What was my life? The year was 2012. Besides being the end of an era according to the Mayan long form calendar, it was the end of an era for me too. I just wasn’t quite sure what era I was ending and what era was to follow. I realized my world was now open pockets in my favorite new jacket—that oversized denim patchwork thing. I looked down at its comfortable form and put my hands in those big pockets and realized how that jacket perfectly described me, you know if I was fabric.
But I had loved that jacket for so long that it was fraying at the collar and the cuffs. I had washed it a million times and it was still functioning, but like me, it was looking a little ragged around the edges.
A few years before after a week respite in Sedona, I stood at the curb in a small old town, a smile on my face and observed my life as a slow-motion movie scene while brushing blond strands of hair from my aging brow and lifting my eyes to the Arizona sun.
I typed in a one finger text message (I know, but I can’t do it the way everybody else does with two thumbs) to my son a thousand miles away.
“Standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona.”
He replied within seconds, “take it easy.”
I was surprised he remembered those lyrics from the Eagles as he wasn’t really a fan, but he had heard the music often as he was growing up.
My year in North Carolina with family now seemed nonsensical. I packed up and went back to California, the South Bay Area, a place familiar for decades. The year of taking a break had blown out my savings and I had to go back to work. I had burnt out it’s true after my public relations agency died a somewhat unnatural death due to the dotcom crash a decade earlier. I survived for several years off my art and working for a law office. The good thing was I learned a lot about law. Class action, personal injury, construction defect, and a lot of buzzwords (almost as many as the tech industry); attractive nuisance; force majeure, and tortfeasor all funnier sounding than they are in a court room.
By then my reflection was changing. I was feeling the impact of age but mostly the frustration and boredom of starting yet another corporate job. I had already been there and done that for too many years.
The plan started one lonely weekend I pulled out all my old journals. I have about thirty of them that span decades. They were not as detailed as I remember and much of the content seemed to revolve around some relationship or my inadequacies of being a mother.
Two divorces. Then a substantial history of serial dating and 2-week-stands (is that a thing?), three long-ish relationships that ended oddly. One guy had PTSD and couldn’t cope (should have seen THAT coming), the other died of leukemia, and the last serious relationship was with a guy significantly younger. I had pretty much given up on relationships by then. Men do younger all the time, why not women? If you think about it for a minute, it works well. Men over fifty have a little bit of, hmm, let’s call it trouble, in that area without some blue pills, while women can keep going. And despite our age difference, we stayed together for four years. I had to break up with him because he wanted children. With me! And I was like, oh hell no.
The content of the journals had some surprising information though. Actually, it was the lack of information that bothered me. Year after year there were the same complaints. Where was I going with all this? There was no improvement. There was a list of things I was to achieve each year. I made my New Year’s resolutions but year after year nothing changed. New goals unachieved. Things undone. Yet time had ticked on.
I wasn’t where I wanted to be or who I wanted to be. I was a ghost of myself.
I did my bit though. I raised an honest good boy who respected women and usually had more sense than me. I did it mostly alone as a single mother (probably a mistake now looking back—not the divorce just that I don’t think I put enough effort into finding solid upstanding replacements for the dad-type). But I managed to live in a nice condo in an upscale town solely for the purpose of having my son attend the best the public school system had to offer. I had done all I could do. I worked a lot. I was exhausted all the time. I set up my body for anxiety and panic attacks and all the assorted things that go with that. Didn’t feel I had a lot of options. That was the way things were and some part of me felt lucky to have what I had. It was certainly more—much more than I grew up with.
We had nice clothes and the latest of something desired, healthy non-frozen meals even though I wasn’t much of a cook. My my son had the latest video games, and I kept myself in designer heels and nice, but not designer, clothes. People called me classy but that’s just a persona I learned from Glamor Magazine when I was a teen. I didn’t feel classy. Men called me sexy, and one guy even called me the most lucid woman he’d ever known. Now THAT is a compliment.
And sex? Trial, error, an open what-the-hell attitude, and that porn paperback I found behind the dumpster when I was fourteen. I got pretty good at all those things, but it came at the expense of my own security. I didn’t have money left for a retirement fund or much of a savings for anything except for the common luxuries like new tires or mini-vacations. And I knew that was going to bite me on the ass one day. So, I hustled. I spent time on projects and small businesses on the side to try to bring in extra money here and there and hopefully set me up for some future source of income that I could maintain until I dropped dead of something.
It was not a pretty picture, but what other options did I have? I could have, I suppose, hustled some rich guy for a husband—and I mean hustled in the most normal non-fraudulent kind of way, but I just didn’t think that would work for me. Rich guys tend to be narcissistic control-freaks, and I would have ended up in another divorce after 5 years of arguments. Poster girl for pesimistic?
The bottom line is that the journals were a revelation. What had I been doing? No goals reached! One year I did a visualization board, another year I was into law of attraction BS. I did gratitude and mindfulness meditation but year after year, the journals reported the same result.
What came to mind was that quote attributed to Einstein but debunked. “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” The thought is good, but he was actually talking about quantum theory at the time and in quantum world you can do the same thing many times and get different results. However, in my case the former is true.
The thing is that’s all just prep work. Things change when you make a real plan on paper—just like they do in any good business or PR plan. I needed to stop hugging myself and giving myself pats on the back for nothing accomplished and stop waiting for answers to magically come to me. I had to act. Step-by-step. And that’s when things began to change. And it started with a two-year road trip. In a trailer. Alone.