This Is The Road My Heart Takes

I have been feeling panicked lately. I tend to feel panicked a majority of the time anyway, because that's just how this Schmutzie rolls. At two years old, I realized that things changed irrevocably in my absence when my toast became inedible while my mother and I were out shopping, and my trust in all things turned into trust in very little. I realized the truth of immortality on my fifth birthday as my cake was passed on from my grandparents to my parents to me, and I spent the day crying in my room. I was an early adopter of deap-seated, mortal anxiety.



When I went to my first psychiatrist back in about 1993 or 1994, he asked me if I suffered from anxiety. I had never understood what this anxiety I had read about entailed. Was it a sad feeling? Was it an angry feeling? I couldn't put my finger on what that word was pointing to, so I assumed I had never felt it. I told him that I must be a very calm person, because I had never experienced this anxiety he asked about. "I think you have a lot of it," he said. "I think that it is probably with you all of the time, and I think its omnipresence in your life has made you blind to it and its impact." He was a smart man.

Of course, when I make major life changes, this general anxiety skyrockets. It's how I do. So, when I quit my job at the shoe store so that I could work freelance from home full time, I felt both elated and COMPLETELY FREAKED OUT OH HOLY HELL WHAT IN GOD'S NAME HAD I DONE I DON'T KNOW HOW TO DO ANYTHING.

I love the decision I've made, and I'm fairly confident that I won't be reduced to lining up with my cats to eat out of their kibble bowl, but it's a scary thing to suddenly be your own boss, accountant, manager, salesperson, secretary, and coffee jockey. No one's told me how to do any of this. It's easy to feel like I'm the only one flying this ship from my kitchen table straight into the dumpster just up the alley, because I have no boss daddy to assure me that I will have clients next June.

I woke up feeling quite contented this morning, though, because my dreams have stepped up to take care of me again. Just before I woke up, I was caught in this long dream about my life replayed as if it had been bathed throughout in mediocrity. The pain in it was terrible. Everything was a stab to the heart: my passionless marriage, my high school reunion, my dream husband's desire for children, the suburban bungalow. The concession to convention and necessity over pursuing a more passionate life wove a deep thread of grief and exhaustion through every experience. It's not that that kind of life can't have passion in it, but it's not a life I could have led, and, in my dream mind, I cried for every piece of me that it could not hold.

I woke up relieved to be who I am doing what I do. Having kids would make this more difficult. Having a mortgage would make this more difficult. The burden of a car would make this more difficult. My life, the one it turns out I actually like, is only possible right now because of how it differs from the one I thought my family and culture dreamed for me back in December of 1972.

There are few standards against which I feel I can measure my life, and this used to shake me. How would I know when I was successful? How would I know when I was good at what I did? How would other people be able understand me within the context of the shape my life has taken? This person that I am with my outlaw blend of gender, sexuality, religion, and cultural aesthetics: how do I know when I am following my creative pull and when I am tipping over into becoming the desperado, however gentle?

The longer I live with myself, the more comfortable I become with trusting that I am neither completely lost nor on the verge of shooting up the joint. We're good with ourselves, me and I.

I might find myself panicking at my makeshift desk, because my future has no tidy map, but no one's does, really, in the end. Had I been on the road I thought my family would have mapped for me with a house and children and a car, that would have been interrupted by cervical cancer, anyway. This is how life works. You don't get what you want, and then you get something you never imagined for yourself, and then you get something you want, and then the whole thing gets tossed over for something else, and then you keep going. It's hard, sometimes rewarding, and often unexpected. It's all very messy, and these maps we see charted out for us, the ones we think we see other people navigate better and more accurately than we do? They don't exist. They are a myth our scared hearts would like to be real, but our brave hearts know better.

And so, I'll probably keep panicking, because that's how I do, but I'll do it knowing that this is the road my heart takes. We're good with ourselves, me and I.

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PS. Listen to Iggy Pop's "The Passenger". I listen to it when I want to remember how things are.

Worrying The Past

Sometimes I lie awake at night, on nights just like tonight, and I try to draw the lines down from my childhood to where I lie in bed wondering about how I got here to this place.

I am so much happier, so much more well-adjusted than I once was, so much more hopeful and able to dream than at any other point in my life, but there is an urgency that starts ticking away now in the wee hours, an urgency that is stuck to my waxing sense of mortality and the speed of time, and I feel a greater and greater need to make these connections. How did I get here from there? Why were more than twenty-five years so unhappy? Am I merely on a honeymoon with middle age? Will I find myself there again for another twenty-five, dark and foundering?

I am at the happiest point to date in my life at thirty-eight, and yet I lie awake worried that the past will find me. It will point me out and say This Is Not The Real You.

There were, of course, happy moments in my childhood, but most of them seem lumped into the time before I was five. After that, a deep and keening sadness crept in, as though I were mourning the passage of all things, because all things were always passing. I lay awake at night then, too, but filled with a pain I couldn't shake, and I would panic silent scream into my pillow, because being alive was inescapable. There was nowhere to go with what I felt.

That wasn't all there was, of course. There were sprinklers on the lawn and digging toes into the beach sand in summer and hollowed out snow forts in winter and getting lost inside books, but all of it was touched with the sad and terribly anxious undercurrent that none of this was mine, that I did not belong here.

And now I am happy, and yet here I sit in the wee hours of a Wednesday morning trying to draw lines down from then to now. How did I come to be here? Will I somehow be made to go back there? I worry that I am out on a day pass. I think that if I can find another way to look at my history, if I can just tilt it a bit to the left and change my perspective, I will be able to shake more happiness out of it, and that maybe, if I squint hard enough, I will finally fix the records and be granted release.