Dogs love me ‘cause I’m crazy sniffable

It seems I have quit my job. Not the one where I lie on the floor and pretend to walk on the ceiling of the theatre. (I quit that one too, a long time ago.) People sometimes used to say things to me about teachers being saints, almost as often as people said things about them being assholes. Both are true, of course, at times, and sometimes the opposite. No, I quit the other job, the counselling one. I could not possibly have used up all my empathy, but I quit it anyway, this job that was so exciting and important to me for that time. And then it became a grind, the scheduling and the arguing about things that I don't believe in anyway. When you belong to these big systems you are supposed to defend the rules even when you can make no sense of them, even when you can barely follow them yourself. So I have quit that job, I really have. (I am not a person who quits jobs, although I seem to have quit two jobs that were big jobs.) There is a new job to replace the old job, a bigger job, a job where I make big decisions and hire people and tell people what to do and how. All of this seems impossible and wrong. I don't yet recognize myself in this space. Most of what matters is not different. J is older now, considering marriage and whatnot. I did not save her from the brokenness that was waiting to swallow her when she was twelve. I tried. But also, I didn't know how. I love her but nothing about love erases that kind of pain. And maybe my brand of love isn't soft enough to cushion this kind of sharpness. I have a sharpness about me too; maybe it softens over time and maybe it doesn't. Maybe I learn to let go, maybe I learn to forgive and take deep affectionate breaths right into my centre, and maybe I never learn that because I can write a good enough paper to pass the course on self-care without actually doing it. The reader can decide. I quit the job that defined me so I would have to define myself anew. This is where I find myself when it might make more sense to think about the best five years before retirement and pensions and those sorts of things. It is a luxury that I can afford not to care about this in the least and indulge myself in doctoral studies while colleagues are counting years of experience plus age equals eighty-five, no ninety, no wait. No magic numbers here. Just done and depleted and drained. My parents like to tell me that they are spending the inheritance - they also like to assure me that we will be taken care of. I never count their money; I can't keep track of my own. There have been some terrible mistakes. It reminds me of the summer in Invermere. I wonder how many times I can fuck up the same way without learning the lesson attached to it. (There is no answer to this.) There have been moments I have made other people's lives better. I have helped some people. I have sometimes been unable to see past my own story. Different things drive me now. It takes time to learn who I am in this season.