I don't even know what to really say, I just feel compelled to try and write. It has been a miserable experience buying this house. See, I thought I'd come here and write about it but trying to do so just makes me depressed. It has been one of the worst experiences of my life and so, I have necessarily learned from it. That I will say. I feel broken by the whole process, exhausted from it in every way.
One thing that really stands out to me about this experience though has been the notion of timing - it's all about the timing. A few weeks earlier in the market for us would have made the difference of somewhere between $50,000 and $70,000 in the overall picture. Just a handful of days, two fists full of hours and we would not be in this spot. It feels again like being punched in the face and I am reminded as I have been so many times that timing is everything. It is the difference between getting a break and getting broken, between dreams that sail and ones that sink. It's the difference between stopping at the light or getting broad-sided, between being on the wrong bus in Manitoba... Sometimes timing can really f*ck you, and I am trying to hold fast to the times when it has worked. Of course, as always, Nahanni is the living, breathing embodiment of that. In those moments, in that wilderness at that time in space was her -- and for that, our timing was right. You win some, you lose some...I know, but still! A little slack please?!
I hate what this makes me - the wingeing, kvetching woe-is-me person everyone hates to be around. I hate to be around me lately, which is why, for the most part I have been holed up in the trenches, aiming my gun out the little window and hoping no one else will peg me. Sometimes it makes me wonder why the hell we're even doing this, what's so f*cking great about the 'Canadian Dream' of having a home, a yard, a nice place to raise your kid. I wonder why I would be interested in doing anything that makes me this miserable and frantic. What's the point of working hard to live like this, I wonder. I find myself thinking 'To hell with this! Let's get outta Dodge and live a beautiful, simple life on some blue tinted seashore, in some green footed mountain chain...anything but this!'
Ez, ever patient, ever the rock, tries to gently remind me that we are here for my career [which is when I pop off with some pithy correction like 'my career that's in the toilet?' or 'the remnants of my career?'] and again, I wonder how it's worth it. I'm a simple girl, much simpler than I ever really knew. What am I really doing?
I know, I know, I can hear my lovely friend Kate across the miles from LA, psychically reprimanding me for drawing negative energies toward myself and my career and I hear it, but I'm finding it hard to draw from an almost empty well. I know that there are so many factors in the business right now - it's certainly not only me who's suffering. I ran into a script supervisor in the elevator yesterday and she was holding the door open, talking about how dead it is and how people are finding new careers and I literally put my hands over my ears and sang "la la la la" while I pressed the close button in her face. See - timing.
I think what I hate most is the thought that Nahanni will suffer from this in any way. Not only emotionally - what with having her mother on the verge of a nervous breakdown and her dad away most of the time (which isn't helping any of us) but I also worry about how the stress of this whole thing affects her. She's started referring to everything as 'messy' lately and it makes me feel awful for this uptight, over-clean way in which we've been forced to live for the last few months with this house on the market. {side note - I really, really hate doing open houses. They are a pox upon a normal household. People should not have to pretend to look like they live in a magazine. I don't. I live here.} I worry about how long it will take to dig ourselves back out of this hole. I grew up broke and I swore I would move hell and high water to never live like that again...and here I am; something that is especially painful and humbling after having risen so high. I have recently made a wonderful new friend who has a daughter around Nahanni's age and when we went to her house I actually started to cry when I saw how many toys and books and games she had - Nahanni was in heaven - and I realized she has so few toys and we just don't have the click to get her any right now. I want to put her in swimming lessons and I literally cannot, we just cannot spare anything right now with the hits we have taken in buying this house.
Sometimes it feels like in every way I am doing the opposite of everything I swore I would do in life. I abhor debt and now I am so far into it I actually had to sign over my internal organs as collateral. I always have tried to live below my means, so this is ridiculous...
This is the thing about life that really gets me. Whatever your story is, that's what it is. Some people get better stories than others. Even sometimes when you work just as hard, you do all the same things, the sun just doesn't shine on your little part of the forest that day and you get a different deal. It is both utterly demoralizing and strangely liberating to think about that. Sure, yeah, some people get to be Angelina Jolie or Richard Branson and some people get murdered on their honeymoon in Antigua. Makes a pretty compelling case for the middle of the bell curve, don't it?
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