Until Use And Old Age Accept Them

Mental Illness, Relationship, Religious Indoctrination 3 Minutes

I looked for the source of my fear and I found it. I determined I’d let the fear go.

My brain promptly said “bitch, that anxiety was there for a reason – did you think I was being irrational? I didn’t want you thinking about things that make you want to kill yourself.”

Domestic life has felt like drudgery and chores since I was a young child. I didn’t want to clean, I didn’t want to care for children, I didn’t want to cook. All of that was horribly boring to me.

But, the God I grew up with was a God that taught through suffering. If there was something you hated and didn’t want to do with your life, that God would put you on that path, because that was how you would learn to trust and obey him. And obedience and trust would eventually lead through suffering and result in joy.

That God was bullshit.

But I believed in that God back then, and so I embarked on a life of suffering, to please him but really to please my mom and my husband. I set aside all the things I loved, because if I loved anything more than God, God would be displeased and God would take it away, so I might as well surrender it voluntarily.

So here I am, having thrown away my life to please a bullshit God, my mom and my husband. That God is no longer in my life, except in memories that haunt me. My mom sympathizes with my husband and thinks I need that bullshit God back in my life. My husband thinks I owed him free labor, children and domesticity because “we were married.”

I have never felt so much like a tool. An object. And not the kind of object that gets treasured – the kind of object that is simply one among thousands, that will be discarded and replaced as soon as it is worn.

Working retail makes me feel that exact same way, but at this point in my life, there’s no obvious worth to me outside of being a replaceable part and so retail is where I have the highest chance of getting hired.

Indy M suggested a specific retail chain to me, said she had a friend there that liked it. I looked it up, and the description of the job made my soul shrivel, even though the company seems better to work for than many retail chains. I investigated further and found out this chain still allows people to submit paper applications. That’s almost unheard of in this day and age. So I went and picked up an application, filled it out and turned it in.

As I left, I had the cynical thought that now I could get rejected by places I don’t even want to work, and I started crying.

I was in the middle of venting to A & H when I realized I’d missed a call and had a voicemail. It turned out to be from the man I’d handed my application to, and he wanted to know if I could come in for an interview on Monday. So, that was a good sign. I should be happy, right?

Except I’m not. Everything I hate about retail, all the ways it compares to my childhood and my marriage are still there.

If I even get hired, I’m going to be a divorced mom of 4 in her late 30s working in a grocery store.

That’s basically the lite version of my worst nightmare. What is my worst nightmare? Being one of those middle aged women with death in their eyes working a cash register at Walmart. I would literally rather be dead than have that be my life.

I suppose I sound like a melodramatic idiot. I kind of hate myself for caring so much, for hating this prospect so much.

I woke up this morning with a quote from Eowyn going through my head:

“What do you fear, lady?” Aragorn asked.
“A cage,” Éowyn said. “To stay behind bars, until use and old age accept them, and all chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recall or desire.”

Someone point me in the direction of the nearest Nazgul, please.

Published by humanprobably

I once went to a party and had fun. Sixteen years later I heard everyone thought I hated them. Apparently I have resting bitch personality.

Published

8 thoughts on “Until Use And Old Age Accept Them”

  1. Hmm, that’s kind of what employment is for most people, being a replaceable part and knowing that on some level you are just giving yourself to a company that doesn’t care about you and doesn’t give you back nearly as much as you give them. Unless you’re self employed, it’s hard to avoid that.

    My mum worked retail for quite a few years for various companies. She enjoyed it – not so much because of the job itself, but the friends she made working there.

    You’re going through a big and stressful life event, it’s OK to be a bit jittery about the future and how you will fit into it. But I think you’ll do OK as far as employment goes. You are obviously very intelligent and you write really well. (There are lots of people in cushy office jobs who can’t write an email longer than a sentence and still have it make syntactic sense.) . If you can send off applications with what we in the UK would call a covering note (kind of a letter in addition to your resume, explaining who you are, why you want the job, why you think you’re a good candidate etc), then employers will notice that.

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    1. e.v. – our name is similar – cover letters! I did that for a couple of positions where I had a friend that could mention my name to the hiring manager for the department. I didn’t even get contacted for an interview, which was pretty damn discouraging. =/ (Here in the US, your best bet for getting a position is to have someone already working there put in a good word for you.) People aren’t keen on hiring women that stayed home with their children unless they’ve got some kind of past work history or education to make up for it.

      I know my reaction to working retail doesn’t seem particularly rational. I’ve worked it before though and hated it, so I do have some experience with knowing it’s not a good fit for me. I don’t mind being a replaceable part so much when the work is at least keeping me mentally occupied.

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      1. Well, unfortunately not being contacted by people advertising jobs is quite common. It is discouraging, I know, but you don’t know why you weren’t contacted – it might just be that the company isn’t really that serious about trying to fill the vacancy for whatever reason. It happens!

        See, I think you’re putting yourself down. There’s a small business out there somewhere that’s fed up of trying to employ flakey unprofessional people in their early 20s and what they really want is someone a little bit older with a bit more maturity who they can rely on.

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      1. Yeah I’ll be talking about “boring” INTP things from now on over here. More as a brain exercise than real content creation.

        Yeah, “masculine” ESTP type heroes still seem to be the most popular. You could go to gay male romance too but that genre has its own issues😅
        Just wanted to provide info!

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