What brand of gratitude is this?

Two years ago exactly Philip had just lost his job, a filling fell out, and I broke my hip and couldn't walk for three months. A month after that our car broke down and required a $4,000 fix. Another filling fell out somewhere in there too. No jobs came up. No longer medically covered by Philip's job we started paying an astronomical amount to be covered by Cobra. Looking for insurance we found ourselves uninsurable because of my injury and Philip's asthma. So the medical bills began to mount.

We refinanced our house to buy us some time, but it cost us so much to buy that time that the band-aid actually became a problem all in itself. While trying not to notice that we had to sell our house, Philip broke his arm in such a bad way that he required very expensive surgery. It was right after his surgery that we finally realized that we had absolutely no other options and that we would have to sell our house. The medical bills got bigger. He is still in need of more surgery, incidentally, but we can't afford it.

No work materialized for either of us.

During this time I heard a lot of friends and family and neighbors tell me all the ways in which we were lucky. It's hard to see people's lives go down the tubes, I think people feel that the only service they can render is to try to see the lighter side. I can't tell you how hard I worked to see the bright side, to look for the good luck suffocating under the bad. I dug through the rubble to find my gratitude and I thanked god things weren't worse than they were every single day as they got worse and worse.

But there comes a point when you get sick of people pointing out how lucky you are to be alive. There comes a point when it gets ridiculous, like looking for gold nuggets after the gold rush is over and the mines have been stripped. Sometimes it just doesn't matter that you're still alive because when everything is getting stripped from you and there's nothing waiting in the future for you, being alive doesn't feel like a blessing, it feels a lot more like a burden.

I took a gamble to follow a dream and I lost. In losing, in risking everything, I am losing everything too. I am sitting here watching it all drain away. It's true that we're not dead yet, which I guess is a blessing, though living requires a lot of things like food and shelter and jobs to pay for those things and right now we haven't got more than one month's worth of living covered. For the first time, I am regretting having opened the store. I am regretting a whole chain of decisions over the past two years.

I'm not sure what good it will do to have these regrets because what I'm realizing is that what the Universe seems to have slated for us is a different life than any human being hopes for. I'm starting to really believe, through two years of no one hiring either of us, through two years of living off of our house, that it doesn't want us to work. It doesn't want us to get by. It wants us to suffer.

I have done my damnedest to be positive, to keep on trucking, to see the brighter side, to feel how lucky lucky lucky we are. I have worked my fucking ass off to solve our situation, to make my own luck by starting my own business. To be positive for my family, my friends, and the people I meet out there. I have tried to hang onto my deep belief that if you work hard enough, are humble, have a positive attitude and a willingness to get your hands dirty, that you can always find work and make a living.

I don't believe it anymore. It's over for me now.

Yes, yes, I know it's grim talk here. Because that's what it is for us right now. Underneath all the talk of luck and hopes for change and all the gruelling hours we've put in to change our fortune, our fortune is exactly the same as it was two years ago. The only real card I have left is to sell my house. But what then? Then we use up the last of our equity to survive while looking for work and not finding any? Is that what the Universe wants for us? To have no assets, no shred of safety? Have I not been humble enough? Have I not loved enough? Or given enough? Or been a generous enough person? Have I not felt enough daily gratitude for still being alive after being stripped of a livelihood and my health and Philip's health?

Gratitude was the last thing I was hanging onto and now I have no gratitude left. Life has not been treating us well. The Universe has not been taking care of us. The Universe has not been listening to my prayers or rewarding hard work with results. Sometimes that's how life is. Not everyone survives.

I'm angry. I also don't want to hear from anyone about my good fortune. My ears are shut. I don't have the energy to fight the tide anymore. The fight is just an echo now. Because it appears I have merely been fighting so that I can get a depressing job working at Jo-Annes, renting a mobile home, putting my kid in daycare (which will certainly make more of a thug of him), and never having a day of rest again in my life. Frankly, I could have had all that without fighting at all, I could have had that without all the trouble I've gone to for something better.

I know how hard it is to hear people speak when what they have to say is not a message of hope. When they are covered in the stench of defeat. So until I can think of something less awful to say, I'm not going to post here. None of us are looking to hear how bad it can get out there. We want the happy story. I don't have one to tell.

I hope Bob Dylan is getting out his pen and notebook because I think our life is gearing up to make a very good depressing American folk story. I'd write it myself if I wasn't so busy trying to hold my whole life up with my pinky.