MANUAL LABOUR...at least for me. I just got a job building, dismantling and stocking shelves. It involves some heavy lifting, working with wood and metal, handling merchandise, and standing on my feet for 7.5 hours in a pair of steel-toe shoes that are as stiff as cardboard. Hard work, but it's a real blessing to have a job at all. I'd been teaching English for the last 13 years, but had to bid farewell to that career just a few short months ago because of the voice disability (see older post on Spasmodic Dysphonia). Now, with this strangled voice, all I'm good for until I can afford further job re-training is manual labour. I'm fortunate to still have a pretty strong body to handle this kind of work. I'm also glad that I've long given up my more feminine proclivities - craigslisted all my shoes (not that I had a whole lot of shoes to begin with actually), donated the dresses, discarded the goopy colourful make-up that was a bitch to take off, got the hair cut short so I wouldn't have to think about it, stripped my appearance down and wore only dull dark colours so I'd be less conspicuous. As a matter of fact, I could actually be a boy - I mean a BOY, not a man!
Not that I despise the woman in me, but doing this sort of work doesn't exactly bring up images of me walking down the runway in Karl Lagerfeld's latest creation for the House of Chanel. Better yet, a sweeping silky red Oscar de la Renta number with matching purse. The woman in me has just disappeared for a while till I can bring myself back up to speed, and if it takes working 40 hours a week on a construction site making the daily wages that many newcomers to Canada make, so be it. It's a far cry from my teaching days, but my teaching days required another kind of labour - mental - that was just as exhausting as working with your hands all day.
What I particularly wanted to say about manual labour is that I'm so zonked out from standing on my feet, lifting, carrying, moving, shoving, pulling, and crouching at the end of the day, that I just can't give time to anything else. As a matter of fact, I barely have enough energy to even think. Which brings me to the main point of this post and that is - manual labour has become my anti-depressant. I've been wrestling with a lot of troubling emotions in the last couple of months, weeks, even years...without any end to the daily thoughts and feelings that many people feel when they're down. However, doing this sort of work takes your mind off of that, and actually numbs the pain just like a real anti-d pill does. There are no pills here except the ones I'm stocking on the shelves nor no possible side effects, just physical labour...and a feeling of numbness. No emotions. All I hear is the shuffling and shifting of my body as it moves to and fro doing what my mind chose for a temporary period of time. A temporary period of time to allow me some freedom from the conscious awareness of my reality. Some time and space to re-balance the spirit. With my dirty and scraped hands, I feel a certain emptiness of being, but I can also sense being in the here and now.
I don't necessarily feel great. I feel humbled. In the past, I tried messing with the gods (and messed up), and they've sent me right back to square one, perhaps just a little higher than the lowest rung. They took my voice away, gave me an incurable heartache and poison, and then left me for dead. So I realized that I needed to figure this thing out, and what appeared was this job. There are long intervals of time when my heart and head can clear, and that's all I really need right now. I'm glad to be taking this "pill" at the moment, and I'm hoping it'll continue to numb me until all the "bad" stuff dies in me. Everything else will hopefully remain intact, for after this labour-intensive job is done, and the clouds have cleared, a new path with more lessons to be learned will be ready and waiting for me.
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