Neurosis, Party of One

My neighbor came over to chat for a while yesterday.  I was glad to see him—he’s a good guy, and since we have very similar tastes in books and movies, we can always find something to talk about.  However, I was dismayed when he mentioned work.  Joel disapproves of my day job as a waitress: he thinks it’s beneath me.  Yesterday he pointed to my degree, beautifully framed in dark wood, with its gold seal and glimmering “summa cum laude” on it.  “You didn’t bust your ass for however many years just for ‘table for two?’” he scolded me.

He has a very valid point, of course, and I’ve addressed this before, mostly to reassure myself that there is a good reason for what I’m doing.  But the fact is this isn’t what I want to be doing, and somewhere in my gut I’m embarrassed by my position in life right now.

I tried to skim over it, explaining that I was just taking a break from school and I needed something to survive.  Joel, who is a no-bullshit kind of guy, wasn’t having any of it.  “You can find a better job than that,” he said.  “What is that degree, creative writing?  You can do anything with it.  The world is your fucking oyster.”

And that, I tried to explain, is exactly the problem.  Joel is an EMT; his career is very narrowly focused, but there will always be a job for him somewhere.  I, on the other hand, can set my liberal-arts-educated mind to almost anything—administration, editing, journalism, management, and all those other vague words that people use to describe their careers.  Anything, in nearly any field.  This means that there is no one place where I can look for a job—there are thousands of them, and many with other candidates who are more specifically appealing to employers.  Yes, I might be good working at a magazine, but someone with a journalism degree would be better.  True, I might be an asset to that firm, but so would a person just finishing a business degree.  My focus in my education wasn’t a focus at all; it was an all-encompassing acceptance of the educated world, and while that may make me a very well-rounded person, it doesn’t make it easy for me to find a job.  And of the jobs that are out there, there isn't one I want.  The one I want is not one that can be given to me: I have go and get it myself.

When I had failed to make this clear to Joel, he shrugged and moved on to a new point, suggesting that I go back to school.  “It’s a way to dodge the world for a while,” he explained.

I will admit that dodging the world sounds enormously appealing.  Not to have to worry about paying back student loans would be a huge relief in and of itself.  But I know I’m not ready to jump back into being a student.  I’ve had quite enough of that in the past eighteen years.  I want to be in the world, to be part of it, to let it knock me around a little bit and learn from it.  More, I want to overcome the world, to live consumed in my art and still be able to buy groceries each week.

So what is the point of this rambling post anyway?  After all, I’m just making the arguments I couldn’t make yesterday to respond to some very strong opinions.  Well, the point is that I’m human, and I have doubts, and it’s scary chasing a dream that seems so incredibly unrealistic in this world where most artists are always starving.  It’s terrifying sitting up late, unable to think about anything but taxes and rent and how I can cut back more when I’m already eating the same thing for lunch every day.  In those moments, getting a better, more full-time job seems like a rope offered to someone drowning in quicksand.  But I’m too stubborn to give up yet.  So here is my BA in b.s. at work, rationalizing the life that I lead.  Yes, I am waiting tables.  Yes, I have been avoiding looking at that shiny piece of paper on my wall.  And yes, I know what the chances are of my success.  But I have to try to be who I want to be.  If I don’t, I’ll never become who I’m meant to be.

Ain't it Great to be Crazy

I woke up this morning certifiably insane.  It was an hour before my alarm, and I was wide awake—and what’s more, I was happy about it.  I rolled out of bed and spent a good ten minutes dancing in front of my mirror in my underwear.  I sang songs, talked to myself, and laughed like a maniac.  I threw myself on my bed, curled up in the blankets, then rolled to the floor and pretended I was a dying bug.  Even now I feel that mad energy running through my bones.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been so utterly delighted with life.

Happiness is insanity in this crazy, fucked-up world.  (Forgive my harsh language, but you have to admit that it’s true.)  In a world that has things like war, starvation, murder, rape, disease, slavery, treachery and so much worse—a world that is slowly dying from the poisons we have created, a world where our fellow man suffer in every second of every day—how is it possible to be happy?

But there it is.  Happiness is here, and sometimes it swoops down on us and grabs us up, and no matter what we do, no matter what we think about, we can’t change it.  That’s what happened to me this morning.  I woke up, and I looked at myself in the mirror for a long time, and I saw my red eyes and my mussed hair and my pudgy stomach and inflated thighs and I thought, how wonderfully beautiful I am.  How glorious it is to be alive.

This kind of crazy happiness is a gift.  I am so utterly grateful for it, so thankful that emotions can’t always be explained, that sometimes they just happen.  More than that, though, I am hopeful.  If we can have happiness in this crazy world, then maybe there’s enough good insanity out there to balance out the bad.  In the grip of my madness today, I can’t help but believe it.

A Wordless Thought Fulfilled

One of my friends posted a thought on facebook tonight that really caught my attention with its insightfulness, poetic strength, and its similarity to my own feelings.  She said, “Sometimes I am so overwhelmed with the desire for some grand and magical adventure that it physically hurts.”  Those words ignited a fulfillment in me, a feeling of “Yes!  That is just exactly what I have been trying to say for years.”

I think I have always had this feeling, this yearning for more in my life.  When I was a girl, I remember I tried to keep a journal for a while.  It didn’t last because I didn’t believe anyone would want to read it.  Who cares about the day-to-day life of a teenage girl?  Or that of a woman in her twenties, for that matter.  For me, life was dull, monotonous, boring.  It still is, sometimes.  I get up, go to work, come home, change my clothes, put on makeup, turn the heat on and off.  Who really cares? 

I live for the magical moments in life—for that bright red bird who sits above the door to my car, the autumn leaves dancing as I sit at the bench of peace and light, singing a lullaby to myself as I swing in an empty playground.  I sustain myself on beauty, on poetry, on wisdom and kindness, and I live my life to the fullest in those cracks in the monotony of “everyday.”  And yet it is not quite enough to satisfy my longing for magic, for adventure, for grand-ness and magnificence and things that one doesn’t seem to find in this world anymore.

This is why I am a writer.  This is why I compose new worlds for myself: to fill my life with the brightness and the vividness of the magic this world has lost.  Sitting here in this very spot, the energy of new words, new idea, new stories to tell runs straight through my dancing fingers and up into my mind and my heart, washing clean the cobwebs and making me good as new.  This is why I do what I do.  This is why I am who I am.

Lonely is a Freedom

I am alone a lot.  I’m a loner, an introvert, antisocial, solitary.  I like my privacy, my space, my me-time.  We have a lot of ways to describe being alone.  It’s a facet of not just our culture, but of all of humanity that we know what it means to be alone.  Sometimes we yearn for it; sometimes we fear it.  But like any good English word, there are many meanings to the word, many shadows cast by this one idea. 

In the connotations of the word “alone,” you find negativity.  There is something about being alone that is up to no good.  People who are alone too much are maladjusted, awkward, maybe even creepy.  I understand this—it’s part of human nature to seek out human interaction, and so I do…from time to time.  But there are ways to make loneliness work, to make something out of alone.  There is comfort to be found in the solitude, in the many ways that we are separated from others.

Tonight, I am alone in that there is no one around me.  I live in a tiny apartment that wouldn’t have room for anyone else.  There is no cat or dog or fish or gerbil or snake or lizard to keep me company, and though my computer and my car have names (George and Baxter, respectively) I don’t really count them.  I am alone.  This, however, is what I call solitude.  It is the mental space where ideas are born, the blank canvas in my mind.  Without solitude, I wouldn’t have my art.

In this stage of my life, I am alone.  There is no man (or woman, in case you were wondering, and no, that’s not the way I’m looking) to speak to me, to call to ask me to dance and “murmur vague obscenities” as Janis Ian would have it.  There is no commitment, no connection, no fireworks, no deep understanding between myself and anyone else.  This doesn’t really bother me.  I fully believe—maybe because of blind faith, or my romanticism, or because of that one tiny relationship line my friend read in my palm last year—that I will find that person, that one, and I look forward to that day with all my heart.  In the meantime, I’m enjoying not having to tell anyone to flush the toilet, and the fact that things stay where I put them, and the fact that I can look at photos of a naked man reclining on a motorcycle if I like.  And I do, when that man is Adam Levine.

And in this world, I am alone.  As far as I can tell—and I’ve only had twenty-odd years to explore, so I could be wrong—there is no one else on earth who thinks exactly like me.  There are a few who have come close, but there is no one I have met who puts thoughts together the way I do.  I think that everyone is alone this way.  And that’s the hardest one of all to bear, and sometimes I don’t manage it.  It makes me wonder, sometimes, how we understand each other at all.  But then I think about a quote from a movie I saw recently, some rom-com that is only memorable while you’re watching it.  Except for this quote: if we’re all alone, then at least we’re all together in that.  And that is true.  We can all understand how it feels to be different; we can all understand what it feels like to be alone.  And there is a wonderful paradox, because it means we’re not alone after all.

So here I am, alone, and I don’t mind at all, because it turns out alone is a wonderful thing.

The title of this post is borrowed from a wonderful poem by Tanya Davis called How To Be Alone, which says much the same thing as I do here, but in a more beautiful and captivating way.  As for the Janis Ian song I referenced, it is called At Seventeen. 

Where the Heart Is

I met a good friend for lunch today.  It had been a while since we’d seen each other, so we were catching up, talking about the holidays, what we’d done, where we’d been.  As we talked, I was reminded of a moment during the holiday that stood out to me as it was happening.  I don’t remember what was happening in detail, only that I was talking to members of my family—I couldn’t even exactly say who.  But I remember someone talking to me, asking me what I would be doing the following day, and I answered, rather absently, “Going home.”

My own wording made me pause.  At the time, I was at Carrigafoyle, the brown house on the mountain, the house in which I’d grown up, where all of my family was gathered for the holiday.  Wasn’t I already home?  The answer is yes, I was.  But now here I am, alone in my foxhole apartment where I’ve been living for less than five months, and I am just as much at home as I was there.

“Home” has been a strange concept to me for some time.  I’ve learned of myself that I don’t like to be on the move.  Living out of a suitcase, always aware that in a few days or weeks or months I will be leaving again—this is repugnant to me.  I want to be settled, to spread out my things in a place and stay there for an indefinite period of time, or, if it is defined, at least a good long period of time.  Nevertheless, I never could bring myself to call my university “home.”  Even though I didn’t really live in that brown house with all the dogs and cats and people anymore, it was more permanent in my mind than Hollins was, and so it remained my home.

Now, I’m not talking about the careless “I’m going home” at the end of the day’s work, as in “I’m getting out of here”.  Everyone has said that, but it doesn’t mean that the place to which you go is home.  For me, the various dorm rooms at Hollins, the various cabins at my summer camp jobs, and the room on the third floor of my London homestay all held a certain amount of affection for me, but they weren’t home.  Deep in the back of my mind I always knew I’d have to move on and someone else would take my place.

This apartment is different.  Perhaps it’s because I don’t know when I’ll be moving on, but even knowing that I will someday doesn’t bother me.  I come here and I sink into my red chair or settle down at my desk and I know that I am home.  This place is mine—this life is mine.  And so, though I will always love Carrigafoyle, though I’m sure I will return many a time in the years to come, it’s no longer home, or not the only home in my heart.  Here in the Foxhole, I’m deeply content, and I freely use the word “home” to describe it.

Year-Long Resolve

At the beginning of the year, people seem compelled to analyze their lives.  They look at their choices and their actions in the past year, and they make promises to themselves to do better, to be better.  In the interest of learning a bit more about what kind of things people resolve to do, I looked up a page of statistics on typical New Year’s resolutions, and this is what I found.  Forty-five percent of Americans usually make resolutions.  The most common, according to my source, is to lose weight.  Others include spend more time with family, spend less and save more money, get organized, quit smoking, and help others.  Only eight percent of people succeed in these resolutions, while twenty-four percent fail every year.  On the other hand, people who explicitly make resolutions are ten times more likely to reach their goals than people who don’t.

I have to admit that I’m one of the latter.  I’m an observer in the great game of New Year’s resolutions, and I do think it’s that, a game.  In my experience, people don’t usually take them very seriously.  Certainly it’s a nice idea, to have a period of time once a year when people are thinking about self-improvement.  But I also wonder if it’s a bit of a cop-out.  When people fail at their goals, they can say, well, there’s always next year.  They have an excuse to put off making the change.

I don’t think we should parcel up our lives so very much.  Time is really just numbers and dates, squares on a page.  Everything I did and learned in 2012 is still with me, still just there over my shoulder.  I want to keep it with me as I move forward into this year, and I want to continually, every day, resolve to be better, stronger, wiser.  Maybe, if I keep making my resolutions all year, they’ll begin to stick.