Limbo. It’s where I’m at.
I’ve gone from there being not enough hours to there being hours I cannot fill. I’ve joked about this being working nirvana. An undemanding job. Under-employment for f/t pay. But it’s a strange hell and I’m feeling the pressure of making a couple of things last all day.
It’s a temporary state. The passing from one life to another. The waiting-room between jobs, where your old employer can give you nothing new to start; where projects are moving on without you and where the stuff to finish is finished or finishing.
At the few meetings I’ve attended I feel like a ghost at the table. My words are not heard. They carry no forward weight. Insubstantial, I just sit, observing a new world where I do not exist – at the same time cutting the ties that have bound me for so long. Ties that were all illusion I now find out. Because they are so easily severed. I have been expunged by my bosses and colleagues – I just need to cast off the emotional ties. They move on – into a future that I will not share and in which I have no stake.
Rightly or wrongly I am finding this hard. I’ve been with them for almost 9 years. But it has long been time to move on – and I am not sorry about that.
My new employers seem desperate to involve me in their plans. I’ve done a little for them in my own weekend time – out of genuine desire and interest, I don’t do arse licking.
In the meantime – between wee gigs at work where I have something real and substantial to do – I am tying up loose holiday ends.
Packing for the wee ones is now done. Carrie (the surrogate daughter) has packed Lewis the Lad’s gear. Evan the Baby Giant is holding out – prevaricating out of sheer shiftlessness until I take serious charge this weekend and bully him into identifying the shorts and t-shirts he wants to take. Meg – my rebel eldest – has a case full of the new clothes her Mamie and I bought for her. I have my own meagre changes of clothing set aside. R can sort his own.
The last of the passports came in today. The numbers are entered on Easyjet. AirBerlin is sorted for the inter-Spanish flights. Hire cars are booked. Long stay parking is paid for. Insurances have just to be printed out. Medication for the chronic conditions (Jamie is asthmatic) is ordered and to be collected. Euros will be purchased tomorrow.
This will be the first holiday for a very long time where I have not been worried about work stuff going pear-shaped. Where I have not been reachable by mobile or email in the event that it did.
I cannot wait!
Impaled on the thistle 