Every Lesson Forms A New Scar...

My life used to be...shall we say...chaotic. I left San Francisco,the city I had wanted to live in since I was five years old, in a state of turmoil and things didn't get much better until about...an hour ago. Okay, that's not fair. I can't say exactly when things started to get better because it happened in stages; First I replaced CMI, a "job" that is best suited to affirming your belief that you are pond scum (and if you didn't hold the belief that you were pond scom, CMI would have gladly convinced you!) with Amazon, which provided stability and the ability to earn more money than Al Bundy. Until it didn't. The problem with Amazon is it's like playing three card Monte; can you find enough hours to support yourself? Can you keep up your UPH (length of time it takes to complete an order) without having a panic attack? The thing is, while I was doing all of this transitioning, I wasn't really worried about being happy, as I had long since stopped considering happiness to be a possibility, at least for me. Then, the weirdest thing started to happen... I traded being a shopper at Amazon for being an assistant teacher at a wonderful daycare\preschool and things started to stabilize. I mean really stabilize. All of a sudden I was able to do things; Give my mom money without having to go beg rides on mass transit. Buy Writing Rainbow supplies without budgeting a month in advance (though to be fair, I still have to budget two weeks in advance, but only because I get paid bi-weekly). Buy gifts for people that aren't from the dollar store! Also, my commute is now 45 minutes (as opposed to four hours) and there's a parent who praises me for, quote "dressing like a princess everyday." Yet I was hesitant to trust it. You remember the rubber band theroy? Yeah, that shit is real and it's just waiting to snap and destroy anything you've built. Or was it? As things continued to improve I was afraid to admit how good things were, believing that the second I did it would all come apart. I fought against, not the fact that things were good, but the admission that they were. About a month ago I decided to stop and embrace the new reality God has given me. Things are good. Really good and I owed it to myself and God to say so. So I did. When friends asked me how I was I answered 'good' instead of 'okay.' Because they were. Until last Friday. Last Friday I woke up to discover Antigone's (my cat) back legs didn't work. I called work and told them I would be there as soon as I could but I had to get my Tiggy squeek (if you knew her this nickname would make sense) to the vet. Turns out she had a stroke and by 8pm that evening she was gone. Just like that, my world shifted. The rubber band had struck. The second, the second I allowed myself to embrace the fact that my life was in a good place and on a good trajectory, I lost Antigone. Last week was hell, filled with anguish and depression, feelings I am all too familiar (though the anguish is new) with but don't have any idea what to do with inthis situation. Except learn the lesson, heed the rubber band, and make sure I stay emotional middle.