OUCH

I’ve been experiencing a feeling, for the last hour or so. I don’t know exactly what to call it. It’s not loneliness; closer to emptiness. It’s not a good feeling. I’ve experienced it before. It’s kinda like hopelessness. It’s a feeling that makes a mockery of life. This life that we take so seriously kind of feels like nothing. Do you get an idea of what a truly bad feeling it is?

I don’t know where it’s coming from either. I mean, things aren’t great, but they’re no worse than they’ve often been and a lot better than they often are. So I don’t know why I’m feeling like this.

The feeling’s leaving now. It’s not completely gone, but it’s leaving. I think that me writing about it is banishing it. I think that writing about it is also giving me a little clarity. I think that I’m feeling less than. I’m feeling kind of empty and useless. It (the feeling) just kind of came out of nowhere! Weird. I’m pretty sure my sister would say that it’s the devil.

Maybe it came over me because we just moved from our big, suburban, four-bedroom home to a two-bedroom apartment and I’m still trying to figure out how I’m going to make the money we have do what we need it to do. Sometimes I feel like a failure, barely providing for my family. Here’s Christmas coming again and I’m wondering how I’m going to be able to get anyone anything…… again.

Money, or lack of it, is constantly trying to steal any joy that I might have. But I didn’t prepare for the future. I never thought about it. I certainly didn’t envision the day when I would have to provide for a family – a wife and kids. So here I am. Pushing fifty and struggling to get by. I’ve alienated several people who were once good friends, a consequence of my financial failings. I have an aunt who’s got to be rounding the corner towards ninety and I am afraid to call her because I owe her money that I can’t pay her back right now. My ten-year old daughter – frustrated when we had to leave her friend’s house whose parents, our friends, had invited us for Thanksgiving dinner – in her anger expressed her dismay at having to leave to go to our little apartment when we used to live a few doors away, all because we are “poor.”


I feel like less than a man right now. I can’t believe that I’m thinking about posting this. Of course, hardly anyone reads my blog anyway, so it’s not like I’m telling the world. It’s not like I’m some asinine entertainer who has millions of “followers” that followed his every insipid tweet. At the same time, I guess that anyone who might be reading this would be thinking, “This guy’s having a public pity-party!” I guess I am. I just feel bad and I feel the need to say it. I know that it will pass, just the same as I know that this feeling is always lurking in the background somewhere, waiting for that perfect moment to step forward and start sticking those pins in.

Ouch.