It’s Furious Balancing

I’ve been thinking — off and on over the past day or two — about Denial, specifically how powerful a coping mechanism it can be.

I’ve mentioned somewhere, sometime in this blog that I’m a legal secretary specializing in Probate and Estate Planning, an offshoot of what I euphemistically call the Death Care Industry. ¹ I have worked with Death and Mortality, albeit indirectly, every working day, for thirteen years.

Despite this, I am quite thoroughly convinced that I will live forever.

So far, so good.

I’m wrestling with a Really Big Denial right now. Yeppers, bigger than my belief in my own immortality. The attorney I’ve been working for all these thirteen years will be retiring at the end of December. There will be another estate planning/probate attorney joining the firm, so I’m not worried about losing my job or anything like that. ² It’s just when I contemplate coming into the office and having my boss Not Here, it feels like my stomach bottoms out into a black pit.  The rug is pulled out from underneath me.  I don’t even know how much I can write about how this feels, and I like to think that my verbal skills are my forte.

So, I’ve been choosing to ignore it. Not the wisest choice, but it’s working for me at the moment.

1. I don’t write about my job in great detail for several reasons — worries about privacy (both my own and my clients’) being the predominant concern. That and I don’t define my Essential Self in terms of my job. [↩]
2. Since everyone dies (except me) I have some serious Job Security. [↩]

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 8th, 2007 at 10:42 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.