The Proportionate Heart

When I was a freshman in college, my oldest sister would send me postcards to my school mailbox.  On one of them sometime during the fall, she described a medical appointment she'd had and expressed her dry disbelief that having a small hole in her heart was not in fact a very big deal, according to her doctor.  This postcard was how I found out about her apparently not-emergent heart condition.

I had a meltdown right there in the greasiest dining hall on campus. 

Here's the immediate background:

When my parents and I had been driving to New Hampshire to install me in my freshman dorm, we had stopped in Michigan to visit my sister and newborn niece.  The day we were going to leave, we were sitting in the family room when my usually hyper-articulate sister began stumbling on her words.  She looked bewildered, then terrified.  She was having what's called a TIA, which is a type of stroke.  Her blood pressure had been off the charts when she'd been pregnant, and a small clot had gotten through the hole in her heart, which no one had known about, to her brain. 

As it turns out, if you're going to have a stroke, a TIA is-- odd though it may sound-- the best kind of stroke you can have.  My sister suffered no lasting physical effects, and the hole in her heart was deemed not dangerous enough to merit surgery.

But here's the deeper background:

Seven months before my sister's TIA, my friend Ben had been killed in a drunk driving accident.  Ben had been my senior adviser when I was a freshman in high school, which doesn't sound likely as the foundation for the kind of bond I had to him.  The thing is, when I moved to California and was more lost and alone than I had ever been, Ben was my lifeline.  When he called me to set up our first advisee group outing, we ended up talking for two hours.  He was so exceptionally kind and generous with his love, and I think it would be impossible to overstate what that meant to me at that time in my life, and how grateful I've always been to him since then.

Even now, I refuse to say that he died.  He was killed.  He didn't leave-- he was taken.  I don't know why that language was, and continues to be, so important to me.  But it was, and is, and when I found out he had been killed, I thought I would break in half from the grief.  I had never lost anyone in my life up to that point, and the fact that he was no longer out there-- no longer in the world-- made me want to scream.  I think I actually did do quite a bit of screaming during that winter and the spring the followed. 

Ten months later, when my sister casually mentioned on a postcard that she had a hole in her heart, my own heart did some very basic math:

If losing a friend-- a marvelous, loving friend-- had made me want to turn myself inside out to escape the pain, then even the possibility of losing my sister terrified me more than I had thought I had the capacity to be terrified.  It was a terror that completely swamped my capacity for reasoning: I think this is what people mean when they say "scared out of your mind."

I called her the day I got the postcard, crying hysterically and frightened literally beyond words, and she couldn't understand my reaction any more than I could explain it at the time.  I was beyond reason, and that's the only language she understands. 

When we were both home for Christmas that year, and (as usual) a fight between us had become all the fights that had ever been between us all at once, she told me pointblank that she thought I had over-dramatized Ben's death.

Even ten years later, the impact-- the violent collision of her words against me-- makes me flinch.  And though we've come a long way in our relationship, I don't think I will forgive her for that.  I also don't think I have any desire to do so, and I think that's okay.

When I think about the progress I've made towards becoming the most adult version of myself I can manage, one of the things I'm most proud of is being able to articulate the things I wasn't able to before.  For instance, and importantly, I think the first thing I should've said to my sister was that she should waste no time in fucking off, as she had no idea what the hell she was talking about.  She had never lost anyone before, much less at as young an age and as violently as Ben had been killed.  Her judgment, outside of being unbelievably cruel, was also completely uninformed. Hence: fuck off.  Immediately if not sooner.

Recently, I wrote about my fantasy of traveling back in time to comfort my younger self in times of grief or pain.  In this case, when I imagine going back to myself, I wrap myself protectively in my own, older arms before turning on my sister and really letting her have it with an additional ten years' worth of honed expressive abilities. 

This is all well and good-- the anger, the articulation, the perspective-- but none of this is by any means resolved.

Last week, I found out that a friend from college had been killed in a car accident.  Again: she did not die, she was killed.  As when Ben died, I could not understand how everyone on earth did not feel it the moment she was taken.  Surely the molecules and atoms and photons should've simply stopped-- appalled that someone so energetic and charismatic and intensely loving as this woman was just suddenly gone. 

As I thought about her-- the texture of her voice, what it felt like to be in a room with her (it felt incredible, by the way)-- a horrible, familiar doubt came to me:

Am I over-dramatizing this?

Am I making it about myself?  Is my reaction proportionate to our level of closeness?  Is my reaction attention-seeking?

To put it bluntly, questions like these really fucking suck, whether they originate externally or internally. 

This may sound strange, but I wish I could just grieve, and not ask myself these questions (proportionate grief-- seriously?).  After all, in terms of a life lost, such questions are neither here nor there.

Because my friend was amazing.  She lit up any room that was lucky enough to have her in it.  I found out this week through memories shared that she made a habit of flirting with her friends in good faith-- I had thought for years I was just flattering myself and imagining it.  I have to tell you, I'm straight, but that woman's flirting was one of the most delightfully flustering and gratifying experiences I have ever had.  She was vibrant and hilarious and so intensely, purposefully herself that you couldn't help but be more sure of yourself in her presence.  I hadn't seen her in a couple of years, but I had this blithe certainty that when we saw each other again, we'd do a hollering tackle-hug by way of greeting.

And the fact that she is no longer on this earth makes me want to scream.

Maybe at a certain level it is possible to over-dramatize or make a loss about yourself.  But when you lose someone you love, someone who indisputably raised the awesome quotient of the world for the time that he or she was in it, you have to let yourself have that loss.  There's no proportion or formula: that's the thing about love.

Obviously, this is still something I'm working on, and when my thoughts turn to self-doubt, I'm trying to turn them back to the friend who was effectively the cure for self-doubt and unhappiness. 

Because ultimately what's most important and absolutely beyond any judgment is as simple as the fact that I-- we, the world-- may have lost her, but goddamn, it is a fine, fine thing to have loved her. 

Old Breaks

I don't really believe in time travel in the practical sense.  In spite of how much science fiction I consume, through screen or literature, and in spite of my persistent agreement with Hamlet that "There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy," time travel falls outside of even my own credulity.

That doesn't stop me from thinking about it, though.

If you can believe it, this came up in therapy recently.

One of the defining traumas of my life occurred one day towards the end of my eighth grade year of middle school.  My father had been commuting to his new job in California since January, and our house in Illinois had been on the market for five months.  I had been a hostage to an undefined, impending uprooting for about half a year, during which time I had finally found the kind of friends who made leaving seem especially cruel.  I had felt simultaneously obligated to hold together my mother in my father's absence, as well as my own remarkable impression of a high functioning human at school.  I don't remember the exact catalyst, but that morning in the late spring, I broke. 

Looking back, of course, I recognize several things, undiagnosed depression being one of them, deeply seated anxiety being another.  Yet another is that I had learned from a very early age not to make a fuss.  We were a good family.  We didn't have problems.  My exemplary grades and virtually spotless behavior were part of the deal and regrettably unexceptional.  So as everything fell apart around me, I felt as though I had to hold it together.  I didn't know at that point that sometimes holding it together is the worst thing you can do for yourself.

Standing outside of school that morning, I felt something heavy settle on my chest.  It was as though my brain were submerged in dark, murky water: everything was muted, echoing, translucently shadowed.  When we were let into the school, I made my way to the office of the counselor, to whom I'd been talking for several months.  I sat down and, though I don't remember the details clearly, I communicated my desire to hurt myself.  From valedictorian to self-harm in ten seconds flat: I didn't know how to be anything in between, and it never occurred to me that sadly those two things didn't have to be mutually exclusive.

The irony was that such a statement of intent to self-harm immediately kicked off a series of events that ended up doing more harm than good; of course these procedures are in place for a reason, but still.  The counselor had a legal obligation to hand me off to the school's social worker, whom I hated.  I had asked that my close friend Ross come to the office, and he came in on high alert, tall and blue-eyed and remarkably composed under the circumstances.  When they told me he couldn't come in with me to the social worker's office, I flatly stated that if Ross wasn't with me, I wasn't going. 

I remember that moment as being the first time my anger had ever really gotten traction in reality, and Ross sat beside me in the social worker's office.

Of course the school had to call my parents.  That morning, my mother was driving my father to the airport, because he was flying to Japan for a business  conference.  My mother told the school they would pick me up on their way.  This meant, of course, hauling me out of my friend's protective grasp and planting me in the backseat of a minivan.  I'll never know what exactly the school told my parents, but in short order, we were on our way to O'Hare. 

I remember spilling Diet Coke down the front of my shirt in the car.  Isn't it funny the things you remember?

When we got to the airport, it suddenly became apparent that my dad had left his laptop at home, so my mother went tearing back to the suburbs to get it, leaving me with my dad at the airport.  Back then, you could go through security even without a ticket, and I remember sitting in the dilapidated terminal seats with my dad, who had no idea what to do with me.

Until his cellphone rang: my mother had been in an automobile accident.

Here's where the time travel comes in.  I want to step through a portal, or push a button, or hail a TARDIS, and go back to that moment.  I imagine stepping out of the vortex (or police call box) and sitting down next to myself.  I want to put my arms around my younger shoulders and lean my head against hers.  And most importantly, I want to tell her how sorry I am.  It goes something like this:

"I'm sorry that you're in the middle of the worst pain you have known yet in your life and that no one seems to understand or even really notice.  I'm sorry that what you don't know is that your mom is fine, but the accident will effectively erase your part in this day from your parents' minds and memories.  I'm sorry that in a year or so, when you bring it up with your dad, asking him if he remembers the day you had your breakdown, he'll answer with uncharacteristic cruelty, "Oh, I'm sorry, the day your mother was in a car crash?"  As though your asking was appalling. I'm sorry you will have to hear that.  I'm sorry your mom will shrilly remember only her own emotional injury that day-- that your dad got on a plane the day after her crash and left her.  I'm sorry you're not in that equation.  I'm sorry you haven't articulated yet that emotionally, someone always has to 'win' in our family-- that there can be only one hurt that gets the attention, and that yours did not win that day, or any of the days that followed.  I'm so sorry.

"I'm sorry that you just don't have the tools, but you should know that your not having them is not your fault.  You haven't learned to own your rage, to hone it, as I learned in my early twenties, and you haven't learned how to manage pain, communicate it, use it, and calm it as I only have in the last couple of years.  I'm sorry you have no language to give to this dark, ugly pain that is very real.  I'm sorry that the worst moment of your life so far is about to be forgotten.

But I promise you this: I won't forget it."

This is not the only instance in my life that I would like to revisit-- not to do anything differently, but simply to comfort a younger version of myself, to acknowledge the situation and bear compassionate witness.  My sister, thinking she sounded wise but actually sounding cruel, told me once that I remember every wrong that has ever been done to me.  What I didn't have the words to tell her then was that I have to remember, because nobody else bloody does.

Sometimes, when I'm hashing out the oddly mundane details of these fantasies, I wonder what my past self would think of my current self.  The acne has certainly cleared, thank God and benzoyl peroxide, and the braces are gone.  I like to think that I'm comfortable in my own skin and that I wear it with greater confidence-- I hope this would show somehow (though, of course, that could just be wishful thinking).  At the very least, I imagine she would be impressed with my tall black boots and my refined command of eyeliner.  But these details are kind of beside the point.

As traumas go, I realize in the grand scheme of things mine is not so enormous.  Nevertheless, it felt that way, and it overwhelmed me.  I've revisited that moment so many times, especially in therapy, as a sort of archetypal break, one that is difficult to address in writing.  But I wanted to, and I think I've just realized why: because now, after fifteen years, I am bigger than that hurt.  There was a time when I was not, when it was like an eclipse; even when it was done, it still flickered in my consciousness. 

I joke with my therapist that when I enjoy moments of enlightenment, I say that I feel it in my "therapy" (this is kind of like another version of having it in your "feels," as a friend of mine would phrase it).  My therapist thinks it is a funny turn of phrase, but she observed once: "I don't think that's all your therapy.  I think you're just growing up."

It's the thing I've been trying to do for most of my life: to grow up.  What we realize, though, is that we're never done, there's no finish line, and there's certainly no prize.  We do the best with what we have and keep on truckin'. 

I guess, though, that at least I've made some progress if one of the things that I have is an increased ability to handle large, unwieldy pain more skillfully-- or at least, the ability to discern when, where, and with whom it is most effective to lose my shit.  I also have the knowledge that sometimes it is absolutely essential to lose your shit: to be a mess, to raise the red flag, to not hold it together and to reserve the right to fall the fuck apart.  To let people know that under no circumstances am I at this minute even remotely okay.  And that that's okay.

I wish I could give some of that hard-earned wisdom to that fourteen-year-old at O'Hare.  When I think about it, I find myself rubbing my arms, as though that self-comfort will transcend fifteen years.  I wish it could.  But, if I believe as I think I do, that I really have absorbed all of my former selves, like rings in a tree, maybe it does do some good.  Maybe somewhere inside of me there's a fourteen-year-old with Diet Coke down the front of her shirt who will take that comfort how it's meant.

Because this is the one, truest instance in which someone really does know how she feels.

A Stable Life

"How can you tell if you're depressed or just kind of hate your life?"

I asked this question of my oldest sister towards the end of my second semester in graduate school.  Though our relationship has not always been on the most even of keels, JR became one of my strongest life-lines in grad school.  Having completed her PhD in English about eight years before I started my MA in Art History, she provided remarkably canny insight regarding the trials, tribulations, and general batshit politics of getting an advanced degree in the humanities.  To her, my misery was truly unfortunate but not surprising.

 "How long until the end of your semester?" she asked.

 "Two weeks."

 "I think you'll know in three weeks or so."

She was right of course: after the semester ended, I caught up on the missed sleep, reined in abundant stomach acid, and managed to more or less pull myself together. 

My plan at that time was to research my thesis for the summer, avoiding my department and my cohort like the plague.  There are worse things than burying yourself in books for a summer, but it also occurred to me that it might not be the worst idea to try to incorporate something into my life that had nothing—zip, zilch, nada—to do with graduate school.

The solution I came upon was almost comically straight forward:

I found myself a barn.

It was no coincidence that this was where my mind (and later, my Subaru) took me: the intense loneliness and rigid stress I experienced in grad school felt very similar to my emotional symptomology in high school.  Back then, I had found an equine therapy barn by pure coincidence just down the street from my house in California.  Patience, my fiery little mustang counterpart, held me together through general misery and acute loss.  And she did it simply by being a horse.

It is difficult to describe the effect a barn has on me—the bone-deep, shoulder-releasing peace I experience when I come within smelling distance of a stable.  Scent is supposedly the sense most strongly linked to memory, and I can attest to this: when my anxiety is at its worst, I will occasionally pull out my old riding gloves and nestle my face in them.  Sweat, hay, and manure: the combination of these smells will calm me down faster and more reliably than anything else I have found.

In retrospect, I wonder why it took me as long as it did to find a barn in Colorado.

I fell into volunteering as though the intervening eight years, between high school in California and grad school in Colorado, had never happened.  That summer, when I wasn't up to my eyeballs in modernist theory, I was up to my knees in manure—and I loved it.  I had forgotten that a barn is full of comforting rhythms: the arc of a lesson, the patterns of grooming, the beat of each horse's gait, even the satisfying rasp and heft of a shovel in a dirty paddock.  That rhythm brought me back to myself that summer, and I held onto it through the next year, scheduling my volunteering in next to my classes. 

It was marvelous to be quietly good at something.  My graduate program was stridently and passive-aggressively competitive, and I struggled between my inherent desire to enter the fray and verbally whup the crap out of my more obnoxious peers in class, and the coinciding awareness that such a whupping would only mean I was playing the game I hated.  At the barn, competition was the furthest thing from my mind, which for me is saying something. 

I ended up being paired most frequently with the two alpha mares of the herd, a dappled gray named Lou and chestnut quarter horse named Lady.  Working with alphas, in my experience, requires simultaneous assertion and respect—a complementary balance of stunning chutzpah and the knowledge that if she wanted to, this mare could walk all over you (literally) and not even chip a hoof. 

For whatever reason, I happen to carry that balance in my bones, so the alphas and I got along swimmingly.

In my year at the barn, I became close with one of the instructors, who knew about my difficulties in grad school.  One afternoon, when I came in particularly exasperated and before the horses could work their magic on me, Chris looked at me curiously over another horse’s back as we were grooming and said, “Why are you putting up this this crap?  You’re a boss mare.”

I don’t think I’ve ever received a better compliment, and I carry it with me still.  I thought about it a lot in my last few months of school, and in moments of stress, I would try to channel my inner alpha.  The thing about boss mares is that, for the most part, they don’t stomp around shrieking their dominance (leave that to the boys).  Instead, they play it cool and just ooze authority.  The underlying threat of a whupping—by hoof, teeth, or 20^th century art theory—is there, but it’s beneath them to resort to such things unless absolutely necessary.  I learned the deadpan and the cool blink from a horse, but it has worked stunningly well on humans.

As cool as they are, though, there are moments when an alpha’s warmth can really save you too.

One afternoon, while I was leading Lady back to her stall after a lesson, she paused on the path.  I figured she had an itch, so I let her stand for a minute.  Instead of scratching like I thought she would, she leaned her head over to me and rested it against my chest, just for a few heartbeats.  Until that moment, I hadn’t realized how long it had been since someone had hugged me, and I was barely able to keep from breaking down in tears.  I don’t know why she did it, but I can tell you that in my experience, horses have an amazing ability to discern when someone is injured, disabled, or in my case, just a little bit broken. 

I am a pack animal, no two ways about it, and in Colorado, I was isolated from my pack.  I know that email and phone access make distance a bit more surmountable, but there is nothing that can replace the actual presence of your own herd of people in a room with you: the warmth, the comfort, the safety.  It was no wonder I was miserable—but it is small wonder that I managed to find a herd for myself in that last year.  My western herd just happened to be made up of horses.

There’s not a lot I miss about Colorado, but that barn, and my darling Lou and Lady, make the top of a very short list.

I saw a news story the other day about veterans benefiting from equine therapy.  While I would never, ever compare my own angst to the actual trauma suffered by vets, I thought I recognized the expression one of their faces as he stood in a stall with a tall, gray horse.  It was relief: the lifting, even if only temporarily, of crippling expectations and uncertainty.  In the accompanying interview, he stated simply: “The horse made it all right.”

I knew the feeling, because for the last two years, it was only in the company of horses that I felt human again.

BLITZ! (or, A Defense of the Charm Offense)

On the evening of October 31, 1999, I caught sight of a rather good-looking boy on my friend Katie’s driveway.  We had gathered there for a Halloween party, and this attractive yet unknown male quantity was from another school.  I had had my fourteenth birthday party on the previous night, during which my poor eighth grade heart had been broken in a cruelly casual way: I had invited the boy for whom I had been pining for several months, and he simply hadn’t shown up.  In short, he’d never known I even existed.

The next night, I showed up on that driveway with a broken heart, a seething sense of injustice, and a shit-ton of black eyeliner.

I’d like to think that those circumstances sort of explain what happened next, but even half a lifetime later, they don’t… not quite.  Looking back, I wince slightly in embarrassment, but if I’m being honest, I also experience a bemused kind of pride: my eighth grade self sure had the courage of her convictions.

Because as a way of introducing myself to the unknown boy that Halloween, I made a running start and tackled him to the ground.

And I mean that literally.

Though in the intervening fifteen years I have refined my methods a bit, I tend to think of that night as the first time I really claimed ownership of my own kind of charm, which is probably best described as a “blunt force” approach.  This “charm” (if I can call it that with a straight face) and my ownership of it have not been without their own host of problems, of course.  However, I think I struck upon something valuable that night; a recognition of a phenomenon with which we become more comfortable as we get older: that doing things the way everyone else does might not work for you.

My blunt force methods and I, which at times are inseparable, are often terrifying, frequently off-putting, but occasionally fascinating to the opposite sex.  It is entirely possible that the full throttle, blitz approach scares off potentially very decent men, but ultimately I’ve concluded that weeding out the faint of heart is probably best for everyone if we do it early in the process.  Fortunately for me, the boy whom I tackled that night fifteen years ago seemed dazed, impressed, and—miraculously—intrigued.  It’s rare, but sometimes it really does work—and the results tend to be rather stunning.

I’m also aware, in a way that others might not be, that my firing a shot across someone’s bow is as much an indication of interest as it is a sign of my readiness to fight.  The two are pretty much inseparable for me.  After all, that is what I’m looking for in a partner: someone who doesn’t flinch, but fires back; I want a “skirmish of wit,” a scrum of romantic fission, not a soppy sonnet. 

I’ve been thinking about all of this recently because while my somewhat combative (or at the very least, assertive) approach enjoys only spotty success on dry land, it’s virtually useless in the realm in which I am currently pursuing a mate.  Alas, I have once again joined the ranks of the online-daters.

Heaven preserve us.

There is, naturally, an argument to be made for meeting your partner the old fashioned way (read: in person, on the hoof, so to speak).  I’ve had several close encounters in real time—those fabulous little interludes of chatting with someone on the train or waiting in line for coffee—but for some reason they seldom come to fruition.  At least on a dating website you’re pretty sure people aren’t just there to make small talk.

Online dating is one of those strange little anthropological funhouse mirrors, where the rules of engagement are seemingly similar but not identical to real life.  Call it the “online dating standard deviation.”  For instance, men who state their height at 6’2 or under may be reliably assumed to be two inches shorter than they say.  I myself have developed some personal rules of engagement, which include no bathroom mirror selfies and no exotic fish as pets (don’t ask).

So here I am, sorting through the most flattering pictures I have of myself (not many) and trying to write a marginally appealing yet simultaneously true(ish) personality profile (nearly impossible).  I’m finding that the tools I lack on a screen are the ones that make my in-person approach viable, as much as it ever is: there are no emoticons that signify the raising of an eyebrow, the pursing of lips, the tilting of a head, or the real life impact of a true, guns-blazing, head-on smile.  It's like trying to blitz an NFL quarterback with an anemic fourth grader.

The biggest problem with online dating, in general and for me specifically, is the fact that chemistry is nearly impossible to gauge through a screen.  Sure, you can mostly tell through email when someone is dumb as road tar or a screaming narcissist, but that’s only a small part of what I think of as romantic chemistry.  I am a very firm believer in the idea that you can’t know if you’re really, truly attracted to someone until can smell him or her.  I have had dates in the past with objectively attractive men who were perfectly good company—and zip.  Nothing.  Whatever it is that we seek just isn’t there, and you just have to go out on a metric crap-ton of dates to see if any of them sparks.

When I use my blunt force charm, going in hot for a cold introduction, that’s exactly what I’m looking for: a spark.  And believe me, with that approach, you either spark or you don’t—and you know either way right quick.  But since I can’t complement (or, I guess, temper) my assertiveness online with all of the physical and pheromone-related cues to which I have access in person, I feel like I have to sort of rein it back and try to come across as more… normal.

Which, quite frankly, feels a lot like lying.  And it feels like I’m being untrue to the brave, reckless eighth grader I was. 

I want to be liked for the person I actually am.  I hope against hope that I’ll find someone who likes a little pushback, not to mention pixie cuts, but so far I haven’t even found enough of an online spark (I imagine a sad little asterisk) to generate the mutual interest that could lead to a date, which could lead to a real live ZAP. 

Do I believe I will meet my partner online?  I don’t know.  Do I believe I will meet a partner at all?  I don’t know that either.  But I keep at it, because it’s better than doing nothing, and in spite of it all, I still hold out a little hope.  In a weird way, I owe it to a very hurt fourteen-year-old girl to make this leap metaphorically, since she was the one who made it literally.  And I can say with authority that she didn’t regret it.

So here we go: Omaha, Omaha—hut, hut—DATE!

The Newsweek Syndrome

In July of 2008, I wrote and submitted an essay to the Newsweek guest columnist section.  I honestly didn’t think anything would come of it, but I fired it off anyway since I didn’t have anything better to do in the immediate aftermath of my college graduation.  A few weeks later, I got off of a plane to find a voicemail on my phone: the magazine had accepted my submission and wanted to know when and where they should send the photographer to do my portrait.

I doubt that the Manchester airport had ever known, or has since known, a noise quite like the one I made when I listened to that voicemail.

As someone who has been a closet case writer for most of her life, the idea of publication induced nothing short of ecstasy.  But there was a practical element as well: the essay (found here) was about my job search as a recent college grad with a passion for art.  I thought there might be a reasonable chance that some museum director might read my essay, be completely charmed, and want to hire me.  The glimmer of hope I had been nursing that summer became glaring: maybe my life really was about to get going.

For reasons that were never clear to me, however, the article was pulled a few days before it was set to print. 

Looking back, I wonder which was worse: the fact that this incredible break had suddenly and inexplicably evaporated, or that I had told everyone I knew about it by the time it did.  That same day, a very good job prospect fell through, and I remember the sensation of being very close to broken.  I was in the territory of the two in the morning phone call to my best friend because I was genuinely frightened by the sudden weight and breadth of hopelessness that seemed to block out everything else in my mind.

The short version is that my best friend talked me through and out of it, and I stopped reading Newsweek.

The long version is that since then, when something in my life seems like it’s about to go really, truly right, I experience a sudden, crippling fear that it will all go to hell at the last minute. 

A good example is when I moved from my first job at a business school to the same university’s art museum—a miraculous and unexpected opportunity to actually start doing the thing I had wanted to do for so long.  Naturally, I was convinced something would go wrong.  One day not long before I was to transfer, my new supervisor called.

“So, I got a call from your main professor,” he said cautiously.  I immediately froze, because I knew that a) said professor had been massively pissed about my leaving and b) I had never told her in which department or for whom I would be working, so that meant she had gone through the trouble to wrangle it out of someone.  I braced myself for the news that she had torpedoed me, of which I believed her to be fully capable.

My soon-to-be boss continued: “She told me she wasn’t pleased about your leaving and said that we would need to work out some sort of split-time situation to share you.”

As though I were a ski condo.  My outrage spiked but did little to temper my still freezing fear as he paused again.

“She… ah… she doesn’t really live in the real world, does she?”

As it happens, this professor’s Anna Wintour-esque scare tactics did not quite translate across the river, and my new boss, for whom I would work happily for two years, was not impressed.  I left the b-school and never looked back—not time-shared I might add.

Still, my shoulders tense at the memory of sitting there at my desk and waiting for another amazing break to crumble before me.  Sometimes I feel like I’m in a perpetual state of waiting for the other shoe to drop.  I described this phenomenon recently to my dad, who’s a very level-headed person, not prone to fits or freak outs (too bad I’m on the shallow end of that part of my gene pool).  He told me he knew exactly what I meant, noting dryly: “I only ever believe it when it’s bad news.  I’m not sure what to do with good news.”

A few weeks ago, four years out from that frozen moment at my desk, I sat at yet another desk watching a few truly remarkable things come over my horizon… and the dread was almost unbearable.

I was extremely lucky that shortly after I finished graduate school, I found out that the woman who had replaced me at my old museum job was leaving, and they asked me to pinch hit for a while.  This teed me up nicely for a position at the same museum I’d had my eye on for a few months.  I was a strong internal candidate with several important people going to bat for me.  Not a bad state of affairs.

At the same time, my sporadic Craigslist apartment hunt one day turned up a pre-war one-bedroom in Watertown.  It’s the unicorn of rentals: gorgeous, cheap, in unit washer/dryer.  To top it off, my landlords are alumni of my college, and they were ecstatic that they’d chosen a fellow grad as their tenant.  Also not a bad state of affairs.

So there I was with these amazing prospects, and a part of me was convinced everything was going to fall through.

For the record, I am aware that this fear could not possibly have originated in that first incident with Newsweek; that particular disappointment probably just gave concrete expression to long-held, bottom-feeder anxieties.  I’m also aware that there is, in fact, such a thing as “too good to be true,” and that anything that seems perfect should be examined even more closely than things that seem merely passable.  Ultimately, it’s probably true that a good dose of reality-based skepticism will serve you well.  My problem is that my anxiety swan-dives off the edge of skepticism and straight into an ocean of borderline paranoia.

As usual, I find myself on one end of a spectrum, wondering how to make my way back to a reasonable middle.  One important thing to remember is that something can be amazing but not perfect.  A good example is that my fabulous apartment was filthy when I moved into it—I spent my first four hours in it wiping down baseboards and sweeping up cat hair.  There are things that are wrong with it (one psychotic, 2:30 a.m. carbon monoxide detector episode being one of them), but on the whole it is wonderful.  I never trust things that are perfect, because very few things actually are.  But maybe I can learn to trust things that are really great.

The second thing to remember is what my best friend told me when I expressed all these anxieties to her.  In the way that she has, cutting swiftly but lovingly to the heart of the issue, she said: “Honey, good things are allowed to happen.”

And in this case, they did: my job offer came through the day before I moved in. 

The Hearsay Rhinoceros

There is a statue of a rhinoceros outside of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where (incidentally) I do not have a job.  It looks like a rhinoceros—you immediately register it as such, not as a whacked-out version of something that started in some artist’s mind as a meditation on rhinocerosity.  But if you look more closely, there are some telltale scrolls on its body armor, almost like calligraphy or runes.  Interviewing for a job a few months ago at the SMFA, I recognized the design immediately: the sculpture was the three dimensional manifestation of a woodblock print that Albrecht Dürer, the rock star of the Northern Renaissance, had done early in the sixteenth century.  And the rhinoceros that he had done was based on descriptions and possibly another sketch; Dürer never saw a live one himself, so he essentially made a hearsay version.

As I stood there in a suit skirt, about to go in for a second-round interview, I thought about exactly how many layers of abstraction and artistic license stood between the sculpture in front of me and an actual, living rhinoceros.  It seemed to me that the actual rhino, the living version that started this whole chain, in the end didn’t matter as much as the exchange and renegotiations of ideas that went into its representation.

These are the things you tend to think about, on the tail end of your art history MA, about to go in for an interview.  Otherwise, you have to think about the extremely daunting task of getting a job in the arts and how the next indefinite amount of time in your life is going to be extremely stressful.

Well, okay, you think about that too (in fact, you never really stop thinking about it), but sometimes it’s nice to squeeze in some ruminations on rhinos.

But of course, it’s never quite as simple as a rhinoceros, is it?

As a general rule in art, and I suppose in other, more far-reaching areas, every abstraction removes something a little further from its reality (if, in fact, there was a reality to begin with).  It keeps getting more and more funny-looking until the original trace of the thing is gone and you’re not sure of what you’re looking at anymore.  What I wondered was this: how far do you have to abstract something until it stops being the thing that it was?

If asked, I guess I would have always defined myself as type-A.  Good evidence of this may be found in the fact that I committed myself at the age of seven to getting good grades so I could get into a particular college.  The ambition that sprung from that peculiar commitment became a significant part of who I believed I was in the years that followed.  In a way, the abstract concept of ambition came to overshadow and even replace the commitment that had inspired it, especially after I did get into that college.  I was an ambitious person—and it felt good.  It felt like some sort of a righteous calling that could justify my intrinsic stubbornness. 

After college, though, my ambition, which had shifted from college to career, took some pretty substantial blows.  But I muscled through, because that’s what I do, it’s what I’ve always done: I worked a crappy job that led to a not crappy job, which felt like a reward for my sheer doggedness.  I went to graduate school and earned the damn Master’s and came back looking for the job, only to find that it was not as near a possibility as I had thought. 

So there I was—again—prepping myself for the long, stubborn haul—again—and the only thing I could think was how tired I was.  It took me a while to articulate it to myself, and I’m still coming to terms with it, but the issue essentially comes down to this: I do not feel particularly ambitious at the moment.

I was absolutely repelled by this realization: I’m ambitious.  It’s what I do.  It’s who I am—or was.  Who the hell am I now that I’m not ducking my head and pushing through, always with my eye on the prize?  I demanded these things of myself, angry and shaken.

Surprisingly, there was a dry but compassionate voice in my head that answered with another question: “What exactly is this prize?”

I was more or less stunned into silence by my own internal voice.  Who knew, right?

At first, ambition was the means to the end reality: it was how I set about getting the thing that I wanted.  But eventually, the abstract concept of ambition solidified into something I saw as a characteristic, a thing I just did because that’s what I did.  Sure, there were concrete goals along the way, but as I look back, I wonder about the things I missed in my relentless pursuit.  More importantly looking forward, when does the ambition end?  When, where, and what is enough?

The abstraction had become more important than the original reality, so I started looking for the real-live specimen, the original rhino: What exactly is the thing that I want?

Fortunately, I’m a bit better equipped to answer this question as an adult than I was as a precocious seven year old. Here's what I came up with:

I want to be happy.  I want to genuinely like the thing that I do with my days, and I hope what I do will have something to do with the arts.  I want to be in a place where the people I love are nearby and ready for adventures, even and especially the ones that happen in a living room.  I’d like to be mutually bonkers about someone, and I wouldn’t mind having a bathtub and hardwood floors. 

Will all of these things look like what I had imagined for myself in the haze of ambition?  No, probably not.  But that’s the funny thing: abstractions are never quite as terrifying and marvelous and satisfying as the realities.  Just think of the rhino.  It’s still difficult for me not to feel like I’m giving up on something; it feels weak to admit that my own blunt force determination can’t eventually batter down certain realities about dream jobs and other fantasies.  And hey, maybe in a couple years I’ll feel the same old itch again (and it’s not as though I’m going to miraculously become less stubborn any time soon).  What I hope, though, is that I can keep the reality of what I want in mind, and not let it become obscured in habitual abstractions.   

Because I’m fairly certain that had he met one, Dürer would have agreed that a hearsay rhino ain’t got nothing on the real thing. 

Circles and Squares

 

“Where are your people?”

           

Two years, sixteen states under my Subaru, and one graduate degree later, those four words still haunt me.

When my oldest sister uttered them, they were the final push I needed to accept an offer from a graduate program in Colorado.  And I really did believe I was right: I thought that my proverbial people, the post-graduate equivalent of my collegiate pack, were more likely to be in Boulder than anywhere else on earth.  I headed west convinced that, not counting brief visits, I would never really come back.

To put it simply, I was wrong.

My dad told me a couple of months ago that there is no such thing as the Right Decision: the single option that is correct, and if you choose it, all will be well, and if you don’t, God help you.  He said that you make the best decision you can, based on the best information you have at any given time.  Whatever comes after doesn’t change the fact that you did the best you could with what you had.

There are so many things I couldn’t have known about graduate school.  In general, there really is no predicting cohort chemistry or departmental drama.  Specifically, I could not have known that my year of graduate students would be filled by crazy people (I guess I have to include myself in that), nor could I have known how dysfunctional our department was.  A friend back in Boston told me at the end of my first year that graduate school was not a team sport, and I took her words to heart: at the end of that semester, I severed all social ties with my cohort, avoided the art history office like the plague, and managed to finish my requirements with out-of-department classes.  Not surprisingly, my second year went much more smoothly than my first.

That didn’t make it less lonely though.

Another key element I could not have predicted was how badly I would miss my Boston people.  It wasn’t that I saw my friends and family every single day, but that they were there, and when shit hit the fan, they closed ranks around me immediately.  I vastly underestimated the value of proximity: having at least a dozen people you can hug without preamble, a few houses where you can show up unannounced in the middle of the night and not be turned away, and clusters of friends and family with whom to spend the small holidays that do not merit major travel.  Colorado is not, in fact, the edge of the known universe, but it felt that way sometimes. 

Even stranger to me was how much I missed Boston itself: the trolley bells and alarming creaking of the Green Line; the oddly onion-like smell of Harvard; the shockingly high ratio of Sox hats to heads anywhere in the city; the fact that anyone born and bred here over the age of forty calls me “dear” (pronounced “DEE-ah”); and that in spite of the ridiculous, meandering curves of the streets, the whole area is full of squares: Copley, Davis, Porter, Sullivan, Inman, Kenmore… and the list goes on.  And above all, I missed the loyalty: it’s what Boston does best.  They know who they are and who they cheer for, and somehow in my first four years here, I became a part of that identity too.

Hell, I even started giving a marginal crap about baseball, and believe me, that’s saying something.

When the bombs went off on Marathon Monday, I had an irrational and shockingly strong urge to get on a plane and go home.  I was exceptionally lucky in that none of my loved ones, who are often at the finish line for most of the day, were hurt (I will thank God for the rest of my days for one particular knee injury and one characteristicimpulse to do the dishes before heading out the door).  I was even luckier that I was able to get a hold of everyone almost immediately: all accounted for, all safe.  I thought I had mostly pulled myself together when I overheard two people talking on my bus in Boulder, mentioning the bombing as though it were an interesting news item and not an attack on my people, my city. 

My home.

I damn near vomited right there in their laps.

Visiting Boston a few months later, I figured out fairly quickly that there was one place I wanted to be, and ironically, it was the place I had left in pursuit of my supposed destiny.  There is potentially some wisdom in the idea that leaving—something, someone, somewhere—can clarify and intensify your need to go back.  Still, sometimes I feel a little stupid, as though I’ve come full circle right back to where I started.  The thing I have to keep in mind, though, is that I may have come back to where I started, but that does not mean that I never left or that I’m the same simply because the zip code is.

I’m proud that I left, that I struck out and did something completely uncharacteristic.  I’m glad that I figured out that I am not built for academia and, observing my fresh-out-of-undergrad cohort, that I had taken a few years off to do the figuring out and growing up that I needed to do.  I love the thesis that I wrote and the thinking that I did, and I’m simultaneously aware that it’s very important to figure out a way to talk about those things without sounding like an over-educated asshole. 

So in retrospect, I was wrong about where my people were, but ultimately my decision to go west was not.  My decision to come back east does not change that.  Those two equal and opposite decisions can in fact coexist.  Unsurprisingly, the lived geometry of my life directly contradicts the basic laws of mathematics: if you complete a circle, you will be right back where you started. 

Maybe that’s the key: I’m where I started, but not who I was when I did.  I’m still trying to do the best I can with what I have.  And what I have right now is a bemused awareness of the universe’s sense of humor, since it seems this circular path has brought me back to my city of squares.