Fi Crisis

 After almost 20 years of being a nurse, and over that working my ass off, I am FI, Financially Independent.  That means that I can lay around and do nothing and still pay my bills.  My husband can have no job and we can still pay our bills.  All of it over the years suddenly came to the finish line, crashing down in front of me without even me knowing it.  Boom!  There it was, as I had pedaled as fast as I could to keep up with life.  And now.... My motivation is gone.  Poof!  Just a last little puff of smoke that has disappeared into the wind.  I have no motivation to do anything.  I feel like I gave it my all and now my body has just given up and needs time to just recover.  It almost reminds me of when I got pneumonia last year.  I was coughing and still going and doing and holidays and Christmas, and then I was down for a week once I got home and got meds.

So now what?  

All these things other people seem so keen on have never appealed to me.  I don't like to shop.  I would like to travel more, but dragging my little kids with us slows everything down and they are in school. I could take them out and we could travel, slow travel around the world, but all of us like routine and our space.  We need our place.  I just don't know.  It seems so weird and strange.  Nothing changed, but everything has changed.  I don't look at things the same way anymore.  I have all these options and yet, no motivation to do any of them.  Mostly work, in general, does not appeal to me.

I almost feel like I need to call my therapist to talk it out, but how do you explain that you used all your energy to get somewhere and now you are just burned out?  Maybe that is what it is, burn out?  Maybe that is what it is.  Burn out.  I have done everything and reached the finish line, and now I have used all my energy and just want to sit down and recover from the race.  The race that has taken almost my entire adult-ish life.  I went from just desperation and trying to stay out of dependence on my mom and escape that life, to working/striving/struggling/building.  

I just kept going and it did pay off. Even better, it is a life I am happy with.  I checked all the boxes I had laid out for myself.  College, career, husband, kids, house.  I think that is the problem now.  I had this check list for my life.  I checked every box, even ones I had never thought would happen, and now I have no goals or checkboxes left.  Never thought not having a goal or a checkbox was possible.  That's how I got from one place to another.  I had a goal, a vision, a thing to work for, to pursue, to capture or achieve.  I did all of them.  I did them better than I expected or could have imagined.

I am just not used to this feeling, a complete lack of drive.  I have a constant force that propels me toward the future, toward my identified wants.  And for the first time in my life, I don't really have anything I really want.  Yes, I want to do some activities and see some things, but I don't have a vision of what my life needs or what I need to focus on that will help me make decisions.  Maybe its not a lack of drive, maybe its a lack of goals, because I can't have drive unless I have a goal I am pursuing.  I'm not pursuing anything right now.  And goals for me are not "do the dishes" or "clean out the garage and office".  They are multi-year, life altering and defining ideas, and they are missing in my mind.  

I have heard a lot of people talk about how people don't talk about being FI after they reach it.  It seems to be this big hairy Audacious goal, and then once they reach it, they just fade away or disappear.  I guess they got to their finish line and went off in to the sunset.  I might be the exception to that rule.  I am instead feeling a need to reach out and figure it out.  Like how to I define my life now.  I was a career person, who achieved more in her career that she ever pictured possible.  This is new and a bit unsettling.

1960's could be Today

"It's as if everybody'd made this tacit agreement to live in a state of total self-deception.  The hell with reality!  Let's have a whole bunch of cute little winding roads and cute little houses painted white and pink and baby blue; let's all be good consumers and have a lot of Togetherness and bring our children up in a bath of sentimentality- Daddy's a great man becasue he makes a living, Mummy's a great woman because she's stuck by Daddy all these years-- and if old reality ever does pop out and say Boo we'll all get busy and pretend it never happened"

The above quote was written in the 1960's, but it is amazing how it rings true today. The art of denial and acting as if everything is perfect to make ourselves feel better.  It brings to mind the song "Stand by your Man".  Why, I have to ask.  

The man is the bread winner and the woman stands by her man, through hard times and good times.  Where is the importance of a single person's life, with a thought in their head and a question on their lips.  Everyone touts the importance of family, and all want to be politically correct, while behind closed doors it never is that picture perfect family life and no one is politically correct when not in front of an audience.

Creeping up on you

The internet really has way to much information on it at all times.  I mean how else can you type in someone's name, and then all of a sudden 7 years later see a picture of them, ones you know and then new ones that witness that passing of time.  It all seems so unreal.  I have this person that I knew for years in very intimate ways staring back at me, and they don't even know that I saw it.   Hell, I wish I hadn't seen it.  I don't like the past coming back.

All of these peer networks, and facebook and myspace give so much access to people's lives if they put it out there, you don't even believe it sometimes.  Click on a link and you are thrown back into your past that you have tried to run from for so long and tried to push out.  Click on another link, and you are thanking your lucky stars that you didn't end up with a person.  You know you dodged a bullet.  You click one more link and see the family you could have had, and didn't get.  And then there are the real surprises when you see someone that influenced a really close person in your life, and keep it to yourself because you don't want to give them the pangs of regret and remorse.

So thanks to the age of rapid access, I can diagnosis a rash I have never see before based on a picture online, and then turn around and find that my past has crept up on me by seeing a picture of an old flame.

Go figure.

Punch Biopsy and Pizza

The phrase this might hurt a bit was never mentioned. I mean they could have at least warned me that tonight, I would have a burning aching spot on my leg. I just figured since the numbing medicine in my leg wore off, and it wasn't hurting, I was home free. Tonight when I was making dinner it starting hurting.

Yeah, so after ibuprofen, guess what, I now know that punch biopsies really do hurt a bit......later.

They didn't warn me about pizza making. So after making two pizzas, I can say it was the limit of activity. I'm sure trying to make the pizza dough and throwing it in the air, only to throw it a bit too far and too high, I tried to catch the flying dough didn't help as I dove towards the floor, didn't help my leg any.

At least the pizza was good.

One week

Two weeks, no, only one week, one day. I have only one week before I leave for a country I have never been to, I had never wanted to visit, but now had found there was no way to get out of going to. This isn’t the life most people have. Most people do not have the life where they are being forced to go to "exotic" countries for a vacation, but then again, most people do not have a husband that is from an "exotic" country.

In the “exotic country” lives his crazy family, who up until the month of our wedding had never met or spoke to me. It took 4 ½ years from the time we started dating until they even were willing to admit they had lost their son to an American woman. I had led him into temptation, and they were unable to pull him back into their clutches. All part of my evil plan. Until they had acknowleged this undeniable fact, they had refused to even talk about me, to me or meet me. When they did finally come to the US from said exotic country, the tension was palpable. It smothered all around when they and I were in the same place. Being in the same room made it so thick, you could scoop it with a spoon and serve it to guests.

Now 2 years later, I have not seen or had to have any converstations with my in-laws. They are back in their beloved country, and I have stayed in my comfortable America, home of the 1 dollar cheese burgers, SUV’s and women’s rights. They live in a 3rd world country where the norm is arranged marriages, no one wants to eat a cow, and the smell of home to my husband is diesel fumes. Ah, India, glorious, 3rd world, far away India that the only time in my childhood I had ever heard mention was in storybooks like “The Jungle Book” and in “The Seceret Garden”. And everyone I meet just can’t figure out why I am not jumping for joy to travel 20 hours in ecomomy class airline halfway around the world.

No one could really say my life has been boring though. I mean, my god, my life seems like a comedy sketch sometimes. This morning alone I woke up remembering that I had to go to a doctors appointment for a thing that had been on my leg for years. I am not a big complainer. I ignored it like every good person does until it bugs you too much, and then I went to get it looked at. My doctor looked at it, poked at it and said “um, well I don’t know what it is, but we will send you to a dermatologist”. Two weeks later, I had a message on my phone, which I happened to accidentally erase that had my appointment time and place. I remembered it was this morning, but I didn’t know the time or place.

Thank god for google. There was only one dermatologist office around my part of town. I called them at 8:30 and found out I was supposed to be there at 9:10am. I was still half asleep, hair sticking out, sleep in my eyes. My mad dash after that consisted of finding clean, unwrinkled clothes, and my keys, cell phone, and trying to look like I didn’t just roll out of bed. I half managed the look. Oh yeah, thank good for google again, because to go somewhere, you have to know the directions. Yea google maps!

The trip got me to my appointment 5 minutes late. Not too bad. One hour later I was walking out with stitches in my leg. Oh yeah, in two weeks I have to have the stitches taken out. I will be in India. 3rd world country healthcare, here I come. Another fun thing in India I have to look forward to experiencing. Yippie, now I know this trip will be great.