Same As It Ever Was

And you may ask yourself
Where does that highway go to?
And you may ask yourself
Am I right? Am I wrong?
And you may say yourself, "My God! What have I done?"
-Talking Heads, Once in a Lifetime

I was promised as a child that if I worked hard, studied hard, believed in God and never gave up, I would have a good life, a good career, a nice little place to live, and someone to love me.

While the 80s had the best of intentions, I was fed lies for sustenance of formative years of my life. A friend called it "Immigrant Attitude" and that people whose parents move here from other countries and "make it" teach this mentality to their kids and those kids never learn to ask for help because they are taught that they just need to work harder rather than ask others for help. I don't believe his assessment is correct. I believe I just haven't found the right key to unlock the right door and I just need to try harder to find out where it is. Although I fully realize I'm more than likely acutely proving his point.

The bible says not to work yourself to death trying to become rich but the American dream says if you don't work yourself to death, you'll die of starvation anyway. It's a lose-lose situation. But only if you stop trying. Who knows, maybe my entire life is a joke; a waste of time. Maybe I was never supposed to be born and all the "hard times" are just God's way of trying to convince me I'm long past the point of needing to give up.

On the other hand, despite the terrifying current aspects of my life, I think I've done pretty well for myself. I've lived on my own or with roommates for the last 15 years, I've never had to move back in with my parents, I've never filed for bankruptcy, and while I'm pretty close to losing everything right now, I've never had to actually live in my car.

The future is so uncertain. I've been waiting for 2 and a half weeks to hear back on jobs I've applied for and still I'm getting nothing. I have used almost my entire savings and at the end of this month, I really have no idea what will happen to me. It's terrifying. But if you flip the coin over, it's also the most thrilling and exhilarating feeling of my life.

A friend of mine who fell off my radar for about half a decade recently came back into my life and told me how he spent 2 years living out of an RV and traveling the country. He said it was scary but also the most freeing experience of his life.

For me, it all comes down to a matter of faith. They say you have to practice something to master it. It's easy to practice faith when you have everything you need: food, water, shelter, clothes, a JOB. But when those start disappearing one at a time, faith becomes a lot harder.

But faith, when you try hard enough, always comes through. A friend of mine lives on a huge piece of property with his family and they have extended their planted crops to me, allowing me to grow my own food there and share in the harvest their other trees crops yield. Another friend brought me a bunch of fruit over the weekend from a farm she works on. Between the two, I have been able to eat and make food I have then used as bartering tools with other people to obtain other goods and services I need.

If I can minimize my possessions enough, my ex-boyfriend has generously offered me the entirety of the storage unity we shared when we were dating, at no cost. It's pretty small so I'll have to work hard on deciding what to keep and what to give away but it's a new challenge I am excited and nervous to accept.

The friend who brought me fruit has offered me a room to rent in her house (assuming my cat can get along with hers) and even if I had to surrender all my pride and work fast food, I could still survive on such meager wages because my cost of living would be significantly lower.

I have to wonder if it was this terrifying for Moses wandering the desert for 40 years. If there were any frivolous possessions he was forced to give away, if he had the same selfish desires as me to just find a place to live and settle down and be happy for ONCE in his life. If he got tired of people looking to him for guidance or if he felt as completely unqualified to guide anyone to anything like I feel.

We hear these stories of displaced people and in the aftermath, we shape them into nearly fictional heroes. "You escaped tyranny from a corrupt government and moved here to start over and now you have a house and car and family? Awesome! You're a hero and inspiration and proof that anyone can do anything." But that can't be the whole reality of things, can it? Where are the stories of the days THEY were afraid? Believing others overcome such things without any struggle through fictionalized heroism only makes the reality of one's own struggle all the more terrifying: this wasn't part of the original plot. Or was it?

There was a time when I was so poor all I had to eat for 3 days was leftover cake a friend gave me that he got from a party his friend had. It was a massive and lavish party with a cake so big that I only had a small portion of the leftovers and it fed me nine meals until I was full. I saved up for months to buy a computer a friend made for me out of spare parts and I put it up on 4 garden cinder blocks and to planks of wood. I sat on the floor and I used my parents' aol dial-up account to fill out paperwork to get into college and find a safer place to live than a 9x12 attic room in a boarding house full of drug addicts and some of the scariest men I've ever met.

I worked hard, I put in my time, I graduated college got a car, a job in my field, made a nice little life for myself... and then it all got blown away overnight. I assessed the damaged, I rebuilt, and I started to thrive. Then it happened again. And again and again. I am really getting tired of wandering the desert.

Right now I am left wondering if I'm one of those people who never made it to the promised land. If I followed in blind faith and died on the journey. But the good news is that Schrodinger studied the probabilities of life and death, not joy and sorrow. I might make it, I might die trying. But that doesn't mean the journey dependent upon my success in life. It doesn't have to regulate my ability to find joy in even the smallest things. I have food to eat, I have more food growing, I still have a car that is actually really comfortable to sleep in when I've been on road trips, and I have a free place to put all my things for the time being. Things could be a lot worse. Things have been a lot worse.

The problem with the fractured dreams I was raised to believe is that, after a certain point, it becomes such a fundamental part of who I am that the very fabric of my being becomes dependent on hope. No matter how many things I lose in life, hope is the only thing I'm completely unable to surrender. I've tried. It's like voluntarily giving up my sight. Even if I tried to walk the rest of my life with my eyes closed, I would still be imagining what things looked like based on how they feel. If you handed me an apple, I would still see it in my mind. And maybe that's a crippling defect to some but for me, it's all I have. And it works.

I am completely and utterly terrified of what the future holds. But if God were to tell me "Step out onto the water and walk upon it" ... who am I to not believe? The worst that could happen is I'd get a free bath. Who knows, maybe even free dinner if I reach out and accidentally grab a fish.
Things could always get worse, but they could also always get better. You just never know. And I think that's quite possibly the most exciting part of life.

Things You Can't Say Around People

My friend posted this picture online a while back and hit the center of my heart in a way from which I still have yet to recover.

What's worst of all was that I spent the last hour and a half writing a carefully thought out assessment of all the things I feel the need to apologize for being excited about... and then I deleted the entire post. Because even though nobody reads my ridiculous online journal, I'm still afraid someone might randomly stumble upon it one day and think "My GOD, will someone PLEASE shut her up??"

Thoughtful Regrets

Last night, my friend's little brother performed in a Doctor Seuss rendition of Hamlet at the local high school.
It took me back to so many memories I felt I was going to drown in them.

I remember being forced to read Hamlet in high school before we could get to Romeo and Juliet and all I could think was how boring this guy's family drama was and I just wanted to get through it. Don't get me wrong, Hamlet is a great play, but nothing is more fantastic a story than two star-crossed lovers fighting against all odds only to still lose love in their last breath. It's fucking tragic.

Almost as tragic as standing in a high school auditorium realizing I was the same age as my friend's little brother in an equally small high school in an equally small town twenty years ago. And now, all my friends have kids in high school. The surrealism is overwhelming. What the hell have I done with the last 20 years of my life?

I remember being fifteen and wanting nothing more than to be pretty and popular and have a boyfriend. Embarrassingly, I was foolish enough to actually try out for cheerleading even though I didn't stand a chance in hell. I dressed up for all the spirit days, I ran for student council (and lost), I was in the marching band, and I bought a ridiculously expensive $130 designer gown for the big winter formal dance only to be humiliated and turned down by my crush, ditched by my best friend who got the flu the night before the dance, and I showed up alone. In a designer black velvet dress that I still have packed away in a box somewhere under my bed.

I wrote love poems for guys who barely knew I existed and now those same guys are married with multiple kids, a 401K, a house, two cars, a dog and  cat... and they stay in touch by "liking" the pictures of my cat on instagram.

I'm not entirely sure where I expected to be by the time I hit my mid-thirties but I certainly didn't expect this life. Which is not to say it's all bad. I have a fabulous couch, a hilarious cat, and I've almost finally completed my vintage Cinderella gooseberry Pyrex casserole dish collection.

I have pictures of me and my sister hanging just outside my kitchen from our sophomore year of high school. I'm pretty sure even back then we knew with certainty that we were never going to be cool, but I'm also pretty sure we were okay with that.

But back to Hamlet. I remember all my friends having crushes on Mel Gibson in his rendition but I was always partial to the version with Ethan Hawke and Julia Stiles. She was the perfect Ophelia and I loathed Hamlet for turning her away because they would have make the prettiest babies and had a perfect family and a perfect life. Juia was my favourite actress... and ironically, tied to a lot of Shakespeare covers that influenced my life in my teen and college years. She was in the retelling of Taming of the Shrew via 10 things I Hate About You which gave poetry writing girls like a chance to finally kiss the dreamy curly haired bad boy who serenaded her on the football field. Then she was on O, the retelling of Othello. And later in college, she was in that princess movie where she falls in love with the prince of denmark who poses as a foreign exchange student. And of course it's Denmark because it comes full circle back to who she could'be been in Hamlet.

I suppose though, just like with Romeo and Juliet, I'll never stop holding my breathe hoping if I read it enough times she might actually wake up before Romeo drinks the poison and they could run away together and still be happy.

I'm always chasing the rainbow at the end of that silly Utopian dream of a happy ending. Which is probably why I'm in my mid-thirties living alone with a cat and still writing poems. Perhaps it's just an unchangeable constant in my life that was set forth by the universe before I was ever born and in every conceivable alternate plane of existence, there is always a version of me living alone writing poems.. but with varying numbers of cats.

After the play we grabbed some burgers to go from what's apparently the only bar in the hole-in-the-wall city where my friend lives. The food is always good and the people remind me of home in a way that's almost painful. Listening to those drunk guys getting on stage singing Alabama and Alan Jackson on karaoke night reminded me of the dive bars my friends my theatre friends and I used to sing at in college. My roommate and I performed in The Tempest together my sophomore year. It was one of the last plays I did before graduation. Theater led me to a career in radio and radio led me here. And it seems, "here" led me back to Shakespeare.

Given that the play last night was written like a Dr. Seuss story, my friend asked me how accurate it was in relation to everyone dying and I explained that it was a classic Shakespearean tragedy. Sometimes life doesn't feel too far off. I mean, at best, more than a third of my life is over, at worst, I could be already halfway to my grave. I wonder sometimes if I'm destined to live the rest of my life in solitude, replacing cat after cat as they age, and when I finally expire myself, the neighbours will poke through my belongings at an awkward estate sale full of old paintings and dozens upon dozens of notebooks filled with hopeless romantic love poems and photo albums of awkward teenage girls from the 90s. Being a writer was never my choice. It was something that crawled into the center of my soul, took root, and consumed me whole. Along with this silly girly notion to fall madly in love like Ophelia, but not be crushed by the weight of my own heart beneath the surface of a nearby lake.
So much of Shakespeare's writing is wrapped up in tales of love. I have to wonder if maybe he had a cat too. And which side of the lake he was on when he left this world...