Rescue

The first step, for me, is acknowledging that the expectation of rescue is really quite spiritual.  This is how I will begin to shed the guilt of being 'here' in the first place, 'here' being almost 28, living in my mother's home, paying off a college degree I am not using with money earned from a full-time retail job that cannot support me.  It certainly cannot support any dreams I have hoped to live out, any dignity I have expected to have.  Not to mention that I hate my job, 'Sporting Goods Department Head at Blain's Farm and Fleet'.  Lord, how I hate my job!  It is flattening my feet, making me tired and fat, and instilling me with such a deep-hatred of my fellow man that I am beginning to relish the idea of any kind of apocalypse that would remove me/them from this planet.  Pictures of the Blain family might as well be Chairman Mao posters, or images of Big Brother, the Farm and Fleet eagle at the top of my newsletter might as well be rendered in gilded ink, be stamped 'From the desk of Joseph Goebbels'.  My tendency towards hyperbole does not take me too far from the truth in this case.  I truly believe that these people are bad.  I truly believe they think that I am stupid, and that they can make money off me while shaming me for not working harder, to say nothing of the poor Indonesians who are making the crap that I sell in my department, nor the poor saps who buy this shit with their hard earned money.  I want capitalism to fold, I want democracy to buckle, and I want every miserable son-of-a-bitch whoever asked me to check in the back for something to have his brain devoured by a zombie against the backdrop of a smog-filled sky, while dead, three-headed ducks float by on a green river of toxic waste. 
And I know I am not supposed to feel this way!  On the one hand, I am supposed to feel very lucky that things are not nearly as bad as they could be, given the history of human experience, and on the other I am supposed to be putting up some sort of fight to improve things, for myself and/or for others, aka adjusting my work ethic, morals, expectations, etc.  Everything is fine, but in the off-chance that you want it to stop sucking you will have to worker harder/smarter/etc.  Independence may well be a state of the soul, but I would argue that it is easier to achieve such a state with a job that can pay your rent without destroying your spirit/leave you praying for nuclear fall-out.  And as of late, not knowing how to proceed on a new path or to adjust to the one I find myself on, my hope has turned to the unrealistic place it always has, aka lottery winnings, being the next J.K. Rowling with my 5 awful first pages of my awful first novel, coming into a large amount of money through some improbable familial or romantic connection, etc.  I have been ashamed of myself since childhood for relying so naively on the idea that help was coming.  After all, one who needs help cannot help themselves, so one should not wish for help, let alone expect it to fall from the sky.  Middle class people are not supposed to believe they cannot help themselves.  Educated people are not supposed to believe that they cannot help themselves.  Feminists are not supposed to believe that they cannot help themselves. And I am (or have been told that I am) all of these things.
So, in summation, I'm a little angry.  At the world, at everyone who told me things were going to be ok, everyone who told me to follow my dreams, everyone who told me to forget them, everyone who  told me to buck-up,  everyone who told me to give up.  So basically, everyone.  Even you.  But mostly, I am furious at myself.  Because I am not supposed to feel angry at Prince Charming for never showing up, because I was never supposed to believe in him in the first place.
But whether it is Prince Charming slaying the dragon, or Uncle Charles Dickens sending in a kind, wealthy relative at the most desperate of moments, or the helicopter swooping up beneath you as you lose your grip on the cliff-face, I believe the implication is the same.  Help is coming.  Believe, and do not give up hope.  When you surrender your control, you gain the aid of the universe.  And not in the form of the zombie-apocalypse, which I believe is generally viewed as something to be avoided, despite my rigorous and hopeful planning... 


The earliest lessons from school and family were how to avoid these situations.  Stay away from dragons, poverty, and cliff-faces.  Go to college, don't have babies until you're ready, and learn to support yourself.  All good advice, all loving and sound.  All from people who believe in me, who believe the world is a good place, a place that nurtures and provides the worthy with what they need.  And knowing this, I have tried to follow these bits of advice the best way I know how, which has proved to be not good enough, or the world too changed for any effort of mine to matter at all.  I still feel like I am trying to hold on to the side of a skyscraper with my fingernails, and worse, that help isn't coming for I haven't proved myself to be worthy of it.  If it did come, say in the form of a free-place to live, I would surely learn, in my bitterness, to resent it. 

And still, I will not let the notion go.  It is a bit of hope trapped in the box when all the evil is released on the world, or a stubborn way of not getting a master's degree, or keeping myself from believing that I will be in retail my whole life.  I don't know what form I should put my faith in.  But I am somewhat glad, embarrassed as I am by my silly girlishness, that it has not abandoned me, when everything indicates that it should.  If the woodsmen wants to slay the big bad wolf, I think he and I can work out the gender-role issue later.  Right now, I just want to believe that he is still coming.