In addition, I realized after getting out here just how much my job had contributed to my self-worth - here we're getting into the nitty-gritty territory. I've had problems with self-esteem all my life (but learned to cover up pretty early and pretty well), and when I started back to school after my divorce, I had less than zero confidence in my abilities and myself. Only through the casualness of the Work-Study program and a supervisor from Heaven (thank you Pat!) was I able to slowly realize that I was a capable person. But the evolution of this took years, with several peaks and valleys along the way. Paralleling this development of professional self-esteem was a much rockier path to personal self-esteem. The two paths fed off each other, however, and I know the professional side bootstrapped up the personal side far more than the other way around. But I was feeling pretty good about things - very good about my job and my abilities in it, and relatively good about my personal strides, when I left New Mexico. That's when the ka-whammy hit! Not having a real solid network of friends here (my best friend here is busy 25 hours a day, and there's not much spontaneity or her being available for crises, and other friends are not the kind I would pour my heart out to, at least yet), I find that there's not a whole lot of people to talk to about the changes occurring in my life. I do have a "gentleman" friend here, but for various and sundry reasons (mostly that he's a loveable but not reliable varmint) he's part of the problem and not part of the solution. So I'm feeling pretty isolated, which is another reason I've thought about looking for a job a bit earlier than I had planned. I really do feel like I'm drifting pretty aimlessly right now, and some days it's OK and some days it's not. My circle of new acquaintances, met mostly through my brother, are not generally the kind of people I would naturally gravitate towards (no aspersions intended, just different strokes for different folks), though my opinions about a couple of them change daily.

I'm doing a lot of walking (I was biking, which was what screwed up my back), which gives me a lot of time (as if I didn't have enough already) for self-evaluation, which I'm not sure is good or bad at the moment. I have a very good sense of who I am and what I want from my life, but when I'm feeling a bit shaky, as now, I start to question "me". Maybe I should be doing something different, maybe I should be getting out more, maybe, maybe, maybe. But the end result is always the same. Whenever I have strayed from what I know is the "essential" Joanie, I know that I'm not being true to myself. And the older I get, the more solidly I realize that, and the less I am tempted to stray from that "me-ness".

Unfortunately, part of the core of Joanie is the fact that I have definite hermit tendencies, and enjoy solitude. And that bumps headlong into what I need to do when I'm feeling a little blue, which is to get out and do something with people. Maybe that's part of the current war going on in my head....I really am feeling very, very restless these days.

(End of Chapter 1) Feel free to share this with the others, and we'll go from there - I sort of felt like I was rambling, and am not sure this is what you were looking for, but then again, I got the feeling during our conversation that you were looking for what we wanted to express, without boundaries, basically.oanie (1998)