Write it down.

Everyday I keep telling myself that I need to start writing things down.

There are now whole chapters of my life that I have only a vague memory of because I never took any notes. For example, I wish I knew more about my life when my kid was little. I know that I wasn't very happy, which is why I never wanted to write, but even the details (how we spent our time, things he said to me) would be better than nothing. This morning I woke up and read a few chapters of this Zelda Fitzgerald biography I'm reading and while reading through these letters that she wrote to her husband, letters her husband wrote to her doctors, I wondered what I was leaving behind. I don't mean that I think someone will write a biography about me one day, just that there should be some sort of record of every life. I know that eventually every person, every life, will be forgotten but shouldn't you at least remember your own life several years down the line? Are there not ideas that I had at 23 that would come in handy for me now, at 33?

I feel like an amnesiac when I think about myself in the past. Like I just woke up and I can't remember my own name. I can't remember how I got here.

So, I'm going to write. I'm going to write when it feels like I haven't got a thing in the world to say. I'm going to outline the details and maybe when I feel like I can articulate it, the insides of it all.

Also, I've got to give up on the idea that a journal only counts if it's written out, with ink on paper. I have probably started 100 journals in my life that haven't gone further than 5 or 6 pages. I have some pretty silly notions that keep me from getting things done. I spend half my life on the computer these days anyway, may as well write this stuff on the computer also.

So this morning - awake at 7. I could have gone back to sleep for a few more hours but I really enjoy my lazy weekend mornings these days. If I sleep until 10, like I did yesterday, I feel like I miss out on that. Feeling anxious about lunch with a friend. Why is it that when I have something planned I feel like I can't relax? Once lunch is over I'll start feeling anxious about something else I should be doing, no doubt - like laundry or something like that.

My kid slept over at a friend's. I enjoy my mornings alone more than I let myself admit. Not that I don't also enjoy mornings with him here, it's just a different sort of pleasure. I like being able to make my coffee in my underwear and use the toilet with the door open - you know, the small things haha.

Something I wasn’t looking for.

ANOTHER something I wasn’t looking for. A new relationship that went sour before I could get used to feeling grateful for it. The good news being that the break-up black hole funk is only two days old and is already starting to clear. I’m getting good at something I never wanted to be good at. That’s the good part.

The bad part? It’s really hard to keep the bitterness at bay. I mean, I’m failing at keeping it at bay. I am bitter. I get mad at myself for being bitter cause that’s something that I don’t want to be.

I read something in a book at a very vulnerable point in my life. It was around the time that my boyfriend of six years broke up with me and started dating a 17-year old (12 years his junior). I think it was maybe in a John Irving book. Sounds like something that bastard would say. It was something like ‘men fall for the young girls because they are fresh, can love without being hindered by the sadness that older women carry around’. Funny the things that stick with you.

Funny that this “bitterness” that women feel is probably seen as something more like maturity in men. Is it just in the labeling of it? Will it be better if I just call my bitterness maturity? No, because maturity feels alive and bitterness feels dead. They aren’t the same thing.

Edward

A week ago my sister came up and talked me into going along with her to the Edward Hopper exhibit at the National Gallery. Of course I was familiar with his work, from all the art history classes I’ve taken – but I have to say that it was an unexpected revelation, seeing those beauties in person. I was particularly drawn to the etchings.




As I stepped up to get a closer look at a few of them, I felt a tightness in my chest, something heavy and tangible - a desire to DRAW. I love that an experience you think will just be merely ordinary can turn out to be life-changing. Try as I might, I just can’t orchestrate this kind of inspiration. I have to appreciate it when it shows up. And then try to make it last. Hold on to it.

A late night.

A Year

In the car last night:

“Can you believe it’s only been a year since we moved back up here? It seems like we’ve been here for so long.”

“Yeah.”

“Maybe we should move somewhere every year so that they can all feel this long.”

“I don’t think I want all my years to be this long.”

“When you’re my age, you will.” *

“Yeah, ok. I guess I do.”

A year ago this week, we moved back to the city after a year in the country. Two years ago, I had just finished an internship at a swank design firm and a short stint at the Library of Congress. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. My folks own a farm a couple hours outside of the city and since I didn’t really have a better idea, I decided to look for jobs down there. I found one and packed up everything and moved us to the middle of nowhere. I thought it might be exactly what suited me. The job I’d found was dull but undemanding, it left me with lots of free time. I was home in the afternoons in time to see my kid climb off the bus in front of our house. I started – and almost completely enjoyed - renovating the house. It was an old hulk of a thing, with peeling wallpaper and dusty corners. I set up the perfect art space in a room with a wall of floor to ceiling windows (with a view of the Blue Ridge Mountains). I planted a garden. I chatted with my farmer neighbor over the fence about lettuces and beans.

But things, as they tend to do, didn’t go as planned. I felt completely uninspired to use my lovely workspace. I found I was too shy, in general, to strike up chats with neighbors. In the evenings, after hours of weeding and watering, I would watch pesky deer making a buffet of my struggling garden. The house was beautiful but lonely. My kid was miserable. He’d come home from school close to tears. He had to stop wearing his favorite red sweatshirt because the kids were calling him “fag”. The job became Fucking Dull and Fucking Unbearable. I was driving up to the city every weekend to see friends and driving home on Sundays I would feel like crying. Ok, once or twice I actually did cry.

Maybe things would have gotten better if I’d stuck it out for awhile. A year, after all, is not much time to adjust to a whole new way of life. My kid might have settled in – he had, in the end, managed to make a few friends. I might have built a fence around the garden. I might have finally found some inspiration to create something - anything. But I think I’ve learned to trust my decisions. I was only pretending to be someone who enjoyed living in the country. It just wasn’t for me. Wasn’t for me at that point in my life at any rate.

And while happiness is certainly something that comes and goes and is hard to pin in place, I feel happy now. I think I can even say that this last year has been my happiest yet. And I can’t speak for my kid, but he seems much happier now as well.


* Even though there’s only a 16-year age difference between my kid and I, I say this all the time. I cringe a little when I hear it, but there’s no stopping it from happening.

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