crush

crush (n):

- according to Miriam Webster: "an intense and usually passing infatuation"

- according to Urban Dictionary: "a burning desire to be with someone who you find very attractive and extremely special"

Of the two definitions, I’m in the second one’s camp. I’ve never understood why crushes should be fleeting; to me, there’s nothing necessarily temporal about the feeling they embody of being smitten based on a shallow depth of interaction.

I got my long-standing crush on the state I’m now in the second or third time I visited. My first trip, my parents purport, was when I was four; I remember so much from that epic cross-country road trip (Anasazi ruins in Arizona; big horn sheep, bison, and Old Faithful in Yellowstone; coyotes and gold-mining in California; Canon Beach in Oregon; a Redwood forest; banana slugs in a backyard in Seattle) but nothing specific to New Mexico. The next time I came I was 16; to celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary, my grandparents decided to bring all their children and grandchildren to Durango, Colorado to spend one July week on a dude ranch (which felt a lot like summer camp for grown-ups and very unlike my grandparents, but we had a good time and my grandparents still enjoy wearing the “fifty years of fission and fusion” t-shirts my aunt made for the event). My mom decided that we should fly into Santa Fe and drive to the ranch so we could see a bit of the place where my grandparents began their marriage. We drove to Los Alamos straight away and visited Bandelier National Monument, which we enjoyed until we reached our next stop—its much more impressive Colorado counterpart, Mesa Verde. I don’t remember whether that short touchdown in New Mexico was enough to breed a crush, but two years later, my next visit certainly was.

I had just graduated from high school and was mentally preparing to head off to college. First, though, I had the immense pleasure of taking one last outing with the outdoor education program that my high school required all freshmen to participate in and that, after loving it myself as a ninth grader, I was thrilled to work for as an instructor over the next three years of high school. Each six-week session, I ran a group of 12 freshmen through trust-building games, low and high ropes courses, caving, bouldering, hiking, and camping. Periodically, the director whisked the small group of instructors away on staff training trips. My first one—a weekend trip to a different part of north Georgia than the one we took freshmen to—had been earlier that year, and my co-instructor and childhood friend Hayden and I had gotten to do all the planning for it. We’d had a great time packing supplies and managing the sophomore instructors who came—and were thus pumped at the opportunity to spend more than a week with them in New Mexico just after we’d graduated. The group of us drove there in two vans, with me somehow managing to be the only girl in mine, which means I suffered a lot of taunting when I had to go to the bathroom every two hours on our three-day camp-and-drive; but it was loving taunting, and I had a van-full of favorite guys by the time we finally arrived in Santa Fe and drove up to 8,000 feet to start a backpacking trip through the Pecos Wilderness in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The hike was phenomenal; for six days, we saw no other humans—only the mountain goats on whose trails we trekked, elk, marmots, and a herd of big horn sheep. We hiked through incredibly varied flora, from alpine-like meadows to conifer forests to the rugged rock of North Truchas Peak, whose small summit we stood on and stared out, learning what it means to be at 13,100 feet. This was in 1995; 53 years earlier, my grandparents had stood in that same spot as 23-and-24-year-old scientists taking a break from their work on the Manhattan Project. From the view I had there, the journey I’d taken to reach it, I deeply understood why they had grown so fond of this state.

The last few days of that trip included a quick visit to Taos (where I’m writing this now) to raft down the Rio Grande—which was slow-flowing and gentle enough that all of us, nine days dirty, immediately rolled out of the rafts and floated downstream in hopes of getting clean—and the return trip. Along the way we passed through the low-rider capital of the state, near which we saw a Fiesta Parade that plays a seminal role in this novella I’ve been trying to sort out. Those encounters were brief, but they intrigued me. A definite crush began to flourish. So when I decided, seven years ago, to quit my job in Boston and move to San Francisco without one, I knew I had to take my time in getting there; I knew I hadn’t yet seen enough of the Southwest, New Mexico in particular. This time I drove to Albuquerque, where I saw Petroglyph National Monument; and to Santa Fe, where I saw the marvelous little Georgia O’Keeffe museum; and to Chaco Canyon, which honestly you need to see for yourself, or at least read my novella to experience :); and past Shiprock; and on into Utah, this country’s other most stunning geography. And by the time my three days in this state were done, I can tell you, my side of the romance was full-fledged.

To honor it, I began building more New Mexico-based scenes into the novella; my character began to really live here. So did a little part of my heart. I still didn’t know this place well; until last month I was still in crush with it: my heart absolutely certain, my brain not knowing—or caring—whether it was right.

It feels good to be smitten—to know that it’s not only in movies that people are swept off their feet. It feels daydreamy to find your feelings of fondness getting grounded in something deep. Crushes make the heart feel good; they make it remember to beat. That they grow substantive is a rare but delicious treat. 

independence (a meditation)

Friends often tell me that the reason I’m still single is that I’m too picky; and I always argue because I think I’m not. I know a number of guys who fit what I’m looking for, and I actually think I have a pretty reasonable list of hopes for someone I’m with. (Picture traits such as warmth, passion, optimism, a love of learning, playfulness, a fondness for having time alone and time with others, and confidence/inner strength.) Underlying my desire for a number of those characteristics is my utter belief in independence—a quality of my own that I both cherish and think may be the real culprit in my unlucky relationship with love.

I’ve been alone for just over three weeks now, and I’m only mildly surprised to find that I’m not feeling at all lonely (whereas I had been feeling lonely at home prior to this trip). Throughout this sabbatical I’ve realized just how keenly I needed time off—and time to myself. I am someone who fundamentally believes that I can’t connect with others until I feel whole and well all by myself. Over the past three years, with this crazy job that leaves me totally worn out, I’ve tended to make fewer social plans because I honestly haven’t had a lot to say. I haven’t had enough going on in my own life to feel I could contribute much to anyone else. Now I’m getting to refill myself—with things to say, to think, to love. I’m following the rule I set for myself when I decided to move to California: “Don’t just live a little, live a lot.” My three years in San Francisco were full of rich living—but my three years since grad school were not. Now that I’m back on task, I’m writing, I’m devouring books and articles I’ve been meaning to read, I’m seeing gorgeous landscapes and listening to new music and just indulging my brain and my senses with a flood of inputs. I have an incredible inquisitiveness that thrives on seeing new places and ways of life and considering ideas and gaining insights. And I have an independence that can make those things, done alone, feel like enough.

I drove to Abiquiu (AB-ih-cue), New Mexico earlier this week to see the landscape that Georgia O’Keeffe loved so dearly when she lived and painted there. You should have seen the scenery; I found myself smiling repeatedly on the drive. It reminded me of one of the pivotal scenes in this work of fiction I’m trying to figure out; the character has just visited Chaco Canyon (a remote and stunning canyon whose floors and low walls are lined with Ancestral Puebloan (formerly known as Anasazi) great houses) and leaves like this: “In the evening, Sarah made her way back slowly. She wanted to hold on to the quietness she had felt in the canyon. She loved the feeling of smiling with no one there to watch it. Of gasping in awe with no one there to second it. She liked taking in so much of her surroundings and having the space in which to process it all. Sometimes she needed a day to herself, with no human interaction, to hear her own heart beat; to sort out her thoughts. Sometimes she needed to take a journey to find out where she had already been.” I wrote that a long time ago, but right now, I’m living it myself. On my drive to Abiquiu, I said aloud things like “this is life at its finest” and just plain “holy shit.” (The colors in that area’s landscape are vibrant, varied—astonishing to look at.) And saying them made my smile widen; I feel whole and well again. I feel I’ve come back to life.

I’ve taken this trip on my own because of a vow I made twenty years ago. I made it to myself. I was fifteen years old, starting my sophomore year and also keeping an eye on my mom. Having just gotten divorced, she was depressed and also terrified. My parents had waited longer than they should have—years longer—to get a divorce because, quite simply, having two households would have cost too much. My dad was a professor; he didn’t make a lot to start with, and what he did have he spent on the cost of tuition for my brother and me at an elite private school (worth the struggle, in my parents’ minds, given the very low caliber of the Atlanta Public Schools). After spending my childhood working as a potter, by my early teens my mom was solidly getting work in the field of public education reform—but on a consulting basis, which meant her income wasn’t assured. Within a year she would get a permanent position and the money worries would diminish; but in the meantime, as I watched her feel anxious and distressed, and I saw both parents sink into depression at being alone, I made a promise to myself that I hope to always keep.

Always be able to support yourself and make yourself happy. That’s what I said. That’s what I committed to at age fifteen—despite growing up in a time and place where other mothers looked down on mine for both working and getting divorced.

At that age, I had already been given a lot of independence, so I knew something about finding your own happiness. Starting in fourth grade, I came home from school alone. My brother would be at football practice until six and my parents would be at work until then, too. The house usually filled back up with people by seven; until then, it was left to me and my cats—and the puppy I was given at age 10 to keep me company. Until I started playing sports in sixth grade, I would get home at 3, watch the soap opera Santa Barbara (to which I was turned on by my up-the-street neighbor and former after-school babysitter), and then still have three hours to myself. During that time I always walked my dog around the neighborhood—which took 15 to 45 minutes, depending on my route. The rest of the time I spent reading novels and, come junior high, poetry; writing stories and poems of my own; playing cards (I could beat anyone at double solitaire at that age); talking to friends on the phone; writing letters (to which I was very dedicated, writing weekly to my cousin and an adored friend in the town where my grandparents live); and doing homework, though often I saved some of it until my mom was home and did it in the kitchen while she cooked dinner.

In addition to all that time to myself, in both houses we lived in, I also had open space around me, and I spent a lot of time out in it. At the first house, I usually went exploring with my neighbor or my brother in tow; most of our focus was on the areas around the fast-flowing creek a few hundred yards behind our houses. At the house we moved to when I was seven and that I lived in until I went to college, I would take long walks down the often dry creek bed in the woods behind our house and look at the plants and climb up the hill to the cave dug by teenagers and filled with dating-related graffiti and then sneak through the fence above it and into the baseball park that my brother played games at before heading back home by the road. In the summers, I’d go even farther—heading to the park a mile away to see who was in the swimming pool or to watch a horseback riding class or game of tennis or to hear sound check for a concert in the outdoor amphitheater there. And for a few blessed weeks each summer I’d roam even farther afield yet, flying up to Rhode Island, where I traversed not just the four acres of land on which my grandparents live but the coastline, my bare feet completely at home hugging the flat faces of rocks pelted, at certain hours of day, by sea water and clung to by barnacles, mussels, and seaweed as well as by me. Sometimes during my wanderings I thought; sometimes I just felt; sometimes I found a large stone seat and read a book to the tune of waves crashing. Sometimes I sat by the water for hours. And felt ecstatic. As a teenager, I remember explicitly not getting into drinking or drugs because I knew the high that being in nature could give and thought it too precious to compare anything to.

Back then I had a favorite motto, which I placed on the bumper sticker of my brother’s car as soon as he left for college and it was a year away from becoming mine. The background was a deep cobalt blue, and the writing—interspersed among stars—said in white letters “Follow your bliss.” The day I found it, I was with one of my best friends, who bought one that we thought made a good partner for mine: “Enjoy being.” We gained such wisdoms out in the woods, in both the outdoor program at our high school for which we were both instructors and in the semester we both spent living on a farm in Maine, and by the sea, and by the pool behind her house, and in the car as we drove from place to place talking. When either outdoors or with friends like her I was a happy kid—despite the fact that I was also nursing the broken heart that results from living through too many years of a bad marriage.

I enjoyed a lot of time and space to myself growing up; but I was also gregarious. I was involved in just about everything in high school and had plenty of close friendships from which I derived tremendous joy as well. Back then I don’t think my independence got the best of me—it just made me be at my best. A few years later, I think, the balance changed.

As a teenager and college student I bought into all you see in the media about love—thought I’d be happier yet if I had someone to love and be loved by. I’d never had much luck with dating, having had a lot of guy friends but only a boyfriend (ok, two at once! oh my) in ninth grade. In college I had crush after crush but nothing but friendship came of those interests either. Then I met the guy I thought was going to change it all. For two years, I spent tons of time with him and thought it was leading to forever. But he was in a weird headspace in regard to dating and so we never did get there. The first time I decided our closeness wasn’t good for me, I spent six weeks not talking to him—until his best friend begged me to “take him back,” saying that he was moping and depressed and wouldn’t do anything since I’d “left.” Boy did that relationship-like talk give me hope. So we reunited, and another three years had to pass with no dating but all kinds of closeness before I realized that I was trying to derive way too much of my happiness from him. You see, I’m definitely a romantic—painfully so. I’d let that part of my nature win out over the self-sustainer. For five years I’d let myself believe something that for many other people is true: that being close to a certain person was essential to my happiness. And when it proved instead to be essential to my unhappiness, well, I boarded up the windows of my heart and tucked into the basement to ride out the storm. And there I reminded myself that I had learned this lesson before, through my parents. And from then on, in a mode of serious self-protection, I repeatedly told myself that it was my own responsibility to make myself happy, not anyone else’s. And the combination of a belief in independence and a wound as deep as the one I was trying to heal, it seems clear to me now, led me to a place of finding happiness where I knew I could create it and mitigating risk where I knew the outcomes wouldn’t all be up to me. I managed my own expectations, committing to the idea that I would marry someone only if I found someone I really wanted to marry. But it’s taken all these years for me to realize that when you set a boundary like that on your heart—when, in essence, you turn your focus away from finding “true love” because you stop thinking it’s a priority—and when you couple that with a strength at finding joy on your own, maybe it becomes easy to turn too far away from center. You run your odds down, leaving the only chance for love to develop to serendipity. And while it does happen that way sometimes, most of the time—you see at the end of a year when you were invited to nine weddings, seven of which blossomed from online dating—it results from more concerted effort. And while I’ve joined every online dating site of repute in the past ten years and gone on a lot of dates in the seven years I’ve lived in the Bay Area—showing that I am open to dating and actively trying—I think maybe my heart wasn’t fully available to it. I think my ability to thrive independently much of the time made me forget about the thick walls I put up to heal a wound years ago—and thus let me leave them up too long.

I never meant my promise to suggest that no one else could influence my well being or happiness. I just wanted to have a certain amount of all that in place on my own first. To not rely on external sources of it. Consider them a wonderful bonus, yes; consider them necessary for living, not a chance. I still believe it’s the right approach to provide for one self in many ways. But I’m here in New Mexico right now because I cherish the idea of being happy all around—both on my own and then, because of that, with someone else. I have been watching that joy unfold for years now with others; having never had a model of it at home, I now see it every time I visit my brother or spend time with certain friends. Having never had a model of it at home, it was hard to navigate toward it. I think I steered myself a little off course. But if you could see me with my nieces and nephew, or with the kids I serve at work, or even in certain friendships, you would understand what I now understand, which is that for me to fully thrive I need to be giving outward. I love to love. I know how to take good care of myself; I’ve proven that. Now I want to find another independent and loving soul and take care of him too, and be taken care of by him. (And make babies, but we all already know that I want that!)

I wrote earlier that I came out here to refill myself with things to say, to think, to love. I will come home full to the brim, as a dear friend would say, so if I should come across my potential mate, I will be ready to let down the walls and love away.

Write what you know.

Write what you know—I’m the one who cited this, in my last blog post, as the first rule of writing. And the one who’s been overlooking it, I realized last night as I meant to be heading to bed but had my eye caught by an email from Hillary, which I couldn’t help but sit right down and read.

Hillary and I have been sharing our writing with each other for—I don’t know how long. Long. Hillary’s the real reason I’m out here right now, having inspired me first to apply for the same writing residency she did in New Mexico (to which I was not accepted, but the prospect of it gave me the idea to come out here to write—and to relax and revive—on my own) and then to join one of her writing teacher’s classes—thus earning the title of key force in the reinvigoration of my writing habit! So you can believe that I couldn’t wait until morning to read her comments on the newest version of the first half of this little novella I’ve been working on.

I was nervous as I opened them. Hillary had read a lot of these scenes before, so one would hope they’d improved since the last time she’d seen them; but I’d been struggling with the story, feeling a bit stuck with it while feeling a bit stuck with my real life. So I was nervous as I opened them—and totally relieved once I had. Because Hillary suggested some things that should have been pretty obvious to me—but it can be easy to miss your own two feet when your head’s a blur.

What her comments boiled down to is that in the story, I’ve got a character trying to be in a successful romantic relationship—something I haven’t been too lucky with myself. And I’ve got her attempting to be clear-headed in the face of a life crisis—something I know all too well lately isn’t the way things go. So instead of trying to capture what’s not familiar to me, my dear friend highlighted, I could capture what I do know: what it feels like to love someone unhesitatingly and still let them go; to find yourself in a foggy place and figure out how to navigate through. Write what you know. Now that I can do. 

(And did this afternoon—adding a completely new twist to the early part of the story! WOOHOO, Hillary!)

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.