Failed?

Happy Tax Day to all! Hope you filed in time. I did, just barely, and let me tell you what a joy it is to know that the state and federal governments will retain their stranglehold on my finances for the next several months at least. If anyone ever tells you not to worry and that being an independent contractor is no biggie, don't believe them.

1. Do your homework, and make sure that it's legal for the person to whom you will be providing services to treat you as a contractor. (If they have control over your hours and how and when you choose to get your work accomplished beyond setting key deadlines, then it is not legal; whether full-time or part-time, you are acting as their employee and they need to pay and protect you as such.)
2. Figure out how much you need in take-home pay to live on, and then make sure you are being paid at least one and half times that amount; the extra half will go to your tax liabilities (and your health or other insurance).
3. Pay those liabilities quarterly, and pay them all by the end of the calendar year; underpayment penalties suck.

And if you're not comfortable with the arrangement or don't feel that you understand being an independent contractor well enough, don't let anyone bully you into accepting it just because they don't think you have any reason to be uncomfortable ... I let people do that to me, and I'm still paying for it two years later, and I'm still pissed off about it because I was right and I should have fought for what I needed as a worker.

However, the failure in question is not my failure to handle my taxes appropriately. Instead, it has to do with the test that God may have been laying out for me, which I think I totally boffed.

About two weeks ago, I'd reached a new and exciting level of depression not experienced at that intensity in many years. (When you start considering slitting your wrists and letting someone find you dead as a form of revenge, you know something's gone horribly awry with your coping mechanisms.) The primary factor in this new state has been my new housing situation, which was the 100-pound straw that broke the camel's back of my stress management. My roommate and I are not a good match, and it makes home dreadfully uncomfortable for me and totally messes with my place of peace, I didn't know how to handle it at all. My therapist was telling me to engage, be open about how I felt, work it out by talking through it despite my natural preference for non-verbal communication. I felt like God was also telling me that I needed to come up with a new way to handle this conflict, because my current ways of dealing with it were not helping the situation. I think both God and my therapist are going to be very disappointed in me.

I spent a couple of days trying to figure out how to engage and work it out, and then I chose an alternate route - disengage as completely as possible. I don't really talk to my roommate anymore, I avoid being in the common areas with her as little as possible ... and if I can, I prefer not to be at home while she's here and awake. It's a little tricky to manage, but my work and events schedule helps out tremendously; on the weekends, it's a little more dicey, but manageable. I do think it has reduced what little cooking I was starting to do to almost non-existent, but it's not like I was that much of a cook to begin with. I like foods that require minimal prep time before consumption.

Perhaps some would argue that this was the immature, cowardly way out. They might be right. I guess I felt like I was faced with a choice: keep trying to deal with this problem and spend the rest of a month crying, or pick the option that gave me at least space, if not peace. Others might argue that those options don't really factor in the power of the Lord to help me through this, and that if I had more faith who knows what I might have discovered about how this would work out. They might also be right; I certainly feel like, if I had been a better Christian and a better person, I would have been able to find the truly positive, healing resolution. Unfortunately, I'm just me ... and try as I might to pray while I was crying, I guess I wasn't doing it right, because no help seemed to come. A friend today told me I was wise to know my limits and not try to do more than I'm able. I'd like to believe her, and not have to feel guilty for not being whatever it is I feel like I ought to have been.

This has been a real faith trial for me, in a year or more of real faith trials. I really feel like I need the Lord to show or give me a bit more to get through this, because I don't have any idea where He is or what He's asking me or how on earth He expects me to get through all of this stuff in one piece. I might be overly demanding, since He's the Lord of the universe and has already given me everything good that ever happened to me ... but He keeps asking me to hold on to things that I can't see or feel and that are totally intangible in my life, and I know I'm part spirit but I'm also part physical matter and I'm tired and I'm lonely and I'm sensory and I feel like He doesn't even care about that. And then it all makes me ask what or why I bother believing - and that scares the crap out of me, because even though I'm having a pretty rough time with God these days, without Him, what's the point?