my parents decided to move here and I couldn't afford to stay in Florida or go anyplace else to find meaningful employment in my field. That was in 1996. My world was wiped blank for the duration, and my lack of career success since then has added nothing to it.
Conventional thinking might indicate that my going back to school will get me back towards where I've wanted to go all along. The problem is that the goal posts have moved so far I'm not sure if they're still in the stadium. They're stealing the freakin' mountains and all I can do is watch.
