Nothing much, just life

I had a job interview last week; I suspect it will be the first of many while I try and figure out what to do next. Should I try and get another full-time job, one I believe in, one I can get my teeth into, one that will have me boring people half to death as I go on and on about the importance of what my colleagues and I are doing? A job with a decent amount of pay and responsibility, so I don't have to forgo the comfortable assumptions that go with being part of the childless, debtless partnered middle-class? I don't think I'll have time to go to Europe next year, but if I feel like it, then maybe next year. But, yes, let's go to the opera next week, and let's see if we can get a booking at that fabulous new three-hat restaurant as well.

But then again, what have I always said that having money in the bank is for? It's not just about being able to buy pretty, shiny things, but power, the power to walk away from an unacceptable situation, and not have to worry about where my next meal is coming from. I found myself in an unacceptable situation, so I handed in my resignation, even though, as yet, I've got nowhere else to go. Fine dining, the opera, and Paris will now have to wait, perhaps indefinitely. I can't have my cake and eat it too, especially not at a three-hat restaurant.

Maybe I should look for something soft and part-time instead, so I'll have time to write and study. I could drift in and out the office on Tuesdays and Thursdays, both physically and metaphysically near-invisible to the suits and she-wolves as I answer the phones, file the files, clean the printers and load the photocopiers. The trays would rise into place with a smug whir, as I gather my skirts and staplers and skitter back into the stationery cupboard. You'll be bored, the office manager will warn me. But I want to be bored, I'll implore her, with a wide Maggie Gyllenhaal grin, that endearing confection of wisdom and naivete. I will invest nothing of myself, and thus lose nothing - my self-esteem, my stability, my sanity shall remain intact. I will get nothing either, just a bit of pocket money for occasional indulgences - a properly made martini, or a bookshop spending spree.

I suppose this desire to retreat from the world, to choose not to 'work to my potential', is what that idiot shrink was referring to when he diagnosed me with 'simple schizophrenia'. I also suppose this desire is far from uncommon, perhaps overtaking most of us at some point in our lives, and that I'm not out on a heretical fifth limb in supposing so. Just as I had some deep wounds to lick back then, in the past few years, culminating in the past few weeks, I've sustained the kind of work-related injuries that no health and safety advertising campaign will ever warn us about. Nothing's been dropped on my head, except me, at three o'clock in the morning, and from a distance of ten thousand miles, as the crow flies from Paris to Melbourne. Someone, a senior colleague, former lover, and supposedly close friend, sat on the redial button of his phone on the Metropolitain while treating a mutual friend to a crude psychoanalysis of me, one that unmasked his contempt, disloyalty and lack of discretion even through the thick static and burr of background noise. Confidences were broken in the service of constructing the necessary mise en scène, and actual events were ripped from their context and repackaged as evidence of my incorrigible fucked-up-ness.

Only hours beforehand he had been lamenting my lack of trust. It seems that lack was justified. So of course I don't want to be here, or there, or anywhere; I barely want to be. I trust that, in time, this feeling will pass. But for now I want to keep myself from unfolding, keep my scalded, shrunken limbs, my frostbitten fingers and toes, underneath and behind me, away from the dust and germs and anything else that will slow their healing. I feel unfit for the world of work. My skin is thick, but swollen, and hurts like hell when touched. It's not just that awful phone call, but an accumulation of events, and the accretion of corresponding sensitivities, that have left me feeling like a powder keg - one look, one condescending remark, one more jumped-up arsehole introducing me as his 'executive assistant', one more whinge from the bosses' boss about how he knows it doesn't matter but it just doesn't look good when he knows perfectly well that nobody's even watching could set off an explosion that would appear quite deranged and devoid of all context if it happened elsewhere. Obviously, that's something I'm reluctant to risk. I guess the challenge for me now is to strike the right balance in time between staying at home and hiding under the covers, and re-entering the world of work, so that I give myself time to heal, time for my sensitivity and hardened cynicism to abate, without running out of money or losing touch completely.