May 23/13

Change is happening.  To everyone around me.

A week ago, a good friend got her marriage license (in Portugal) after a lengthy and frustrating process involving several countries.  Last weekend, a good friend was married.  A day or so later, another dear friend became engaged while on vacation in Hawaii.  On Tuesday, it was the death of a senior manager from work.  Yesterday, it was news of new positions for a couple of work colleagues.  And tonight, it was the news that yet another good friend is five months pregnant.  The dead man aside, no grass has time to grow under their feet, and I wish every one of them much luck and joy.

But I had a bitch of a sleep last night.  All this news quite rightly gets one doing some thinking about what is or isn't happening to/for him or her.

I haven't wasted my life by any means...on the contrary, I've accomplished some pretty important things; but this isn't the life I worked so hard to achieve.  I'm still stuck in a city I'm not happy living in.  I'm not comfortable or happy with the additional duties of my job since being shunted off to a new group.  I'm in a precarious financial situation that rather limits possibilities for me.  I'm 34, and the opportunities to go out into a world I was very eager to see are slipping past me every day.  I wanted to live abroad and work in development.  Instead I'm a burned-out bureaucrat in a depressing, bureaucratic city.

I'm rather unsettled by the notion that nothing significant will happen for me anymore.  And I'm downright terrified that eventually I'll stop pursuing personal fulfillment.  If or when that happens, it will mean that the hope has died, that I'll fade away into a shell of a person, and that I will stop caring.  I've always cared.  If I stop, I will not be fit for human company. 

It's pretty bleak stuff at a time when I should be rejoicing for the good news of some wonderful people around me.

I think back on the wasted chances of my youth, and the opportunities that I gave up so that others could be happy.  Those.  I allow myself so few regrets, but those moments...those wear on me in the truest sense of the word 'regret'.

Another chance...

...Wish you were here.