Far From Center

I completely dropped the ball on keeping up with this, but I think it's important to have a record of what went on so I'm screwing my courage to the sticking point and soldiering on. 

I went alone to the breast doctor. I really didn't have any idea what I was doing. (If anyone ever has to go to a doctor's visit like this, bring someone!) I brought my mammogram results with me. The doctor had me wait two hours. Yes, two hours. By the time I saw her I was furious, and all she said was she had to tell someone before me they had cancer. That was sad, yes, but it didn't explain why I had to wait two hours. 

She looked at my results and said she saw some calcifications, but she didn't explain what that meant. Then she said she needed to do a biopsy before she could tell anything definitively. There was something suspicious on my left breast, too, so I asked if she could biopsy that also. She told me to schedule the biopsy on the way out. Keep in mind I had no idea what was going on, and I had no idea what a proper time frame was.  I was told that the first available date was five weeks away. Yes, I said that right. Five weeks. How was I supposed to wait five weeks with this hanging over me? In my head, it obviously meant they didn't think anything was wrong, or else it would have been scheduled earlier. Right??? I had no idea that cancer patients usually had a much shorter time frame, usually two weeks start to finish. It went like this: find something suspicious, biopsy it, have surgery. Boom. Done.  I was at the one week mark already. I didn't know any of that, though. All I knew was I didn't like this doctor and I didn't think they respected me or my time. However, I didn't know what to do. I thought I was stuck. So I went ahead and scheduled it. 

I remember thinking to myself,  just hold on. You can do this. You are strong enough. I started praying and praying for God to give me strength to get through this. I thought I had swirling before. Now I couldn't even hear myself think. There was a humming noise in my head. I was far from my center now, and just trying to hold on. 

The Swirling in my Brain

In December, my husband's paternal grandmother finally passed away. It was a blessing because she had been bedridden and vegetative for years. She made my husband the executor of the estate, even though her son was still alive. Her son was that bad. She would never have trusted him to follow her wishes. However, she had a relatively large estate and and there were many many things that needed to be done. The funeral needed to be planned. Appraisals needed to be done for all the belongings in the house. A new home had to be found for my husband's father (he was living in her basement). And I already had a lot on my plate. So as you can imagine this just added to the stress we were under.

Every night I would close my eyes and things would just swirl around me like a tornado. Everything felt out of control. My mother did not feel she had anyone to talk to about my father so she would call me, sometimes 3 times a day. It was to tell me the new horrible thing my father had done. While he couldn't walk consciously, for some reason in the middle of the night he would get up and take his pajamas off and pee all over the place and then not be able to get back to bed. He was a dead weight so if I couldn't help she'd have to call 911. One time he got stuck in the bathtub! I told her that she needed to quit telling me all these horrible things. I said I knew she needed to talk about them but couldn't she find someone else? I begged and begged her. She found someone from her church to talk to but still kept telling me what he was doing. She said she couldn't help it. The swirling in my head grew faster.

Adding to the stress our oldest daughter was a senior in highschool. Her school did not have a good college counseling program. The highest achievement they expected was to get into UGA. But she didn't want to go there. Since we got no guidance from the school I was constantly racking my brain trying to think of places she could apply. I wanted her to have that "aha" moment of walking on campus and knowing she had found the right school. I thought of App State in NC as a possibility and made an appointment to take her there Monday, December 8. We were pushing it time wise but her favorite school so far was Rhodes College in Memphis and it was very expensive.

The day before we were going to leave (that would be Sunday, December 7, 2007) I was taking a shower and felt a thickness in my left breast. It felt like it was about 2 inches long and about 1 inch wide. I knew it wasn't supposed to be there but I also knew it could be absolutely nothing. I almost laughed. With everything we were going through there was no way I could have cancer. This was surreal, though. I figured it was just more crap I had to deal with. Since my daughter and I were leaving very early Monday morning I had my husband call the gyn to make an appointment as soon as possible. I wasn't stupid. I knew that if something was found, catching it early meant a better chance of successful treatment. I was proud of myself for taking care of it and not putting it off.

So I didn't tell the kids. I tried not to think about it. We drove to App State and did not fall in love with it. I had an appointment with the gyn the next day, who felt it and said she wasn't sure what it was. I needed to get a mammogram and a sonogram. It was scheduled for later in the week. I had no idea what to expect. Would I know right away? I assumed I wouldn't because the people there weren't doctors. I was 42 so I had had one baseline mammogram. I didn't even remember how it worked.

The swirling in my head was at a fever pitch. I was trying very hard to be calm and I kept telling myself there was no way it could be anything. I was at such a low risk for breast cancer: no family members, I had gotten pregnant early, and I had nursed all my children at least 12 months each. I had done everything right. There was no need to worry. I went alone to my mammogram and was completely clueless. A sign on the wall said not to ask the technicians anything so I didn't. They did a mammogram and then a sonogram. Then I was told I needed to see a breast surgeon. The doctor could interpret the findings. Well okay, that made sense. I didn't get a rush rush feeling. I got an appointment with the doctor for next week and tried to put it out of my head. That was Thursday or Friday.

Early Sunday morning I woke up in a great amount of pain in my stomach. On a scale of 1 to 10 it was a 9. I kept trying to breathe through it. I hoped it was gas. But it wasn't getting any better. I finally had to wake up Elliott. The pain was becoming unbearable. I honestly couldn't believe it. My mind almost refused to comprehend what was happening. Hadn't we gone through enough? I had just found a  lump. Our middle child had failed French with no remorse. Everything was awful, and now this???
The pain was not getting any better so I had to go to the emergency room. I had gallbladder disease. I needed surgery. All I could think was you have GOT to be kidding me. I was given strong pain medicine and told to eat a very bland diet and they would schedule the surgery as soon as possible. By now it's the middle of December and I still had Christmas shopping to do. I did my best to hold it together but the swirling in my brain was so bad a hole in the earth was forming. I didn't want to fall in that hole. And I still had to go see the breast surgeon.

Down the rabbit hole

After Disney, things didn't change much. My father spiraled further down into dementia. He needed a wheelchair which made it even harder for him to get out of the house. My mother had to hire people (finally) to come to the house to help take care of him. At first it was a few times a week, but it gradually moved up to almost all the time, except at night. He needed help with everything--things you don't think of when something like this happens. He couldn't brush his teeth, or go to the bathroom, or hold a drink, or get dressed, or anything without help. Mom was getting very worn down. My brother and I tried to help but it was tough for us too. It was just awful.

Making things worse, we still had the bugs from hell infesting our house. They were so bad we had to spray Bengal spray in the basement before people came over so they wouldn't fly in people's faces. I learned to leave on one light overnight so they would be drawn to it and I could vacuum them up more easily.  Plumbers and exterminators kept coming out but to no avail. No one could figure out where they were coming from.

At this time our middle daughter started a course of medicine to clear up her skin. It was the summer before she started highschool and we wanted her to be able to start without having to worry about her skin. We knew it was a strong medicine, so strong in fact that even though she was only 14 she had to get a pregnancy test each month to prove she wasn't pregnant before getting her prescription filled. What we didn't know was that one of the rare side effects was a type of personality change. She had been a reader, spending hours and hours reading everything she could get her hands on. She didn''t particularly talk back to her dad or me. She was pleasant, smart, charming, friendly, enthusiastic about new experiences, and generally a joy to be around. All of that changed right before high school. She started talking back to us, yelling at everyone in the house, and slamming doors. At first we thought this was typical teenaged angst. Puberty. She seemed to hate us. We never even thought about the medicine.

Her grades were bad. This was a girl who had made almost all A's and was very very bright. She was quite capable of sailing through her freshman year with all A's. She had never even made a C before. Her grades started getting really bad. Like C's and D's bad. I went to the school to talk to her counselor and her teachers. What in the world was going on? Why was she doing so badly? The teachers at her school were not exactly caring. "IB is hard, she's making C's, she's fine" was the answer I got. There was no concern over the fact that she wasn't even close to living up to her potential. It was very frustrating. We had her tested for drugs without telling her. No one really thought that was it, but we didn't want to be the kind of parents that were oblivious. She was not on drugs.

I took her to a counselor. The counselor told her to pull up her grades so we wouldn't bug her. She said that if she got good grades she could get away with anything. Then she told our daughter that we were helicopter parents and we needed to let go. I'm good about seeing my faults but helicopter parenting was not one of them. Her entire personality had changed. Finally, the doctor that had prescribed the acne medicine noticed her personality change. He immediately took her off the medicine. That was around October/November. We saw some improvement, but then something else happened that took our attention away.

A Break with the Mouse

In the midst of this we decided to take our family to Disney World. Some people think Disney is fun; some people love Disney; our family adores Disney World. We totally think thousands of dollars spent in a made up world for a week is a good investment. To us, Disney represents a whole week where everyone gets along, there is no complaining, everyone is happy, and everyone is positive. Who wouldn't spend money to achieve that? And the thing is, looking back, we could have used that money to experience some place like Europe or San Francisco but I don't regret a minute of it.

Disney is still fun even when it's raining.

Half the fun Of Disney is in the planning. When we lived in Jacksonville, Florida we bought a season pass for Florida residents. It gave us deals not available to the outside world. For our youngest son's 1st birthday we stayed at the Wilderness Cabins but he got sick and we had to leave. This is how awesome Disney is: I called and said we had to check out early and why, and not only did they not charge us for the unused days, they sent us deals for the Polynesian a few weeks later. So we went again and stayed at the the Polynesian, a dream of mine since I was a little girl. It was everything I hoped it would be. Our memories from there are priceless. The Polynesian has 2 queen beds and a day bed so there was tons of room. The pool area and grounds alone are what normal resorts are made of. You could never go the parks and still have a blast. Anyway, in our planning for this new trip we discovered that Port Orleans Riverside had a trundle bed so we could all fit in one room. Since we were no longer Florida residents, we really couldn't swing anything like the Polynesian.  We booked a room at the Port Orleans. When we got there, it was obviously not as nice as the Polynesian but it was charming and the grounds and pool were beautiful.

Everyone in Animal Kingdom

The first day we left super early and got back really late. We were all exhausted and dragging when we approached our room. When we got close we could tell the lights and tv were on and there was something in the window. At first, the kids were confused--we know we didn't leave the lights or TV on. The stuffed animals that we had brought had been set up to watch the Disney channel--Stitch was holding the remote. Other ones were swinging in the window blinds.The housekeepers had set this all up as a surprise. Can I say how much I love Disney? What an awesome ending to a great day.

N and E with Darth Maul--a little creepy!

Things like Disney kept our family sane during this horrible time. We could all forget that my father was slowly dying and losing himself every day and that our house was filled with disgusting bugs that we couldn't get rid of. We know Disney is made up. We know that real Floridians disapprove of the mouse. But for me and my family, there is no better value than a week of happiness in the Florida sunshine.

more of the same

My sister graduated from college that May. Dad came to the ceremony, gray and shaking, but still having a grasp of what was going on around him. He sat far away in the shade, just patiently waiting for someone to come get him. Growing up, he was not the most patient man and if I'd have to guess, I would have thought he would be a mean and grumpy old person. The thing is though, he was so gentle and quiet while all of this was going on. He never lost his temper. Me, I would have ranted and raved and shook my fist to the world at the unfairness of it all. He was just so brave. He knew what was coming and he met it with dignity.

Since it was now May, you know what had come back again? That's right, sewer flies! It was our second summer with them. I called the big pest control companies like Orkin and every plumber I could think of. Every single guy thought he had found the problem-We weren't using the tub downstairs enough, the hose from the washer didn't have a seal on it, the bar sink wasn't working, etc. All of these problems were believable because of the true awfulness of the house. So they would "fix" it and for one or two days things seemed to improve. We kept at it until fall came. That made the score sewer flies  2(summers) and us 0.

We were still working on improving the house. Every single light fixture was changed out. Every single surface got the wallpaper removed, and every single surface had to be repainted, including ceilings. We changed out all of the old fake brass doorknob. We stripped down the fireplace to the studs and built it back up again.

The collapse

One day, when our middle child was in 7th grade, I was driving out of our neighborhood to pick her up after school. At a stop sign, there were 5 cars ahead of me and I could see a fire engine and people milling about. I wondered what was going on. When I got to the intersection, I saw an old man lying in the street with people standing over him. It. Was. My. Father. I instantly pulled into a driveway and jumped out. It appeared that Dad had been walking (?) and collapsed and people had called the police and stopped to help. He was on the ground and the fireman was trying to get him to answer questions. I explained who he was and who I was and I asked Dad if he knew who I was. I'm not sure if he recognized me.

They helped me put him in my car and I drove home with him. A kind neighbor recognized me and offered to get my daughter. I called Mom at work and told her about Dad and said she needed to come right away. Another kind Samaritan followed me home and helped me get him into my house. I plied him with liquid because the fireman thought he might be dehydrated. Dad told me he just wanted to come and see me. That was tough to hear. He had an old picture book with him for Conrad, as an excuse to come and see me. What we think happened was that he found the book and thought Conrad had left it, so he needed to return it to me. We lived about 3 or 4 miles away, way too far for him. Heck, walking to get the mail was too far for him. And, of course, Conrad was in third grade.

It was decided that Dad could no longer be left alone in the house while Mom worked her part time job. I agreed to stay with him one day a week. He went to adult day care the other days. I was very glad he wasn't on his own anymore. I had been scared something horrible would happen, and something did. I was just glad he would be all right.

More heartbreak

After the roof incident, the whole family went to Mexico for Thanksgiving. I will always be grateful for that trip. My father could still communicate, albeit slowly. He could still walk with help. He knew what was going on around him.

When the new year started (06) Dad started getting worse. He couldn't go up or down steps anymore without the very real risk of falling. I had to take his car away from him and sell it. Mom just couldn't handle that task. He would come up to me after the car was gone and pat his pocket and say, "I can't find my keys, have you seen my keys? I need to run an errand." It was sad to explain to him he wasn't driving anymore, but then it became easier to change the subject because he quit understanding what was going on.

My father in Mexico

My mother decided they had to move and found a cute two bedroom house close by. If I thought things were bad before the move, I was wrong. They got much worse, much more quickly. He quit knowing who Mom was and started calling me at least daily (for some reason he could still remember me and my phone number) telling me there was a strange woman in the house who said she was Natalie. He once told me that the strange woman said they were married but that didn't make sense to him; he had never cheated on his Natalie.  I would hear Mom in the background crying, "I'M NATALIE!, I'm your wife!" but he didn't understand. So I would drive over there and sit with him and get Mom to back off. Logic didn't work, but redirection did. I would get him to tell me about Tom, his brother who died when he was in college. Or about his childhood. He walked with an old man shuffle and a walker now, so I would take him outside. It was as if he were a toddler, regressing before my eyes. He was only 65.

Falling Off the Roof

Around the time the kitchen was being completed, I got up on the roof to clean the gutters. Heights do not bother me and I had the attitude (then) of fearlessness that I could do anything. Behind the big pitch of the front roof it was flat, so once you got on the flat part you were safe. Well, after removing all of the leaves from the flat part I got cocky and decided to blow off the leaves off of the garage. Remember, all of the sloped parts of the roof were cedar shakes so they were especially slippery.

And you guessed it, I fell off the roof. As I was sliding off I remember that sick sick feeling of OMG I'm falling but I'll catch myself I'll catch myself oh no I won't...It was about 1 1/2 stories. I landed on some of the huge azalea bushes. Remarkably, I didn't break anything. One of the azalea limbs punctured my shin and I landed on my knee. Poor Elliott felt awful, because I was the one up on the roof. We all know whose fault it was--the house's fault.

He took me to the hospital where I endured many jokes about staying off the roof. I still have a big scar on my shin. And honestly, it was just another curse of the house. Yes we were getting the awesome addition and that was wonderful, but it was as if the house couldn't let us have it without something going wrong.

kitchen miracle

 I am now up to the fall of 2005. At this time, El and I decided that we couldn't take the kitchen one second longer. We had thought we could wait but it was not happening. The irony is that in order to do the kitchen and add on to the family room and add a screened porch, we had to get a second mortgage. So now, instead of saving money, we were paying the same exact amount for our mortage as we had in the other house.

Removing the old

Adding the new!

When I started getting bids, it turned out the kitchen would cost as much as our whole budget. What were we going to do? The layout didn't work and this wasn't a luxury. And then something wonderful happened. Really. The kitchen guy called a week after he gave us his enormous estimate and said a friend of his had bought a house in Buckhead and was gutting it. He had measured their kitchen and it would fit PERFECTLY in our space, and he could disassemble it and reinstall in our house. Along with the almost new stainless steel appliances and the granite countertops. It truly was a miracle.

He did some custom work and added a range mantle, a refrigerator cabinet and a book bag cabinet. Coincidence? I think not. To us it was a miracle like water into wine. Not only could we get a beautiful kitchen, we could add a room to the back of the house

new room off back of house

so there would be a place to eat with windows to the view. And we could do a screened porch off of our bedroom. Doing all of that was what I call good stress. I turned out beautifully.

Done with the kitchen

Finding pictures is taking longer than I expected. I'm still looking, but I should find some today.

My Father

While all of this was going on, my family was getting worried about my father. For a few years he had been acting "off". We first noticed it in 2002, when he was 62. He had trouble following conversations and directions. Things got worse, and in 2005 he started having episodes where his body would freeze up and he wouldn't be able to move. My parents lived 5 minutes away so my mother would call me and I would go over and help. At this point his personality wasn't affected, and the episodes were happening about once every two weeks. At first we thought they were mini strokes, but no.  In August we all went to the beach for a week. Three times Dad fell because he lost control of his body.  One evening we were sitting on the deck and he told me how frustrating it was. His mind and his body were going. I was heart broken.

We had been back a week when he fell when no one was around. He broke two ribs and punctured his lung. He was in the hospital for five nights. While he was there, he lost completely lost touch with reality. I had this "vision" where I saw him in a wheel chair, head down, grayish skin, and very old looking. I really didn't want that to come true.

My father  and I in Mexico

He was never really the same after that. He got diagnosed with Lewy Body disease, a rare disease that is Parkinson's and really bad dementia. When we researched it it looked like patients lasted seven years.  There wasn't much information on it so seven years seemed too terrible to be believed. But since we knew it was fatal (!) Mom decided that everyone should go to Mexico for Thanksgiving, their treat. It was the right decision.

Bugs

The biggest problem to me with the house was that it took all of my time and energy. I was way too embarrassed to tell my friends what was really going on so I gradually lost them. I'm not saying it wasn't my fault--it was, I took days to return calls and I still didn't have any money to go out for lunch. I let it happen. That damn house was a full time job.

We had moved in in October, when the air conditioning wasn't used. When spring came we turned it on and starting noticing small bugs that looked like the cross between a fly and a moth. They were about a centimeter square, were very slow moving, and were attracted to the light. At first it wasn't too bad, just a few here and there. But gradually as it got hotter and hotter more and more started flying around. They seemed to be coming from the basement so I called in exterminators galore. It would get better for a week then return to the old levels. We didn't know what to do. We called them fly moths. The internet called them sewer flies and said they come from open drains. So we called in the plumber, again! He found a few things and fixed them. Once again, they got better for a week or so then started coming back. By the time we had done all of this it was fall again and they disappeared. What was going on? As we were to find out, this cycle repeated itself four more summers until we found the cause. More on that later. I don't want to get ahead of myself.

I'm Not Making This Up

The thing I remember the most was that it was so stressful. Everything that happened just proved what a bad decision it was, but we were stuck. We had to make the best of it. I worked about 16 hours a day just trying to make it livable. I remember that even every single window was nailed shut--even the one on the door to the garage. Two weeks after we had moved in we got the floors refinished, so we moved to the basement for a week. The first night we were sleeping down there, we heard a scurrying sound above our heads. We got traps and caught a two and a half foot rat. I'm not kidding. Unbelievable. I was so so so creeped out. After the floors were done things calmed down some. I could start renovating.

That's me working on the kid's bathroom. After I did that, I wanted to work on the basement bathroom. There was carpet in it (ew), so I pulled it out and planned to just put some vinyl tiles in. When I got the flooring out, I discovered the floor was wet. So to figure out what was wrong we had our handyman come over. After ripping up the wall behind the toilet, he discovered why all of the baseboards were rotted. There was another pipe in the wall that had been cut in two. And not put back together. This had obviously been going on for years, but the sellers didn't disclose it, and the inspector missed it. We made phone calls and wrote letters, but we were out of luck. We just chalked it up to the house from hell. Remember we had moved here to save money? Ha! Every extra bit of money we had went to the house.

Moving Day

So...the day came for us to do the walk through. We couldn't get in. The lock box was removed and all of the doors were locked. What could we do? We called and complained, but we still closed on the house. What choice did we have? So we moved from our clean, lovely, well built house to the new house. When our moving truck got to the house, we thought that the sellers hadn't finished moving out. There was trash everywhere. There was broken mirror pieces, black garbage bags full of trash, old socks, an old vacuum, an old table, dead flowers, old carpet remnants, towels and so much other stuff. It was unbelievable. The attic hadn't been cleaned out. We called our real estate agent and he said there was nothing we could do. We had closed. But the straw that broke the camel's back was when we turned the sink on in the kitchen. They had left a bowl under it and we immediately figured out why. The pipe had been cut but not soldered back together. Water poured out. Yes, our inspector missed it. We got it fixed.

Therefore, the first thing we had to do was empty the house of their crap. Imagine how angry we were. The second thing we had to do was get the carpet out of the three kid's rooms. I mean, it was orange shag. Who knew how old it was? I think we got to sleep that night after 2:00. The rest of the weekend was spent cleaning their rooms and painting them.  I was desperate to give them some normalcy after all the horrors we were uncovering. And were we uncovering them. There were roach droppings everywhere. On top of the windows and door frames, inside the switch plates, in all the cupboards, and in all the closets. Nothing could be unpacked until it was cleaned. It took weeks.

A really BAD decision

We made an offer on one house but they wouldn't move out for six months so that didn't work. When we saw the house we ended up buying, Elliott hated it. I should have listened to him. The bones we good, it had a huge yard, the master was on the main, good closets, and it had a cedar roof. That's what I saw. What Elliott saw:

~ one ac unit for three levels
~ wallpaper from the 70's and 80's on every single drywalled surface
~ orange shag carpet upstairs
~ bathrooms (there were 3 1/2) original to the 1966 building date, and not in a cute retro way
~ 1 1/2 acres of yard with not a blade of grass and bushes uncut for years
~ kitchen with original avocado green appliances, one light fixture for the whole kitchen, a completely   unworkable floor plan, no counter space, and CARPET ON THE FLOOR. WALL TO WALL.

I thought it reminded me of a little country cottage that we could renovate. We ended up buying it. We paid WAY too much for it--our real estate agent was also selling the sellers a home so we got screwed. Our inspector ended up being awful--he was a structural engineer and missed the many plumbing problems. The attic was covered in roach droppings so I made the sellers get the house exterminated. I also asked that they clean out the attic before they moved out.

To be continued:

The things that can happen when you don't feel good enough

In 2004 Elliott and I prayerfully decided that we were living beyond our means. We thought that the smart and godly thing to was sell our house and move to a smaller, less expensive one. "A big house doesn't make you happy", we said.

We had moved to that house in 1999 from Jacksonville. The kids were 8,6, and 2. It was a big house in a really nice subdivision. Half of the the families sent their kids to private school. Everyone took fabulous vacations, had maids, and had yard men. They went out to eat weekly. Elliott had just gotten some money from his grandmother so we used it as a down payment. While we could afford the house (barely), we didn't think about the lifestyle. You can only say "we can't afford it" so many times. I felt like such a fraud. Lewis Grizzard once was sent to Sea Island and he remarked "they don't know there's a taxpayer in their midst". That's how I felt. I didn't feel as though I really belonged, and that everyone was judging us because we couldn't keep up with the Jones.

It wasn't all bad. I had made two very good friends whom I loved dearly. They knew our financial situation, but of course not the extent of it. I remember being so embarrassed about our "poverty" that I look back now and cringe.

We put our house on the market and it sold in three weeks for the full asking price. But we didn't have anywhere to go. So....we panicked.

Things Fall Apart

Why am I doing this?

I have always wanted to write. I had hoped that I was good at it but in my years I have figured out it's harder than it looks. So I gave up. So this year, 2013, I decided that I didn't have to be published. No one had to read this. I could just do it because I wanted to do it. It is yet to be seen if I will keep up with it.

This is the true story of a woman whose life completely fell apart. I want to put it all down because every year past means the details have faded. I want to put it down to show you can make it through devastation and come out on the other side better than before. People can change if they want to badly enough.

When my life started falling apart I felt like I was in the middle of a cyclone spinning and spinning. I remembered this poem (thank you, English major!): 

TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? 

Literature Network » William Butler Yeats » The Second Coming

It's called The Second Coming by Yeats. It was written after WWI, when the world did seem to be ending. I, too, felt "far from center", hence the name of my blog.