Which is of course exactly why I was hired by Mayer/Berkshire shortly after. Figures.I had sent out the resume some time before my ship sank and frankly I had forgotten all about it. This created a very unexpected problem.I had a job but by now it was too late. The damage that the Nomad year caused was so severe that I no longer wanted to work in the design field. To be honest, at the time I got the call from M/B I was beginning to think of other things nonprofessional types could do for a living, like being a truck driver or a dominatrix. I crack myself up with that last one...but seriously, I was signing up for workshops. Then suddenly Nomad was over. All logic said I should be overjoyed, but I found I was no longer interested. It was like trying to attach a limb thought lost to a healed scar. Beanie forced me to go to my new job but I was terribly shell-shocked. Though I wouldn't say Mayer/Berkshire is corporate, it was still a far cry from the more unconventional jobs I'd had. As far as corporate culture is concerned, I'm hopelessly awkward. I was so afraid of miss-stepping that I skipped my lunch breaks to hide by my desk and didn't talk to anyone for months. Emotional progress was painfully slow, but with the job came the fantastic possibility of getting an apartment. Finally I could let go of the dead weight I had been carrying with me for so long as a vagabond.Which created yet another very unexpected problem.There were a lot of emotions that swirled around when I finally got a home, but the most unexpected one was pain. With every piece of my life that I reclaimed from those cardboard boxes I felt something akin to being kicked in the stomach. The Nomad years had been hard, but I had no idea how much hurt had been locked away until the boxes began to open. The event that I had waited so long for as being a grand release became a hollow, bitter and torturous rite of reclamation. And then Winter came. I had been living the apartment for three months but the darkness of the Nomad era was still clinging to me. By February I began to panic. The idea that despite accomplishing the final step in my master plan of self salvation I was still depressed was enough to drive me to edge several times. I even called the suicide hot line, which I'll tell you was not very helpful. Putting myself back together after the Nomad term took nearly a year, a whole year more than I thought it would. The memories continue to hang around the edges of my mind like pond scum, but that's okay. The Spring had returned.