jumping out of my skin (aka my longest, confused-est blog post ever so get a cup of tea before you start reading)

For the last handful of days, I have been quietly, solitarily feeling like I want to jump out of my own skin.

There have been a couple of triggers. First to the draw: I reached the point in my novella when I knew, from the outset of picking this story back up, that I wanted to start fresh, yet when the time came to do that, I didn’t know what to write. For years, I’ve been writing nonfiction because I felt I just didn’t have fiction in me anymore. I’d had plenty of it as a teenager, when I had a hell of a lot of emotions inside me and found that I could do something productive with them by channeling that intensity of emotion into stories about entirely other things (as I once blogged about here). I’d had a bit of it as a college student, but at that point I began to write fiction with some basis in my real life—using it as a way to process, at age 19, the revelation that I had a condition that would make it hard for me to get pregnant and the grief caused, though well before I actually wanted to become one, by the thought of possibly never being a mother—I, whose nurturing nature the students I led on outdoor trips both in high school and college credited by nicknaming Mom. In my mid-twenties, as though sprinkled with fairy dust, I suddenly found real fiction again. I was driving home one day, I can’t remember now from where but I’d guess from his place—from the house of the guy I’d been in unrequited love with for so long—and I was hit with this thought that it was time to leave him. To just axe him from my life. That he was a drug and I needed to go cold-turkey to un-addict myself. It took me another year or two to do that in real life, but that day, I’d come running up the stairs of the apartment, thrown myself on my bed, and started typing out a fictional attempt. I’d taking that one thought—of just up and leaving—and created a crazy and exhilarating scene around it, of a character just waking up and deciding to leave her life one day without thought or planning. From there the story changed in purpose; it became about the journey, about the act of discovery and the self-discovery it can inspire; it became about figuring out what “home” meant; and what love was. The fact that it started with leaving a guy—whom the main character actually still loved—caused confusion. Some readers saw the story to be about running out on something, someone, and they saw that as weak; I saw the story as about reaching out toward something, about re-animating a stagnant life, which I—great believer in independence and making oneself happy before one can be any good to anyone else—saw as so strong. For years, I puzzled over how to resolve the conflict, until two or so ago I decided to remove the boyfriend altogether, which I started doing—but then I hit a scene that would have to be redone through and through to work without him, and I got stumped, and I felt I had no more fiction in me to replace it with. Thus when I joined my writing class last May, I had zero intention of writing fiction; I firmly believed by then that my only skill lay in writing nonfiction, and that nonfiction was worthy of being read too. But my classmates were all writing novels, and as I listened to them talk about arcs of stories and developing characters and I heard their openness to changing the plot if it would add tension to the story or fill in some gap—I felt inspired. I felt I could learn from them what I needed to find fiction at my fingertips again. So I put my memoir chapters away and pulled out that old beloved work of fiction. I believed I had some wisdom gained since last working on it that would help me bring it to fuller life. I’d now been through something like the character had—the thrill of up and moving somewhere new, the falling in love with the place, the feeling alive because of it—and I could use that to enhance the book. Yet I’d chosen to leave that place to pursue other opportunities, to go to graduate school, to start a new career that I was so excited about—because I believed in that career, I really cared about it, and I felt I could make a real impact on it. That’s, perhaps, the first line of thinking that felled me. I believed that what I was doing meant something to others. I could see that it did. I could see the tangible impact I was making on an organization that was making a tangible impact on its community—on low-income families and children and schools. And that’s where I started to feel torn. Doing this job took so much out of me, took away my time for the things that make an impact on me; but I felt guilty resenting it for that. I have always had a complicated nature—extrovert and introvert, people-lover and solitude-needer. In this job, so demanding of the gregarious and giving side of me, I learned how badly I need the balance of my parts to exist. I learned, too, that despite my ability to bring real skill to the realm of hands-on, direct-service work in education, despite my desire to do so to feel more connected to the end customer—the students, the wonderfully aspirant, phenomenally challenged by life circumstances, but willing to work at it children; despite all that, I am an academic at heart, an intellectual, and I need to work in my brain too—something I don’t get to much at all in this job. And this understanding that the work that satisfies the heart does not satisfy the mind perplexed the hell out of me, and that I think was amplified by another one of the triggers that set in this week: this one’s called pressure: this one is my and my family’s belief that one should do something of value.

When working in textbook publishing, there was one spell when I was putting in longer hours than my usual 9 to 5; I was working into the evening and maybe a little on the weekends. I was in a new job at a top-selling publisher that I discovered, upon getting there, was a huge mess. Twenty percent of the staff—hating the work culture—quit in my first six months. Coming into a workplace where everyone was stressed out and miserable was stressful and miserable for me as well; it made it hard to make friends there or enjoy the work. But despite that, I have always held myself to high standards, so I was taking the time outside of the workday that I felt was required to produce quality work. Until my roommate commented one day that I didn’t work in a hospital; no one was going to die if I wasn’t there at all hours to create the world’s best textbook. And that comment both relieved me of some anxiety and stayed with me. Back then I did regular volunteer work that had great meaning; I was deeply involved and influential in a handful of young people’s lives. Three of them, now in their early twenties, I’m still in touch with; one will be my little brother for life. When I made the switch to working full-time in the realm of serving low-income youth, it was because I believed I had a skill set to make a more systemic impact on their education and opportunities than I was doing individually with a few of my tutees. But having stayed in it for three years despite disliking what I do all day most days (which is go to meetings) and how many frenzied hours a day I do it has been about something else too—it’s also been about feeling validated by doing something of value. I remember what it was like to not feel that way at work (no kid dreams of growing up to be a textbook editor, I used to say), and I don’t want to try that again.

But I worry that there is something else underlying my sense that I can’t walk away from such important, community-altering work. I worry that there is the legacy of a family in which everyone else has done something of great value—at least as measured by their field and, in some cases, as measured by the broader world. To start with, I have a grandfather who just after finishing his PhD, at the ripe young age of 24, designed the detonator of a horrifyingly deadly atomic bomb that did bring an end to a horrible world war and that kicked off nuclear deterrence, to which my grandfather remained committed as a chemistry professor at universities like Brown, Princeton, and Harvard and as science advisor to the president. And if that’s not enough to live up to, my other grandfather generated in his biochemistry lab something called a proteinoid microsphere—a replica of how the first cell on earth formed. In his mind, he solved the origin of life—a field of study that my father, as a physicist, also worked on. Both were also university professors for their entire careers, though primarily (phew) at public state institutions. And let’s not forget about the ladies! One of my grandmothers earned a PhD in chemistry from Harvard (in 1950! Go Grandma!) and was a professor at Trinity College and Wellesley, dedicating her career to getting more women into science. Maybe she came by it honestly: her mother had an MD! (Though she only used it for about two years.) Her father was an organic chemist who published prolific research in German and English, shares a patent on Chlortrimeton (which I loved taking when sick as a child), and helped develop the birth control pill. My other grandmother didn’t work after having children, but she too had a graduate degree—a master’s in pharmacology, which made sense for the daughter of a biochemist who had built not one but two pharmacy empires, first in Russia (where the czar was one of his biggest fans) and then, from scratch after fleeing the Bolsheviks, in Shanghai, where his (now Chinese-owned) pharmaceutical company today has 14 manufacturing plants and was the second-largest in China until bought out by the largest. Yup. And then there’s my mom, who did amble a bit through her career, after not completing her PhD in biology spending ten years being a truly outstanding potter before getting into education reform, a career in which she has excelled as a researcher despite her lack of any appropriate qualifications (PhD or teaching experience) and has become the deputy director of the country’s leading research center on dropout prevention. Mm hm. Thankfully my brother—ever the wonder boy growing up, considered by our teachers a true Renaissance Man and better at absolutely everything academic than anyone else with whom we went to what’s considered the best school in the Southeast, plus a good athlete and painter and pretty decent guitarist—has become a truly awesome dad and is deeply in love with his wife in addition to being a math professor at one of Madrid’s most prestigious universities and who keeps, despite being an outsider (and, according to him, not of the same caliber as a US mathematician), getting government grants for his work because he is considered top-notch in the country he lives in.

Needless to say, despite my being a very strong individualist who has, within her family, always done things her own way, I can still succumb to wondering why I have so little clue about what I should be doing with my life when the rest of the family seems so clear on their paths. (If only I’d been into science!) And I can question my ability to pull off even art—even the totally self-indulgent creative writing I came out here to do.

There’s a pretty easy summation for all this rambling, and that’s that last week I fell deep in a hole called self-doubt. This, I think, is inevitable when you’re going through an early-life crisis, which I feel that I am. So I’m not holding myself at any fault for being deep in it. I am just trying, right now, to acknowledge it. I feel lost. At a loss. Unsure of what should or could come next for me. And desperate to find it.

I was hoping to find my way out of the foggy place I’m in right now through exactly what I’m doing—giving it some time and space to rattle around inside me and then putting it on paper and, in so doing, exhaling it. But the reason that process isn’t working in my fiction right now is that I’m living something similar to what the character’s going through and I’m not finding my way out of it. She radically alters her life to break the bounds—to take control in a way that she was starting to feel she couldn’t—to overcome that sense of being locked in to what you have. I’ve been trying to do that in my real life for three years now and I can’t make it work. I have applied for endless other jobs and not gotten any of them; I have looked for apartments in San Francisco commuting neighborhoods and not found a single one I can afford—first because of my non-profit salary and now, with that having finally gone up, because of the rising prices in this seemingly (and understandably) most desirous of all cities in the US. So I’m jumping out of my skin because I believe I know how to live a life richly and yet I’m failing to be able to do that in the place I really with all my heart want to do it. Which is making me not just jump out of my skin but want to jump ship altogether. But that IS the weak way to go. I don’t want to skip out on anything; I want to do as I did when I left Boston: wrap things up neatly, leave happy, walk toward the next thing strong. That’s why I came to New Mexico for a few weeks, took a leave of absence rather than just up and quitting my job. Yet last week, two weeks into this blessed time off, the prospect of ever going back to the insanity of that job paralyzed me. I don’t want the life I have right now, and I do feel stuck in it. Thankfully I have five more weeks to try to figure out a fix.