Can there be hope for the new year?

I tried to paint tonight. I was not able to. There was too much in my head, too many things to think about, too many threats looming on the horizon over which I have little or no control. I decided to do some sewing instead so the day would not be a total loss. I pulled out the pattern and the fabric I wanted to use only to find I didn’t have enough. Once again, my resources fell short of what was required. I ended up just sitting in the fading light, alone with my own darker thoughts. This has been my New Year’s Eve, not a time of celebration, but a time of reflection on the bitter disappointments of 2019 with no reason to suppose that 2020 will be any better.

I am not, however, a pessimist. I consider myself to be a hopeful realist. I tend to be brutally honest with myself in assessing the world around me and my own place in it. I have a sense of my own value and abilities, and I know myself to be creative and tenacious. I can usually find a way forward even when the path is not obvious. I keep plugging away at things long after most people would have quit. Some might call it persistence, others stubbornness, and I sometimes wonder if I’m just to stupid to know when to stop. I seem to be having one of those days today, facing a number of seemingly unsolvable problems and being frustrated by all of them at once.

I wanted to paint but my studio was a mess because of the disruption holiday decorations bring to the house. This will be taken care of fairly soon, but it is a process, so the studio remained too cluttered for me to work without distraction. The sewing project may still be doable, but it will require some adjustments and some creative thinking on a level I just didn’t seem capable of this evening. These and a few other small frustrations took on greater significance than they should have today because there are a couple of larger issues looming in the background.

We live in a duplex and the apartment next to us was recently vacated. The landlord has decided to take the opportunity to clean the place up and do some much-needed maintenance. Rick and I stopped in yesterday to check their progress and say hello. We were admiring their work when the handyman said something to the effect that it could be ours for a mere $1.200 per month. We smiled and left. We had asked about exploring the possibility of moving over there once he was done, but that apartment turned out to be smaller than ours and that rent is half again what we are paying now. It would be impossible for us to pay that much. It would eat up Rick’s entire income and my income is unreliable. That is the second big issue.

I have been working at Joann’s for the last year and the main problem, besides it being a minimum wage job, is that the number of hours they give me varies wildly from week to week. They might give me as much as 28 hours one week, which would be fine, or as little as 10 another, which is not so fine. I have had a couple of second jobs over this year in an attempt to stabilize the unreliable income offered by Joann's, but both of them have been a bust. The first one was for a small local art teacher who was trying to start up a school. She could only offer me 5 hours a week, which seemed somewhat ridiculous, but there was hope that those hours would increase over time, so I gave it a try. After a few months she decided she couldn’t even afford 5 hours and wanted to cut me down to fewer, even asking me to not work at all one week. I decided it wasn’t worth the hassle and we parted company. I started looking again and in the fall was called to interview at A.C. Moore. I was hired on the spot and divided my time between them and Joann’s for a couple of months. It wasn’t a great job, but it was working out. It worked until A.C. Moore was acquired by Michael’s just a few weeks ago, and it was announced that the store would be closing. We were all to lose our jobs sometime in the new year. I talked to the manager at Joann’s and was assured that they needed me there and would offer me more hours if I left the other store early. I had already decided that I wanted to be out of there before the end of the year to make taxes next year easier and because I recognized that the workplace would probably become somewhat toxic before it was over, so I gave my notice. I suppose this could be considered a leap of faith or a sign that I have hope for the future. But that hope was immediately betrayed. Despite telling my manager that I needed at least 20 hours a week, I have been scheduled for 14 this week and 10 next week. I am once again looking for a second job.

If you are not familiar with the job market in Maine let me enlighten you. There are no jobs in the arts, period. There are lots of volunteer opportunities, but everything else is drudgery and minimum wage. The only real jobs are in the medical profession or require specialized training in fields to which I am not suited. I am reduced to retail or food services. It seems the only thing my three degrees are good for up here is preparing me to work at McDonald's, and that don’t pay the rent. And speaking of rent, I imagine that, while the rent has not been increased yet, it will increase soon. The landlord hinted that he might want us to move to the other side so he can work on our apartment. I imagine he would want us to pay more if he did renovations, so such a request would put us on the edge of homelessness. Most other rentals in the area are at least $1,000 per month and often require the tenant to pay for the heat on top of that. We are struggling to get by as it is, so such an increase would be disastrous, and we have no safety net. On top of all this my mom has been hospitalized multiple times this year and she is slowly failing right in front of me. It is clear that I arrived just in time, but I have been denied the possibility of just spending time with her. I have had to step immediately into the role of a caregiver.

So, I sit here looking back at a year that has been full of struggles and disappointments. I see no reason to imagine the year ahead will be better. In fact, there are many things that seem primed to get worse. My mom’s health may stabilize, but it won’t improve. The cost of living will probably increase as will my debt load. I will probably be forced to juggle a second job again, which is stressful enough, but chances are that that job will be unfulfilling and odious. I have been trying to pursue my painting as a way of adding meaning to my life, but what to do with it? I end up just storing it away in a closet once it has been posted on Facebook. Central Maine is not exactly a hotbed of cultural activity and I am not adept at making the connections needed to make an income from art. I imagine that all that work will end up in a dumpster once I die, meaningful to me for a time, but of no value to anyone else. So, what's the point? In a culture where a person’s worth is determined by money, the fact that I can’t even get paid for a minimum of 20 hours a week at minimum wage is quite demoralizing. So, I'm left with the question I began with. Can there be hope for the new year? Of course. I just can't see it from here.