And when I see you, I really see you upside down / But my brain knows better, it picks you up and turns you around.
I remember being in middle school science class learning about the human eye and how it works: the cones and rods, cornea and retina, tear ducts, blah, blah, blah. I couldn't, at this point in my life, tell you which part does what or attempt to label a diagram of the eye but I distinctly recall being taught that your eye flips everything that you see upside down. This baffled the shit out of me. I'm going to admit to you right here on blogger that I actually thought for a small portion of my life that the entire world was upside down but we saw it right side up. I felt like I lived in some kind of Wrinkle in Time universe that had a bizarre dimension which allowed me to walk on the ceiling but made it seem as though I was walking on the floor. I panicked for a while thinking, "why didn't my parents tell me this?" How could I not realize something was off from the very beginning? I thought I was smarter than that. Was my life really like the video of "Dancing on the Ceiling" by Lionel Richie?
It was upsetting, to say the least. The concept that what I knew as up was really down made me question everything.
As it turns out, roughly twenty years later, I'm dealing with essentially the same issue. My up is down, my right is left, easy is growing difficult, longtime friends are becoming acquaintances, people I once thought were secure are showing their insecurities. Everything I thought was right is wrong and my patience is slowly turning into frustration.
Now, I am not a high maintenance person but I do enjoy sensing a feeling of order in my life, both inward and outward. I prefer routines. I appreciate that everything is in the proper place. These are the things that calm me down. At the moment, however, my insides and outsides are utter chaos. The only routine I have revolves around a job that is slowly eating me alive. It pays and I am grateful to be employed but there is absolutely no order and even when I try to create it, it dissolves within days, sometimes hours. I tried going with the flow but that concept is much harder to maintain when you are supposed to be the one creating the flow. It also doesn't help that I have no flow-creating experience other than the insanity that has been the past 21 months of this unbalanced job.
This is not the first time I have not loved my job but there was always a landing spot, a comfort zone I gravitated towards that would take me in and make me remember the age-old saying: it's just a job. It was a rock that grounded me and gave me perspective in a crazy world. As of July 17, 2011, that comfort zone disappeared. My rock got up and walked away, perhaps proving that maybe it wasn't a very good rock to begin with. But it had been there for more than half of my life and now that it's missing, I can't quite figure out what to do. I didn't realize how much I depended on that friendship until there were limits set upon it. Now I feel like I've walked into my house and someone has changed the location of all the light switches and rearranged the furniture. Everything is basically the same but it's completely different. And I don't know how to deal. Yet.
Clearly, I wasn't paying attention to the remainder of the science class where they informed me that my brain flips the images my eyes produce back to normal, that my eyes were just step one in a two step process, that my reality hadn't shifted at all and that everything was going to be okay. I hope the same holds true for me now.
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