2023-04-23 — The Show Must Go On

The day started off a lot earlier than expected. Having gone to bed at about 9:30, I woke up about 1:30 in the morning with my eye hurting, an ingrown hair between my lower lip and chin that was hurting badly enough to bother me, and a zit Right at the corner of my nose and cheek, all three together apparently enough to wake me up. 🙃

So I plucked a bunch of whiskers near the area where the infection was, as I couldn’t even see what exact part was infected. I poked a whole where I thought it was and was able to squeeze out some pus.

Yummy. 😶

I took care of the zit, I tried to figure out what was wrong with my eye, but it wasn’t bloodshot, and there weren’t any visible scratches or lacerations or anything, so I didn’t know what was up there.

I hadn’t taken a shower, so I figured a hot shower would be good for my face as well as for getting all the grease off from the week’s work.

After my shower, I tried to go back to bed, but it took quite a while. I think I finally might have fallen asleep somewhere around 3:00 or 3:30 or something.

I had scheduled with Cory to start working through stuff about 6:45 my time 5:45 is. Super cool of him to make himself available to help poor little struggler me trying to make some real progress in my life.

I wasn’t doing well at all, though. Between what happened yesterday with those two customers, and the weight of what I was about to try and work through, having tried so many times and having gotten nowhere, I was, and continue to be, anxious. It takes a massive amount of mental and emotional energy just to Even begin going back to those things.

Having gotten nowhere after years and years of effort, I just feel nearly hopeless that I can make progress. And every failed attempt ways heavier and heavier, I think.

I don’t think I can handle too many more failures.

But I tried to work through it, and Cory was patient with me, and that was really nice. It’s nice to have a friend as good as he is.

We talked through a lot of things. I didn’t want to try and have the conversation in the house with other people in it, so I had gotten in my little Z4 and driven to the neighborhood market in pea ridge. I sat in the car talking for a little while, crying a bit, struggling through painful things.

Very painful things.

I grabbed some food from inside the neighborhood market, having to use my business card to buy it because I guess with my credit card company issuing the fraud alert, they must have also put a lock on my card because it’s not been working the last couple times I’ve tried to use it in person.

Anyway, from there I started driving around, driving up to Pea Ridge Park and pacing around the parking lot while I continued the conversation with Cory. In the beginning, my conversation with him had revolved mostly around the topic of god and the most spiritual experiences that I had had in my life and the situation that I currently find myself in that came about because of those experiences.

I still don’t have any answers for that part of my life.

I don’t know if I ever will.

But that was actually more or less expected. I wasn’t expecting to work through that today or to have any answers.

What I was hoping, was that maybe I could come up with a name for my organization and finally get started.

I’m not going to last much longer if I just keep being a mechanic. It just crushes my soul, and I just keep doing it to myself out of fear of losing everything that I’ve worked so hard to build up financially.

But it’s killing me. Slowly but surely, it’s killing me. If not physically, yet, emotionally and spiritually.

I’m a shell of who I used to be. I know who I am is still in there. I won’t ever stop being me. My heart will never stop wanting to help people and love people, but I lose more and more of my resilience. I lose more and more of my hope… I lose more and more of the bright person I once was.

I’ve got to get this figured out.

I may not be able to figure out the most monumental of all my struggles and challenges right now, but if I can at least get the non-profit going, then maybe I’ll have something to hold on to, to buy me time, to keep me going as I try to work through the pain of the… other stuff that kills me even more than wasting my life away as a mechanic does.

I need something, something to look forward to, something that makes my heart sing, even just a little… or I don’t think I’m going to make it, and the nonprofit stuff is the most reasonable course that i can see for some getting some of that.

In some ways, though, it’s even hard to do the nonprofit stuff. It’s not how I pictured it. I never pictured myself doing this alone. It was always side by side with my person, my companion, the one with whom I was one. In my mind’s eye, I always saw us going out and lifting the world together all day every day, and then coming home and spending the evenings together, talking about everything we did that day, who we helped, the highs, the lows, and what are hopes and dreams were and plans for the coming days.

But… that’s not where things are at. Doing this alone is not how I wanted it. Very little is how I wanted it. But there’s nothing I can do about what happened and what is.

I’ve been treading water… hoping, waiting, afraid…

But it’s time for this intermission in my life to be over. Part of me will keep hoping and keep waiting that maybe somehow what I had looked forward to might come to be the way I hoped it was going to, but as of now…

The show must go on.

Even if it’s with a solo cast.

As we talked, Cory asked me why I didn’t just use lift the world as the name of my organization. I remember in all of my brainstorming about organization names in the past, I had thought about it, and I had rejected it for whatever reason. I don’t remember, for sure, my reasoning for not seriously considering that as the name of my organization., I think others have even asked me if I could use that, but for some reason I had something against that name in the past. But today, whatever I didn’t like about it in the past melted away, and I started to like it a lot as the name.

As I was strolling around the Pea Ridge Park parking lot, I started to get a big smile on my face, getting more and more excited about that as a name for my organization.

I started to feel a weight lifting off my shoulders–like maybe I was finally getting over the hump on something that is held me back for so long.

I got back in my car and started to drive to Fayetteville (while I continued to talk with Cory), hoping that maybe the Walmart there still had some of the $3 clearance flannel shirts that I had bought the other day. I think I had only bought three or four, and I should have bought them all, but I didn’t, so I started heading back down that way to see if maybe some of them might still be left.

On the way down, Cory mentioned a couple of alternative name choices, and the first one was a definite no right off the bat, but the second one was one he actually liked a little bit better than lift the world.

He was doing exactly what I had asked him to do, make suggestions and whatnot, but I let myself start to second guess, and then I let myself start to worry, worry that maybe there was a better name, and I would choose this one, and then I would regret it later.

It wasn’t long before I found myself back down in the dumps, discouraged, feeling like I was right back at square one, having not made really any progress.

From Fayetteville, I drove all the way north, discouraged, and down. I drove to Big Sugar Creek north of pea ridge, and hung out for a little while by the water, and then I decided to drive around Southern Missouri following Big Sugar Creek to see if maybe anybody had any property for sale along that creek. There were some beautiful areas, but nothing that I could see that was for sale.

I drove home, and I jumped in my skid steer and moved a fallen tree that Stevie and I had cut down last fall that’s just been sitting there in the middle of the grass for the last six months or so. So I got it moved off the grass–finally.

Then since I was close, I went down to the pond (which is dry because it can’t hold water 🙃), and I used my skid steer to load a whole bunch of trees (that I had cut down previously) into the center of the pond to burn. Then I took my skid steer back, drove over to my house, grabbed my chainsaw, the loppers, and my ax, and I headed over to the pond area to continue working on de-vining that area, as well as cutting down more dead trees, thinning out thickets of too many trees, etc.

I spent the next probably 5 hours doing that, and that’s where I find myself right now, the sun having gone down, the temperature having dropped significantly, and me standing just a couple of feet away from the hot coals as they smolder.

Another day in the books.

I’m tentatively leaning toward choosing lift the world as the name of my organization. What do y’all think? Please feel free to express your thoughts in comments. Or you can text me if you have my number.

Now that I’ve written my post for the day, I’m going to head home, as I think this fire of mine is at a safe point. It’s time to get some dinner, get myself hydrated, as I haven’t had anywhere near enough to drink, and then get my little butt to bed because it’s almost 10:30.

A big thank you to my friend Cory who spent probably 4 hours on the phone with me today. Maybe more.

Love and hugs. 😊

Lift the World

~ stephen