One thing I’ve learned recently you know Mom, is they are right, a lot the good stuff in life begins as bad stuff. In the end, it’s all perspective, and how one chooses to continue afterwards.

So Monday morning I go into work for 8am. A snowstorm overnight had slowed everything down a bit, as the sidewalks where giant drifts and snow still covered the roadways, but I arrived at the same time I always do. I started off my day in the way I always start, arriving a half hour earlier. One of the first things I usually do is check to see if they’d updated my schedule, and they had.

Our new shift bid had gone through and we were beginning to see the product of the changes. Well, right then and there something snapped inside me, and I broke.

Whatever will or whatever I’d used all the days previous had been jarred out of kilter, and quite frankly I think I actually had a mini-breakdown right there at work. I’m not going into the specifics as they are redundant, but the world of call centres is about numbers on a balance sheet, about metrics, and coverage, and lives and individuals and work/life balance are things one must scrape together best way one can – these places can not care, and do not, as the bottom line is the only line they recognize.

I swear, standing there amongst that dry, cold truth is daunting for one such as I. I’d been well treated in the past by their cold metrics, and it had lulled me into a certain compliancy.

Sometimes I wonder you know if you did Lex and I a disservice loving us so much. Perhaps demonstrating the power of unconditional love is so strange that we sometimes suffer for our softness, our sense that we are cared for. I do. I often feel as though I am wounded by that mean old world outside my door. I almost gave up on Monday.

So I decided to take a step back and really look at where I am and where exactly it is I want to be. I’ve been on automatic pilot since my deliverance from the mouth of grief, and I’d lost my ultimate direction.

I wonder this morning as I sit here and dash off these words what today will hold for me at that cold-minded call centre. Yet last night, as I walked Irish through the quiet village streets, as the misty snow fell, it felt like I was being christened anew.

I don’t know what life has in store for me, but at least now I know what I want is possible. I’m no longer that trapped animal in a cage I was, or thought myself to be. They have their metrics, and I have mine. They have their goals, but I have my own, and finding our way through, or hunting for that open window to crawl out if need be, well sometimes we all need to do what we must to survive. It would really be a shame to have come this far only to let them derail me, and forget that I’m only caged if I let myself believe I am.

Always,