Crush Anxieties

I promised my therapist that I would not look at job boards for at least a week. It’s only been a few hours, and already I am feeling anxious.

I know, I know… Only three months ago I declared my freedom from never having to work a job, ever again. But, I have yet to receive my first full pension check, and there’s still several months before I will be eligible for a social security check. Yes, yes, I have savings, but what if something happens? I don’t know… a zombie apocalypse? A depletion of social security funds? I run out of coffee? God forbid! *clutches pearls*

I just know it’s beginning to feel…uncomfortable this, not having a job, and I am beginning to feel a little anxious. Did you feel this way a few months into your retirement? It feels like a progressive itch for which no amount of scratching will satisfy. I know there are those who will shrug off my feelings as first world problems, but each time I check my phone for notifications, at least half of those checks that I do is to see what’s available in the job market, and what’s popping up on numerous job alerts that I set long ago. This eerie, unsettling sensation is threatening to sabotage my ascension into the ease and soft life I’ve been planning.

I almost titled this essay, “Until the First Check Comes,” but I quickly realized that this feeling has less to do with money and income, than with deep-seated, society-imposed, fear, anxiety about the future, and assumptions of lack and limitation, not only in life in general; but in the lives of Black women in particular. You see, Black women have always worked. When (White) women were relegated to the status of simply housewife, Black women longed for that shit. (We longed to have a house.) Instead, my grandmother worked in the railroad yard when she was fifteen. My mother was considered fortunate when she finally reached the status of housewife, but she did so for her babies, with the threat of abuse always looming.

Those firmly establish communal mindsets, are coupled with our complexed patterns of associating our intrinsic value and self-worth to the physical work we do. That’s right, I said it. So, I, like many of us of a certain age, must relearn, overstand, trust, and recognize, that we have value and worth—Just. As. We. Are. As Michael Benard Beckwith reminds us, we are, each of us, unique emanations of the Divine Spirit…the presence that is never in absence. And baby, that means we’re something special just like we are.