Two years ago, my very first blog was designed to be a creative outlet as I set out on a journey to lose weight, get healthy, and turn my life around. Both projects - the blog and the weight loss - failed miserably.
Here's what happened in the time spent between blogs: My father died. I was laid off. I wrote a book. I lost some weight and gained it back. And then I got a new job, allegedly as an Associate Marketing Director (but what she really wanted was a yes-girl) working for a world-class cultural institution that employed some of the most ridiculously evil people I've ever met.
After a year of mental, emotional, and physical workplace abuse, I got sick. Very sick. With a staph infection that wouldn't respond to medication, threats, violence or entreaties for mercy. Three hospital stays later, I ended up hooked up to an IV machine for 3 hours a day for two months, had a tiny piece of bone removed from my left foot, and ended up with an extended tour of duty on crutches.
After the whole ordeal ended, I was diagnosed with severe rheumatoid arthritis - "a little souvenir of a terrible year."
Oh, and after I got sick, you guessed it: I got fired.
On the other side of the darkness, there were also good things: I finished my book, and found a fabulous new agent. I applied to rabbinical school. And - miracle of miracles - I got in, but failed the Hebrew entrance exam.
A year later and I'm still trying to get it together: to learn this language so that I can escape the realm of Sales and Marketing; to get healthy and back to a reasonable facsimile of myself before the Death Eaters got me. I still feel haunted by what happened in my old job, by the consequences of not taking care of myself - consequences of pain, vulnerability, sadness and solitude that I still live with every day. Like a prairie dog who is too scared to do more than peer up from her hole in the ground, there are days I prefer to spend underground, because even with all of the good things, and all of the blessings, in my heart, I'm still afraid of the light.
I tell myself it doesn't matter. People lose jobs every day. People lose themselves in illness and are forced to cut back. I try not to focus on the losses - the loss of prestige, the decrease in expendable income, not even the uselessness and boredom I feel every day when I'm not racing around like a crazy person - the way I used to - just to try to avoid incurring the wrath of She-Who-Must-Not-Be Named (but who will be called Mimi Fiedler in my next book).
I tell myself I need the time to heal, the time to make sure I don't do anything stupid again. I tell myself I need better boundaries. And finally, I tell myself that if I had actually stuck to my guns, and achieved that original goal of eating right, losing weight, and being healthy, perhaps I wouldn't have ended up in such a bad place.
So I'm starting over. Call it Operation Or Chadash - a new light.
In my first post on my old blog, I remember quoting Deuteronomy - the verse I chant every year on Yom Kippur:
It is not up in the heavens, that someone will have to go up, and get it, and bring it back and teach you. It is not across the sea, so that someone will have to cross it, and get it, and bring it back and teach you. No, it is very near to you, in your mouth and in your heart, and you can do it.
That was how I felt - as if my goals were near to me, as if - even broken - the world was still full of possibility. But today I reflect on the words Lady Augusta Gregory's poem, "The Grief of a Girl's Heart:
You have taken the east from me, you have taken the west from me.
You have taken what is before me, and what is behind me.
You have taken the sun, you have taken the moon from me.
And oh - my fear is great - you have taken God from me.
It's amazing what a job - an illness - a broken promise - can take with it when it finally goes away. So perhaps this time, it is not so much about what I need to lose. It is about what I need to get back.
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