Rough around the edges

Tomorrow it will be a week that I've been feeling literally sick about a situation I'm dealing with. I'll decline to comment on the details online, but I will say it is a situation where I was treated with a considerable amount of disrespect. I find myself wondering if I could ever be a person who can experience these kinds of things and let it roll off my back. Instead, I ruminate, fret, and have trouble sleeping. Why does the opinion of 1-2 people who don't like me seem to matter more than the opinions of possibly dozens of people who do?

In the midst of feeling this way I had the opportunity for a non-job interview. What that means is that I'm in the middle of a fed gov't process to be in a pool of people that could be called upon when a job does open. This is about as close to my dream job as I could probably get. Monday I had an interview which also included a 10 minute presentation I had to make. The situation above has me so screwed up that I had much more stress than usual - there was a moment about 15 minutes before the interview that I thought I was going to have a full blown panic attack. But I got through - even after I realized that rather than transferring my presentation to a memory stick I had put a shortcut to my presentation one the memory stick. I.e. I did not have my PowerPoint with me. The interviewers seemed understanding. There were looks and nods that I interpreted positively as the process went on. I learned that 14/177 people have made it to the interview stage, so that 's pretty good. But to have made it this far and then flub it at the end would really, really suck.

Despite the emotional upheaval, I would have to say I feel closer to God than I have in years. Rob and I have both been reading McLaren's books and have found them extremely helpful in making sense of things that have seemed incongruent in the past. I have a greateer sense that I am a part of something bigger than myself. I had a moment today that seemed like such a God-moment, a pocket of holiness in the middle of Tim Horton's. I'm finding I can trust even while walking through this crap.

I attended a workshop that simulates the experience of hearing voices such as people with schizophrenia do. It was extremely eye-opening. The process was disorienting and confusing and the behaviours of people with schizophrenia make more sense to me now because I found I started to act the same way - I had trouble concentrating, I couldn't answer simple questions and I started laughing out loud.