The Nose Knows

So I have a gift and it's called my intuition.  But I don't listen to it sometimes.  And that's where my fuck ups come in.

The gig is up.  I am no longer going to be able to collect unemployment.  I am officially cut off.  Gone are the days of leisure and low maintenance financial worry.  I bid a somber farewell to the overindulgent moments of recklessness and splurging.  Enter impending financial doom.  

Being that I submitted my unemployment claim late, my checks were stopped until I went through a phone interview with an EDD representative, some flunkey who grilled me and managed to get me to shoot myself in the foot.  I am the worst liar EVER.  Always have been.  I don't know if this is inevitably a good or bad thing.  I want to say it's a good thing.  But right now it's very much not.

So I was told I would receive notification of their decision to release my check in 7-10 working days, which means I'm denied my benefits, according to many an online discussion forum.  This couldn't have come at a worse time, just before I go back to San Diego for "vacation" which is going to cost me some money, especially since it's everyone and their mother's birthday.  I started to think about the downward spiral my bank account would take.  I started to think about the forth coming pressures to find a job, my likelihood of taking up a job I absolutely detested, out of desperation.  I started to think about the possibility of not finding employment and surrendering myself to failure, defeat.  And then I thought about how I'd already known this was going to happen a month ago.  

On 3/2/2010, I wrote:

I am freaked out.  Mr. poverty is coming for me, like impending death.  He's just around the corner.  I can smell him.  When I'm on the train with my iPod and American Apparel outfit, there are those frequent occurrences of a pan handler entering your car and making an announcement entailing how depraved and broken they are, asking for anything you can spare so they can get something to eat, meanwhile you become more engrossed in your reading material or headphones, not wanting to even look at them and have to face the fact that you could help them, but don't want to.  They could be lying.  They could be alcoholics/junkies/lazy assholes.  But the worst one is thinking, that could be YOU.

I knew then what I know now, not in the same sense, but I had an idea of what was to come.  Yet it didn't make things any easier.  And here I am.  Facing the dragon.  I'm still scared shitless.  Though somewhat delayed, I'm now thick in the midst of navigating through the difficulty of change, having left everything behind for a place where I had nothing, simply because something within me was crying out for it.  And now it's time to find out what I'm really made of.  Before I moved to New York, I knew I would be forced to make such a finding, to see if I really could endure difficulty alone.

Immediately after being faced with the possibility of running out of money, I had a moment of weakness.  I feared defeat.  I thought of the possibility of being sent back to San Diego with my tail between my legs.  Admitting I couldn't make it.  Failure; the initial fear that caused me to avoid trying so many things.  But yet something inside me still tells me that won't happen.  My intuition whispers in my ear, telling me to do this or that, it haunts me and keeps me awake at night with worry.  But it's never been wrong.  And just as it told me rough times were ahead, it also tells me I'm capable and strong enough to see them through.  I trust I'm going to make it, somehow.  I will find a way.  I just need to stay hungry.