Remember Me? (Part One in Catching Up!)

OK, fine. I’m blogging again. Hi. Remember me?

I’m Natalie.

All that I have written thus far in this space was a chronicle of my daily life in the year 2008. This chronicle included my last days at the newspaper where I worked. Yes, worked. Past tense. I was an employee of a company that declared bankruptcy. And I think they held me on as long as they could, but come December 2008, the week before Christmas, I was taken into a conference room and told to pack my things. Merry Christmas. I was also given a legal document to sign, stating that I would never speak negatively about the company. Which put me in a bit of a conundrum over the state of this here blog. I was unemployed, and legally bound to follow the motherly advice of, “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” I was safe with everything I wrote before, as an employee, but now I couldn’t be as free with my words. So I stopped writing here, signed off, and crept away. Another archeological ruin of the Internet, waiting to be deleted or rediscovered.

Since then, the company I worked for was sold. Powers changed. I believe the legal binding still stands – I can’t say a negative thing. But I can still write my personal adventures, and rest safely in the knowledge that nothing negative was published on this space. And with time, wounds heal. I can exhale, shake up the ol’ blog, and know that I won’t write anything that will get me sued.

Being unemployed was depressing, yes, but also? Kind of awesome.
Hang out with grad student friends on Spring Break at 3 in the afternoon? Sure.
Baby-sit a toddler in the middle of the morning? Available.
Lunch with working friends, then home for an afternoon nap? Yes, please.
Mid-day visits to my mom’s work, errands with my dad, walks in the park, books on the sofa and endless cups of tea on the balcony with the cat were amazing blessings; the gift of free time, of meandering the neighborhood, of watching the morning sun drift across the living room. My apartment was never cleaner, my clothes never more organized, and days would go by without my car moving from its place in the driveway. I spent weekends living at Mr. B’s, and still had ample alone time to suit my introverted nature. I pinched pennies, tapped into my savings, picked up some part-time work assisting an established writer and spent a few months trying to sort out which direction to take, which path to walk. I managed to get by, though the future was never quite certain.

And during this time, I didn’t write. Didn’t lift a pen to chronicle my days, didn’t carry a notebook to jot down my thoughts, didn’t blog or type or journal or anything, really, of any greater length than a Facebook status update or a grocery list. I was burned out, the lingering stress of my working environment clung to me, like the scent of cigarette smoke to woolen cloth. It took months to shake the resentment, the stings of the daily racism and sexism, the gaping void of deposits in my bank account, the feelings of worthlessness in a busy capitalist society. I wasn’t meant to be a silver spoon, there was no trust fund keeping me from the working world.

For the first part of unemployment, I channeled all my energy into cleaning. I rearranged the entire apartment, cleaned out closets, washed everything, scrubbed the stains that were older than I was from the corners of my 80-plus-year-old walls. I donated. Purged. Tossed. The flat smelled of lavender soap and incense, masking the scent of bleach and borax. Soon there was nothing left to clean but me.

I had to pull myself up, dust off the compass, and get on with it.

So. I moved to London.