From an email to A:

This week got away from me. Its rainy here, so its a perfect day to be holed up at Brunswick getting tons of paperwork done. I'll have a rare 3 full days at the house (Brunswick) this week - usually my days are split up with meetings or trainings or committee work all over town. Makes for big mileage reimbursement checks!

Do you have a bete noir? In my journaling lately I have been discovering that many of the situations that make me uncomfortable, and many of the times or actions I wish I could change, centered around money. I had no idea that this was an issue for me. Even now I’m tempted to dismiss it as coincidence because it just seems so strange, so removed from my value system, but I really think that there are some emotional pitfalls for me around money. Most of the “issue” with it seems to be control over my money, rather than, say, lack of money - Money representing freedom or an adequate handle on life or proof of internal control, somehow. Isn’t that interesting? I don’t know what exactly to do with that information. I do know that my anticipated fears about the Future (cap. on purpose) involve money. And I know for sure that I need to figure out my feelings on this so I can ask S. to be part of the solution. I regretted having totally combined funds with **, but S. and I have taken the total opposite approach of totally separate funds, which is understandable, but obviously not tenable long term.

One experience that tipped me off to this was going to Target. I went to Target on a Saturday to by a picture for the kitchen. We had just finished painting the kitchen. I felt worse and worse the longer I was at Target. I felt completely inadequate to Something. Not to over dramatize, but it sent me into a tailspin. I got home – and S. was reading in bed. I laid down next to him and starting crying and crying and crying. I figured out that I was feeling inadequate to the “lifestyle” that virtually everything in Target was representing – matching bathroom decorations, sheets and blankets that represent WHO YOU ARE – CDs and DVDs that carry emotional weight or prove whether your are “mainstream” or “original”– lamps and pictures, and everything that is supposed to show the world what a centered, in control, with it, on top of it person you are. Via your décor. Okay – I’m being flippant now. But, the experience centered around money, since I felt as if I were being asked to choose just a few things that would Represent Me, since I couldn’t afford the whole bag of tricks. On top of all of that, I added the fear that I would never be able to raise a daughter to NOT experience what I had just experienced at Target. Because I hadn’t already put enough pressure on myself.

Do you know what drinking did and reading still does for me? It shuts down the wheels for a while. It gives me a break from a mind that never stops thinking and analyzing and imagining. I was exhausted from thinking. Just getting divorced, much less life in general, provided me with more internal analyzing, thinking, examining, evaluating, restructuring, expecting, and judging than I was interesting in enduring. Obviously its hard for me to quantify too much thinking to anyone outside my own head – it was extreme.