make my life worth the beautiful struggle, make it a good story

When my parents meet me at the airport, when they see my tired face and weary posture, I want them to smile and squeeze me for full minutes apiece. When I tell the man who’ll be my husband about Andy and J, I want him to throw his arms around me, kiss me, and smile and kiss me again, wordlessly promising me he’s different even though I could never mistake that. When I tell my young children about Marietta and Pittsburgh and Chicago and Columbia and Boston, I want their eyes to grow wide as they yawn and cuddle in, refusing to sleep ‘til I get to the next part of the story, one of the best parts.

Through the eyes of those people will these experiences come true. Though the hearts of those people will mine be healed.

I sometimes wonder what I’ll remember when I look back at these years. Even as positive as I was about this a while ago, I can’t help but stare at the clock and hate myself consequently for it.

I need to change my life pretty significantly and while I want to say I’ve been trying so hard to do that, I probably haven’t been doing nearly enough. I also berate myself for this.

Progress? No.

I have to, I realize, somehow find the stability and focus to get myself out of this hole and then things should start looking up. I need especially to truly and graciously accept the help given to me and recognize it as help and then use it. I need to pick myself up somehow and steady myself and move on from there. I cannot focus on 12 tasks at once. I cannot “get better” in a day. I cannot expect to put in 8 hours of work and also 8 hours of job searching, an hour for bettering myself, while also eating meals and sleeping. It won’t happen. Something needs to change, I just need to figure out where to start.

Enough now, I’m not even exaggerating.

Lauren’s right—instead of looking at the last couple of years as a block of stagnation, of mental weakness and/or deflation, of a slow and steady breakdown of confidence, I should be focusing on the fact that I moved to Pittsburgh, that I worked for a rather expensive university, that I flew to Boston twice, that I drove halfway across the country and back, that I saw Chicago and then drove through it in frustration. I ran through an airport in really uncomfortable shoes. I’ll have worked as a poll worker, have gotten a Masters Degree, I’ll have learned how to bake stellar cupcakes, I’ll have grown my hair out. I wrote a (really crappy) novel.

What it comes down to is that even though I’ve been pondering these possibilities, it’s not as if I’m a different person or as if I’ve become weaker or that I’ve lost my ability to write or that I’ve become somehow less intelligent. It’s that I’ve been a bit closed up and not given true reign to be my truest self. I do wish I’d do more with that and stop simply whining or lamenting, but sometimes it helps to step back for just a second. As I so rarely do.

Why is it so easy to focus on the neuroses and so difficult to force oneself to focus on what’s real?

I got an email from a representative of the company I really wanted to work for in Chicago, the company that really led me to Chicago in the first place—I don’t have enough experience for the position I applied for, but she sent me a test I can take if I’d like to show I am qualified without the requisite experience.

I’d take the test, but I know I’m not. I’m truly not qualified for that position, but I really thought that they’d be happy to qualify me if they liked the ideas I could bring, the personality I could add. Maybe not. The point is, I beat myself up for an hour and a half, thinking that if I can’t do this job (which I thought was a really low-level job), I probably can’t do anything in any of the fields I’d consider and that basically, I had to give up any dreams of ever making it in the publish, academic, or literary fields.

Beyond the obvious slippery slope, I’ve been remiss in thinking that I need to have just one career in one field for the rest of my life. I know this isn’t the case, but when I’m so consumed with looking for jobs and writing cover letters, my world gets a little cloudy and I get a little one-note. Typical.

What I forget in these stressful moments, months is that I have an intense impulse to live a crazy, romantic, urban life. I don’t want to go to work at 8:30, sit in an office until 5:00 and then spend my evening reeling from the frustrations of the day. I’d hate myself for doing that, while doing that, after doing that. Instead, I want to have crazy jobs, random jobs that provide fodder for relationships, for short stories, for life experience.

So I have no idea how to go about this, but for right now at least, for right now, I’m looking for jobs that will provide not only enough money to pay the bills, but will provide experiences, will provide for exceptionally good stories. For instance, compare:

“Yeah, and then I moved to Chicago where I worked as a copyeditor for a while…it wasn’t glamourous, but it got me a little closer to writing, so…”

&

“Yeah, and then I moved to Chicago where I worked at this insane grassroots camp where I met that guy I always talk about, the one who used to raise alpacas and then gave it up to sing on cruise ships?”

I’m tired of boxing myself in so completely, tired of doing the prescribed thing even as I try to escape it with such enthusiasm. I admit that I don’t know where to start in looking for these jobs (advice is all the rage, kiddos), but I think that’s probably my newest mission.

When I either write or regale grandkids or biographers, even with the details of my life, I think this period will be the grand question mark. It’s hard to put on paper exactly what goes through one’s head when very little goes on outside of it, I find.

And so I’ll tell them that after grad school, I moved home for a year which turned into a year and a half and I worked a lukewarm job and spent my Summers unemployed and in my head and I read the Harry Potter series, remember that? and I thought of Boston every single day.

All experiences lead us somewhere, right? Even ones like these, I’m assured.

life is so wonderful, and i sometimes miss on it. i do not want to loose one minuute more in useless stuff.

I have this everlasting idea in my head that life SHOULD be how you see it in the movies. You know, those girls, the do-gooders that sacrifice themselves for everyone else including the people who have hurt them. The ones who are supported and loved by everyone around them. The ones that carry out a feel of beauty and grace even with all their problems. The people that give a definition to the word ‘amazing’. What I fail to believe is that nobody is that perfect.

So I try to be one of “them”. I just end up getting frustrated and locking myself in a room because I can’t. I don’t want to fake through my whole life, but I just don’t know who I am. I feel like I have no identity. Sometimes I just feel like a robot, and human-robot hybrids can’t possibly have a good life story.

I just disbanded 10 of my too-similar goals that had centered around a long-term bettering of myself (i.e. stop needing to apologize, experience all sorts of love, retain integrity in an insane society, etc, etc). I haven’t decided to quit doing these things, of course, only that ten to twelve goals dedicated to the same basic intent was a little much.

So let’s combine all of that here, eh?

Reminder to self: there is a pure, good, conscious, significant, honest version of yourself. Strive to be that.

My Dad and I both go back to work soon and haven’t seen each other much, so we’ve been spending some time out lately, catching up, discussing plans, being a father-daughter. As we sat down to dinner tonight, we realized that my best pre-college friend and her family were at the table next to ours. “Oh!” they said. “Hi! How are you?” We exchanged gallant pleasantries and returned to our coffee, he and I. When they finished, they walked up and again, the gallant pleasantries. My friend’s father congratulated mine on my nearly year-old degree (do people do this?) and asked me where I was to move. Upon my obvious “Boston,” he asked in mock surprise “Boston, eh? Do you know how expensive that is?”

This sort of brief interaction (determination met with doubt) has happened more times than I can count over the past six months, at the very least. Boston?! Really?! Are you absolutely out of your proverbial gourd?!

I am twenty-four years old and cannot think of a better possible time to start a real life of my very own—a dues-paying, broke, frustrated, blissfully happy, independent life. Is it that most people are scared of change, scared of starting from the bottom that they believe me rash or ultimately insane?

I am actually looking forward to having to make do, I’m looking forward to earning what I have and making smarter decisions and building up from the ground floor and being proud of what I’ve accomplished. I want to be able to tell the story of how I moved to Boston with little more than a couple months’ rent and eventually earned my way to previously unimagined (if marginal) success.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not looking pull myself up by my brave little bootstraps, but I realize the work involved and I believe I have the ability to do that work is all.

Stories are sort of what I do, let me write this one without your cries of incredulity, would you kindly?

I’m sometimes intensely worried that I’ll miss an important opportunity for lack of insight or foresight. In my head, it’s difficult to understand that the rest of my life is a long journey and that I’ll have experiences I haven’t yet even imagined. I sometimes feel like my head is trying to rush me, but I need to remember that an entire life is a brilliant span of time and that I should relax and let it flow. Obviously, I do need to put plans in motion and I do need to create opportunities for grandeur at least on a minute scale, but just as important is the realization that every step along that path is an integral part of it.