Waking Up In Peace Not Existential Crisis

So I found and started a temp job this week.  These past couple of weeks I’ve been full on looking for both short term work and long term work, and it’s been wonderful to stop doing all of that and just get settled into my short term job.  I will most likely be able to have it until I find permanent work.  What a blessing.

It’s been fascinating to wake up every morning and feel so different inside.  This morning, my third morning getting ready for work, I was most aware of how I am not existentially afraid.  At some point in the last couple of years I recognized that I had been waking up feeling scared every morning.  I guess I was aware that had happened as a child.  Perhaps a couple of years ago I realized I wasn’t waking up in existential crisis then.  It’s super reassuring that with a couple of days of work under my belt that I can feel so different even now, even returning to work.

I figure I need several weeks of adjusting to full time, in an office work before I start looking again for long term work.  I have a few applications out there and they just need some time.  I was saying to Andrea that my old instinct would be to let myself let out a big sigh and let go of the pushing toward a long term goal and then pick it up again in a forced kind of pushing way.  This time I’ve decided that I will slow down and just be where I am right now, with a different perspective than a big sigh might suggest.  I guess I mean the perspective of where I am is enough and so I can enjoy this rather than be preoccupied in the back of my head still with where I have yet to go.

I thought that the desire to look for a long term job would naturally build within me again and when it does I will go with it.  I don’t have to push myself.

This, I guess, is linked back into the feeling of not waking up in existential crisis.  I do not fear for my life and so I don’t have to anxiously look toward the next great thing.  I don’t have to wake up in the morning anxious.  I don’t have to expend energy calming myself down which really was about making sure I didn’t feel what I really felt including deep rooted shame.

My life is so much busier than it has been over the last several years, but it feels good.  Years ago Andrea said that it sounded like I wanted my life to hum, to be able to go about life without much dramatic interruption.  That was true.  My life is beginning to hum.