April 13, 2011

It’s been ten days, maybe eleven, since I had a dose of Morphine. I’m beginning to think that today may be the day.

Factors: pain in my lower back, headache, a low pressure high humidity air mass here at the lakeshore, lots of time up in the chair yesterday, anxiety! Anxiety – the key factor to having the experience go from a minor discomfort that disappears into the day’s activities to becoming THE theme of the day.

Why did we create such a world that is so hard to grow up into? Yesterday I found out that the Workers Compensation “tax” on my staff’s payroll is going to take most of the extra allocation that I received earlier this month leaving me – for the third time in 18 months – nearly out of money to pay my personal assistants. No amount of friends’ generousity and creative money finding prepares me for these moments – when someone/thing beyond my awareness/understanding/management exercises their “legitimate” right to take “my” money. I am left with “hopeless”! Anxiety!

Of course the Morphine does not find the extra $5000. It just takes the pain out of “hopeless”. Hence the risk of addiction.

Yesterday I was toying with the idea of restarting my PhD at OISE, mostly because there are some fat research scholarships available. I realize that I still don’t really want a PhD – it’s way more like I want to be a Senior Researcher of my own Institute on Excellence in Research and Development in Inclusion. It’s what I am anyway, and it would give me the appropriate “trappings” – context – for me to look like what I am and to attract the team and the money.

Today the dream seems more than usually unattainable. It seems utterly defeated before it’s born – like: “Who do I think I am, anyway!” The raid on my payroll is just another example – another message from the universe – “Know your place. Go back to bed and die.”

I need/want a different place to go back to. I don’t mean I want to move. I mean I want Square One to be real enough that I and we are not constantly shoring up daily life.

Jen has taught me to breathe through the anxiety – to allow the muscles to relax and stretch out. I have also come to believe that miracles are always happening and that I can rely on something being available that right now I have no awareness of. The real question worth asking is: “How am I going to make myself available for a miracle?”