One Month Of Vacation

Today marks one month since the day we drove away from our decrepit old apartment in the desert and did not come back.

 

I drove past it a few days ago. There were no Christmas lights on the balcony, for the first time in five years... I have always made sure to put up at least one strand of Christmas lights. And they are up... just not at the blue apartment.

 

It still feels like we're on vacation in a beautiful little guest house, with our Christmas tree and my husband's streaming setup and my grandma's rocking chair and my husband's mead-making station and all my plants on their stand. It still feels like one day we'll wake up and we'll have to leave and go back 'home' to the desert apartment with the spiders and the mice and the four-storey hike one-way to the laundry room and the cinderblock walls with no storage that pressed in around us.

I cried when we left... I was shocked at that. While there were memories in that apartment, most of them were bad ones... ones of my husband so sick that he was quite a different person, one who screamed and threw things and allowed his relatives to dictate my life without standing up for me. Those are all memories that dominated that place and dominated our first three years of marriage, before we were finally able to diagnose and cut out a food allergen that was wrecking absolute havoc on his brain.

I am so grateful for this new place, for the storage space and the natural light and the general livability and lack of lead pipes and the quiet streets. We have heard one (1) vehicle the entire time we've lived here. At the old place we were both routinely woken at night (sometimes multiple times) by people street-racing in souped-up Fords at 3am. I sleep like the dead (I have had roommates consider calling 911 because I sleep so deeply) and even I was sleeping poorly.

I'm not sure whether I should treasure those troubled memories of early marriage or if I should be happy to turn my back on them. I don't want to forget how much better things are now. Both my husband and I are coughing less. We can drink the water straight out of the tap and it tastes delicious. We get curbside recycling pickup... there wasn't even a recycling depot in the town where we used to live (let alone pickup) until mere months before we moved. We have more of a social life already than we ever could have dreamed of in the old town. This is an upgrade in every way.

 

I am struggling to set up my dance studio. I have the flooring pieces (although I do want my larger one from my parents' house), and the room is almost cleaned up (it's been a disaster for most of the time we've lived here because it was one of the lower priorities for unpacking and organization). I'm struggling to want to. I don't know if the stress of moving (and work -- currently in the middle of a show that breaking ticket sales records for the theatre as well as launching ticket sales for next season) is zapping my motivation, or just thinking of all the times I've tried and failed to get dance going again since I've gotten married. I have an opportunity to teach in the new year, and I think I might take it... although last time I tried to teach choreography, I was raked over the coals for being 'unrealistic' and my co-worker actively sabotaged my work so I'm very nervous how it will go. I don't know if the flame of dance has died, necessarily, but it has certainly had a large amount of dirt shovelled onto it.

 

I also want to write again. NaNoWriMo 2023 was the last time I wrote anything longer than a blog post. I don't have any ideas, but I'm finding myself poking absentmindedly around for one. I mentioned wanting to write again to my husband the other day and for the first time in our entire marriage, he said something supportive instead of telling me how I'm wasting my time writing. It might be a while before I actually write something, but I'm open to an idea.

 

I don't know if I should post practice videos on Instagram again when I do start dancing. The world of social media changed significantly during the pandemic, right at the time my in-laws banned me from posting on it. It's an alien landscape to me now, all ads and fake positivity, both of which I have always avoided. There's a definite allure now to the thought of not posting a single thing about dance until I create my next major work... maybe during Nachmo? I do have the space for working out choreography now, so maybe I can do an honest-to-goodness Nachmo for once instead of just a thought experiment (I say that as if I didn't choreograph an entire one-woman show during Nachmo 2023 that got screened in their online festival and is now one of my highest-viewed videos on YouTube).

 

So far, both my husband and I are healthier and happier. I had hoped that this move would give us a place of peace where we can heal from the old wounds and grow into a life instead of just an existence.

 

So far... I think it just might be working. 

Staring Down The Barrel Of The Unemployment Gun

Sorry I haven't posted much lately.

 

It's so odd... I look around and I can see the colours and I am happy, happier than I've been since before I graduated college. I can see the life around me, and I can see a faint, distant glow of opportunity.

 

But at the same time... I feel more than ever before the word 'failure' whispering through my mind. I follow through on so few of my grandiose plans. I'm too shy to collaborate with anybody in a meaningful way. I can't hold down a job for a significant amount of time without either my mental health or physical health (or both) collapsing is some spectacular way. I can't even keep up with the housework, let alone be present for my husband... and forget having time to do anything that makes me happy (but doesn't make me money).

For years now, my singular goal and only glimmer of hope was the possibility of working enough to save enough money to move to a place with more theatre opportunities. (Everyone says 'just make your own opportunities where you are!' but none of them have to deal with a brain that straight-up refuses to do anything unless there are boatloads of accolades at every second of the proceedings.) As we move solidly into our thirties, it is becoming apparent that we may never escape this (quite literal) hole in the ground. Despite my best efforts and my extreme mental and physical sacrifices, we may still wind up dying here in this open grave in this forgotten corner of the province.

My current work contract ends on 13 September and it has been made very clear that they have no other positions available (and I've seen enough of the inner workings of the organization to know that this is true). I am less than a month away from losing our only household income. And yet I can't bear the thought of going to work anymore. I want to retire. I am barely into my thirties and I want to retire. I'm just so spent. I have so little left to give anybody anymore, and I think the people who read my résumé can feel that somehow through the pages of dance and fast food and not much else.

I just want to lay down and close my eyes and never open them again. I don't have the mental or physical strength to gut my way through yet another 3-to-5-year job hunt. There are no more reserves. There are no more second winds. There is no more pushing through. I want to, but I can't. There quite literally is nothing left.

But I can't, because if I don't have an income, we will end up on the street.

Living Deaths

The problem with being single and living a fairly transient lifestyle (like, say, freelance performing) is that people don't stay your friends after you've left their city. There's no loyalty anymore. I have lost DOZENS of very close friends because they couldn't even be bothered to try the long-distance friendship thing. It's not that it's 'too difficult' -- some of them literally do not even try. I'm constantly texting and emailing and writing to them (with some I even consider calling), trying to keep the lines of communication open, trying to keep updated with their lives, but no replies... no acknowledgement of receipt... nothing.

Eventually I just stop trying. You can only scream into the silence for so long before you finally get it through your thick skull that you're invisible and nobody will ever answer and so you stop trying because there's no point anyway. After all, you don't want to annoy them either -- assuming they're even seeing your texts.

It's so ridiculous. In this age of smartphones, texting, Facebook, Messenger, email... nobody can be bothered to stay in touch because (verbatim) 'I just don't talk to even my very close friends if they're far away.'

Yes, it takes a little intentionality. Yes, you have to sit down and type an entire 'hey, miss you, how are you doing?' into your phone (back in the olden days we had to actually HANDWRITE letters on actual paper and put it in an envelope which we then licked closed and put an address and stamp on it AND THEN had to take it all the way out to the mailbox or -- horrors! -- the post office three blocks away... but yeah, tell me again how typing two sentences on your phone is just too much effort for a person you claim to care about).

I know you all have jobs and 'are busy' -- but if you're too busy to at least fire off a ten-second two-sentence text three or four times a month, maybe it's time to re-evaluate your schedule. I have a married friend with a full-time job who volunteers a LOT at her church as well as teaching art and taking dance classes on the side and she still has the time to text me at least once a week asking how I'm doing. If she can do it -- I daresay a lot of you can.

This means that every single time I move to a new city, I have to start from square one. None of my friends from my last place of residence carry across. I have to start completely over. It's sad, it's annoying, it's upsetting. And what's more, when I do go back to visit, the reception from my 'friends' is inevitably cool, because 'life moves on and people grow apart.' I'm sorry? We grew apart because YOU DIDN'T EVEN TRY.

I've already grieved enough deaths in my short life. Please don't make me grieve the relational deaths of my still-living friends too.

(Metaphorical) Split Jump

I feel like I have one foot in two provinces and it's honestly exhausting.

Earlier this spring I had made plans to stay in Saskatchewan fairly long-term (despite graduating college in April). I notified my housemates, job-hunted, started looking at places, told my entire extended family/friend group -- and then it fell through. Completely. Entirely.

I came up with a backup plan fairly quickly. Since it involved me moving back to Alberta, I officially ended the perennial Saskatchewan job-hunt -- no point in prolonging the frustration of not getting hired if I was only going to be there another month and a half anyway.

However, because I have zero income, this means I am literally scraping together couch change to pay for gas to get to rehearsals. I have $18 to my name right now. I literally can't even break a twenty for change for the parking meter at the doctor's office.

This leaves me in a very tight spot. I'm still in shows in Sasktachewan till mid-June. However, I don't have money to even fuel my van this week. The one saving grace was that there's a week and a half between performance dates here. It's a long enough period of time to go back home and work for my dad's company for a week. And that should earn me enough money to pay my final rent bill in Saskatchewan and cover gas till I move back to Alberta. It's really kind of stupid that I'm having to commute nine and a half hours (to a different province!) to work, but I swear literally NOBODY ELSE on the planet will hire me. Name it and I've applied for it. Even jobs below minimum wage. I have applied for literally everything.

I've just confirmed my place in a renting option in Alberta. I guess it's official now -- my time in Saskatchewan is ending, much sooner than I anticipated. I really only have about two weeks total here -- the rest will be in Alberta, working to afford to actually move.

It hurts. 98% of my friends -- my support system -- are in Saskatchewan. I really only have two Alberta friends left, and they'd be in a different city than me. I would be well and truly alone in a strange city, when I'm already not in a great headspace.

Don't get me wrong -- I love Alberta, and I love the city (both cities in general and the particular one I'm moving to). But I feel very much like I'll lose all the friends I made here in Saskatchewan, and I'll have to start rebuilding a support system from step one all over again -- do you know how long it took to cobble together the one that I currently have? And that was in a school environment, where you're together with people all the time, in a setting that's fairly conducive to building relationships.

It still doesn't seem real that one day, in less than a month, I will be leaving this house, driving away from this town, taking the exit off the highway... and never coming back.