I wish I were prolific or at least consistently disciplined. I've got all these pseudonyms I can use if I need to shield how productive I am...if I needed to protect the world from my great work. But that's not the case. Actually, my creative output is rather puny, stolen away from days where I'm at work and don't feel guilty about "not spending time together".
It's a funny thing that has developed now that we are on different tracks. My love for her hasn't slacked but my time with her has. And since the new job, my time with myself has too. So there are fewer occasions for me to spend in quality activity with both of us.
When the weekends come, she's had sufficient time with herself, sufficient time to be productive or creative if she chooses, sufficient time to slack off and read a novel or be artistic or undirected.
But not so for me, myself and I: the kind of work I like to get into...reading online or writing, or setting up websites or working through big projects in my office is done only in stolen moments after work in the four hours I have between leaving work for the day and my mandatory bedtime. Regrettably, these solitary pursuits get short shrift. Love that she is, she wants to be out in the world doing stuff with me (really I am so lucky), whilst all I can think about is my big stack of New York Times book reviews waiting for me in the corner.
It's worse now that I hate work --it is not aligned with what I want to do this lifetime other than building a financial nest egg. I have no curiosity about my job so undertaking it feels unrelenting. And when I'm free of it, selfishly the first thing I think about is running to my writing or reading. Immersing myself in a sequestered project. But when I return home she figuratively comes to stand by me and says with that delightful coltishness "What do you want to go do?"
Shamefacedly, I realize I hadn't even given that a thought...all I could entertain was my time by myself, the luxury of no outside obligation other than feeding the animals. But that's not reality. Couples that do best, do things together but the things we used to do...go to restaurants and go shopping, European travel and expensive daytrips (lifestyle sampling I used to call it) those things evaporated when she and the boom boom economy retired. Her current hobbies that we might do together (golf and gambling) are so far removed from anything that I'd consider fun that we're left adrift trying to figure out how to connect.
For a time I tried halfheartedly to figure out how to make my work my play...because then I'd satiate my obsessions...enough to let me feel fulfilled in that realm. Then I'd seek her joyously (and perhaps learn to love golf?) without the niggling feeling that I was leaving some master vocation undone.
But that hasn't panned out...the majority of my most tender dreams live in the territory of jobs that pay very poorly. That country is populated by men and women who have no intention of those pursuits being their sole economic support.
So off I go to a deadening job, begrudgingly lavishing my time and energy on dreck only to return home and deprive both the things I desperately love of attention. How pitifully hollow.
There must be a way to reconfigure the equation here (the new job possibilities in a radically different field on the horizon), to reshuffle the choices available for us all. Because none of us are happy.
