Clockwork Woman

The last couple months have been weird.  The murkiness of our future has been hanging over my head so heavily for the last few months, that I actually stopped obsessively dreaming about hungry black holes sucking me into nothingness.  Instead I had these ridiculous, attending-school-without-pants dreams.  You know, the one where you show up late for a class that you forgot you had (even though you are long done with school), and have to take an exam that you didn't study for, and then, to top it all off, you glance down only to discover that for some bizarre reason, you have neglected to fully dress the lower half of your body.  Fan.tastic.

We sat around waiting to see if we would move, and to which of the possible five locations we would move to, and in the end, the only option was not a financially viable one.  Doctorate applications for big U.S. universities are a nightmare, especially if you are a Non-U.S. student in a tiny country, completing your masters in a university no one in the U.S. has heard of.  The University where my husband was excepted, unfortunately, wanted us to show them a bank account with 80,000 US dollars, just so that he could be admitted and then look for funding within the system.  Just reflecting back on this makes me laugh somewhat bitterly, as we live in a country where the average monthly pay is 30 USD per 8-12 hour day.  That's 600 USD per month.  Of course, now that the exchange rate has changed, and not in our favor, it is more like 550/month.  Meanwhile the price of food and rent continues to climb, as pay for blue collar jobs and unskilled workers remains the same.

I spent a good two solid weeks trying to cheer up my morose and disappointed husband, putting on the best happy face that I could.  Let me tell you, "happy face" is exhausting!  Especially when while smiling, you are taking the (rude) brunt of someones disappointment.  I suppose in a way, I was trying to avoid my own disappointment by discouraging his.

The problem with happy face, other than being annoyingly exhausting, is that once you finally give in and confront your "negative" feelings, you are too exhausted from pretending that everything is ok and putting on a brave face, to successfully rationalize and overcome those "negative" feelings and the reasons behind them.  Some of the darkest women I've known were peppy, smiley, vivacious women, who on the inside, were secretly dying a little each day.

If there is a moral to the story, it would be to confront your fears, your disappointments, your anger.  Don't let it fester underneath the surface while pretending everything is ok.  Holding back your tears or suppressing your anger does not make you a strong person.  It makes you a broken robot.

My clockwork lady.  Watercolor on paper, reference photo for the non-clockwork lady features used (from Vogue).