The Repo Man Cometh

The truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again.

-Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart

5/5/25 7:20 AM Monday

How should I tell you this? They repo’d my car yesterday. I have felt the strangest combo of emotions. Shame, grief, anger, relief, acceptance. Well, that’s that. Well, that’s over.

… Deep sadness, too. I worked so hard to get it. I was so proud. Life fell apart in ways I couldn’t predict. I am not ok, & I am perfectly fine. How can so much be true?

…I have been thinking lately about how I’m sure it’s great & life changing for some people to read theory, but it’s insane to me that some people need to read it to comprehend life’s injustices. Isn’t living enough? Isn’t life punching you in the gut every day enough? To be honest/brutally, the idea of being so out of touch with reality disgusts me.

I am so hopeful that I’ll get pregnant and secretly convinced that I am infertile, too old, too medicated, not healthy enough. The sun is warming me up. I’m free from it all.

5/6/25 7:45 AM Tuesday

For all my positivity, I broke down once I sent the email. My heart is broken. I belonged there. I put my whole heart into those 19 hours a week.

5/7/25 8:20 AM Wednesday

All of it is too much, too heavy. Worse than any breakup. On par with my mom dying. I am not ready to face others. Not ready to acknowledge what I’ve let happen.

… I am so tired. I miss my husband. I think these people are crazy. I don’t know. What’s the emergency? That I am losing my mind.

…Nobody fucking gets it. Every hardship reduces me to a petulant teenager. Don’t talk to me, don’t look at me, don’t touch me. Life goes on. Not fair, not fair, not fair.

…There will always be a gulf between a person who thinks they understand and the one who knows they don’t. I don’t always see things for what they are. But it only takes a few steps back to see, oh, that’s a mark of depression. Get it? It’s not ok, I’m not ok. And yet! We carry on.

(Now)

I got a new job. I quit the grocery store. It was time. I outgrew it, like an old pair of shoes, like a hairstyle that doesn’t suit me anymore. I’ll miss my coworkers but I didn’t fit in anymore and that’s ok.

My new library job is making me feel more insane than I did before, which I wasn’t sure was possible. I am floating between two branches, which makes it feel like I still have two jobs, which kind of defeats the purpose of leaving the grocery store, but I digress. I have less time than I did before to dedicate to each branch. Roughly 15 hours at each to make a 30 hour work week. At one branch, there is no manager. (Look at me - I’m the manager now.) I am not really sure what I’m doing and it doesn’t feel like anyone else is sure what I’m doing either. All of the things I used to do don’t transfer. I am a body in the building. Looking at my planner, at all of the programs I planned for summer that I won’t be able to host, that will probably be canceled, makes me sick to my stomach. Remember - I put my whole heart into those 19 hours a week.

I started taking my medicine again. I’m sure not taking it for a few days made everything worse than it had to be. I didn’t really stop taking it on purpose and I didn’t stop for that long, but I also felt so sad regardless that it seemed besides the point but it wasn’t.

This morning someone picked me up to go to a different branch to host Story Time. The staff member who previously hosted it just retired, and they don’t have a ton of people who feel comfortable leading story time, so they needed reinforcements. This is the first time in weeks I have felt confident, in control, and like myself.

I don’t love that I have become so attached to my job and that my self worth is very wrapped up in that conception of myself. It is not just that I loved working at the library and so working at any branch will be just as good. I used to think that. Now I understand that I loved working at the library I worked at with the people I worked with with the community I was building. I do not like change. I do not like starting over. I do not like a schedule that shifts each week. I do not like people communicating about me but not to me.

I do not like that I tried so fucking hard, that I worked as much as I could, that nobody could help me in the ways I needed them to, that I felt and feel so desperately lonely and alone, that I pushed myself and pushed myself and it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t even close.

The repo man cometh and the repo man taketh and the repo man stood outside my house and didn’t bother to tell me he was the repo man. It doesn’t matter. It means everything to me. There’s nothing I can do and I can’t stop trying to do something.

If someone said, we’re going to cut off one of your feet but you can have your old library job back, I’d say, “Just one? Lucky me.”