March 23, 2018 Email to a Friend
I don’t make the big bucks. Not anymore. Now my friends send me $100 in cash now and then, Amazon food pantry boxes, my mom pays my phone bill and sends me a couple hundred a month, I'm on food stamps and Medicaid, and I’m trying to get disability. I have a part time tech writing job that pays less than half my former contract rate. That pays the rent. I have nothing. My checking account is habitually stuck at $2.67 or thereabouts. I've sold about everything I could sell to pay rent. How the mighty have fallen.
In retrospect, it was destined to happen. I had gotten all twisted in my thinking. I bought into the material shit, and that is not ever what I was about, truly. My worth was based on my career success, my income, and my intelligence. I've lost all three. Now I have to find the right and healthy things upon which to base my worth. And I believe my worth is based on the fact that God chose to call me into creation.
And because of the fiasco that has been my life for the last two years, I am now on a path where I can ardently pursue my writing, and perhaps get back into making and selling my jewelry. Those are the things that feed my soul. Those are the things that are worthwhile for me to be spending my time on, spending my life doing. Those are the things that have redeeming value to me and to others. My gifts, my talents. To have been successful in the corporate business world is done. Achieved. Over. Now I can move onto the things that make me truly happy.
Although I have suffered greatly, and continue to suffer at present, I am free now. I am free of the material world to a great degree. Things no longer have that same meaning to me.
I gave my grandmother's china to H. this weekend, for her to hand down to her daughters. I am very happy it is going to H. and her family, and that I'm not selling it to strangers that won't have the history and appreciate the heirloom. I told her my "line" has survived through all of time and here I am, the end of my line. I want to pass these gifts onto to another line that will cherish them.
I tried to give her a lot of stuff. Some she took and some we argued about. Finally, I yelled at her and cried pretty hysterically.
"When I die, no one from my family is going to come out here, go through my apartment! My brother will hire an estate liquidator and all will be sold or go to charity. So you need to take the important things I give you and cherish them, gift them, or pass them down. I have no one else to give them to." So then she cried and told me she'd stop being a bitch about it.
"Don't steal my blessings!" I yelled, as she held me tight against her.
[Originally published 7/28/2022]