Here Be Dragons (or Gremlins)

Obviously,  no one was rapturable, so we are still here. At least, I am still here; but I was always going to Hell, anyway.

I'm having an identity crisis of epic proportions and have had a difficult time writing about a significant chunk of it because I'm actually, for once, afraid of saying too much and hurting someone in particular in the process. So, I've tried to talk over that part of the identity crisis with him. I'm sure that it will all go away once everything is underway. Meanwhile, as I have to pack and to plan out not just my summer but the next year of so, I feel it sometimes consuming me. Then, I binge -- but that's another story for another time.

Part of my identity crisis has to do with the way that I separated my not-Clio research life from my Clio bitching and moaning life. I haven't sorted out what goes where and it chokes my ability to write in either space. The only way to the other side of that identity crisis is through it, and I won't get there if I don't write it. That, too is another story for another time.

For this time, this is my most worrisome identity crisis: I'm not sure who I'm about to become. Once I'm in the middle of it, I will know that I am still just me, for better or worse. Right now, however, I'm learning some of the things that are essential to my identity that I had not before considered.

An independent income is one of those things. Much of my life has been tied up in finding work that I find satisfying and important. That road has been long and winding. Over the weekend, a friend described me as "taking the long way around the barn." "Around the barn, through the fields, along the fences, into the neighbors' fields, and -- oh! Hey! Look! Flowers!" I concurred. I wish I could have found my focus earlier; but, as my analyst keeps reminding me, I had a lot of shit to wade through first. I still wade through it -- like right now -- but I'd like to think it is more knee deep or ankle deep than over my head these days.

Anyway, I've found my work and my work is central to my identity and that is just a fact. I can't fight that anymore, especially since the work -- that is, the research -- is satisfying. I won't stop working in the next year, and the job beyond that will allow me to do more work. What I'm finding surprising is how much an income is crucial to my identity. Income intersects with the work, but it also separates itself into its own issue.

I've been earning my own income since I was seventeen. Actually, if you want to count babysitting, since I was thirteen or fourteen. Obviously the income wasn't always enough to allow me to live on my own or anything of that sort. Heck, even once it wasn't enough to allow me to live on my own and I still lived on my own! (That's also another story for another time, and one that has been partially told in my early blog posts.) Still, like Virginia Woolf wrote, that little bit of money made a difference. Income gave me independence, which grew with the size of the income. Income and that independence also became central to my understanding of myself as an adult. To have money, to be able to live on my own, to take care of myself, made me a grown up. This was particularly important to me at a period of my life when everyone I knew wanted me to stay a child, despite the fact that I was far far too old for anyone to think that was a healthy idea.

Seriously, I was well into my twenties and everyone in my life had some deep investment in me being a little girl, non-threatening, non-sexual, dolled up in pink and bothering no one by staying in my frilly little girl's room and keeping the house clean. I was actually in physical danger in my own home if I deviated and behaved like a grown woman. My late teens and early twenties had me in this weird bind in which, I had to behave like a grown person to escape my environment, but behaving like a grown person in my environment before I had the means to escape it meant that I could be assaulted in some way or other. Then, I was assaulted in the environment into which I wanted to escape. In fact, I was assaulted twice, once in the professional sphere and once in the private. Resisting the professional assault jeopardized my ability to survive there, too, since the perpetrator was key to me receiving funding.

Luckily, I found ways to earn an income slightly outside of that environment, eventually, and that did a world of good for my sense of myself. That income allowed me to be independent and grow-up in ways that I had not before. It also allowed me to become less of an ugly person, or at least my ugliness morphed into something else. I suppose it still is. That, too, is another story for another time. Suffice to say, the reason I have only snapped to my professional focus in the past half decade was because I had other things distracting me. I had to wade through all of that shit.

Anyway, the whole point of this is to say that an independent income, the ability to take care of myself, has always been something more than a paycheck. I think anyone who has ever been unemployed, knows this, too. It has been independence, it has been self-protection, it has been adulthood. Remove the income and I become dependent, vulnerable and infantilized.

I hadn't thought of this in years, but now I am thinking about it because, while I can research and write next year, I won't be earning an income. This hits me unexpectedly. This ran through my kidding on the square about being a "kept woman." This hits me every time I try to find some way to describe exactly how I'm able to research and write in the Emerald City. This even hits me with the shame I feel at the pay cut I will be taking to go to the Burned Over College to work (although I will be on the fast track for tenure, and I actually get a pay increase relative to the cost of living). I can live with the pay cut because I can afford to take care of myself if -- godforbid! -- anything bad should happen and because I do get the Gentleman Caller every day. Both more than compensate for the cut. Still, that income doesn't come in for another year. So, despite the fact that the Gentleman Caller doesn't see it this way (and is a tad insulted that I would), despite the fact that he in no way contributes to this feeling through anything that he says or does, despite the fact that he tires to help me reframe this neurosis and explain to me that interdependence is part of a partnership, despite the fact that I wouldn't give up this year in the Emerald City for anything, this gremlin presses itself against me, breathing down my neck, pressing its claws into my scalp, and sneering in my ear that I am still a mere child, unable to take care of myself.

To exacerbate this feeling, to give that gremlin greater strength is the fact that I'm leaving the first place that has felt like home in over a decade in order to live in someone else's home, I'm leaving my life to join someone else's. Again, he is a little hurt that I feel this way, and I understand this. I'm not used to being with someone else, and being with someone else has always been a fight for my own identity within the relationship. This has, really, been the case since birth. Only this time, the enemy is not the other person by any means. The enemy is that gremlin. I am the enemy.

I have to explain to myself that I won't feel this way once things are actually moving -- like when I start packing after I finish this blog post, like when I'm in the car headed in that direction, like when I see him again for the first time in a month, like when I get to the other side of the rainbow into the Emerald City. I'll write a post making fun of myself for this anxiety, for this stage fright, for ever thinking that something like an income could challenge my sense of Clio-ness.

Nevertheless, at this moment, that challenge is there, and it is part of this identity crisis. I'll just have to see how it develops. As I told myself when all of this went down, "this is all going to be an awesome adventure." As I told myself, too, "adventures aren't always stress-free and fun and new. They can be scary and uncomfortable to." In fact, scary and uncomfortable mixed in with the stress-free and the fun and the new are sort of what separates and adventure from a vacation. So, this is the scary and the uncomfortable. This is "here there be dragons" at the edge of the map (or, in my case, gremlins).

Time to get moving into it, anxiety, identity crisis and all.