Hey! You’re here! I’m so glad. Since you came, could you do me a favor and hit the heart, leave a comment, or share? That’s how we grow this community and this project together. I can’t do it by myself. Thanks. ♥
Before we get into it this week, let me say thank you to all of you who commented last week, leaving sweet words and wishes that I would feel better. And thanks also to all of you who also took a moment to hit the heart. I am feeling much better, and it’s not just the inevitable passage of time that helped. Y’all were a balm, for sure.
I’ve been working hard recently to notice and appreciate the love that gets shared with me. I’ve also been working hard to share it back out. I’m probably not sending back out nearly as much as I receive, to be entirely honest, but sometimes life ebbs and flows like that.
I’ve been applying myself to noticing the love and beauty and joy that winds its way in and out of my days because otherwise, it’s too easy to get caught up in the slog of it all. To feel like all the work I’m doing right now is being forced upon me instead of all of it, every single bit, being something I chose.
I chose my day job because I wanted the relative ease of a steady paycheck and benefits. I chose, on top of my day job, to sign on for another year at my spring freelance gig because the extra income will cover an annual contribution to my kid’s college fund and let me pay off the last of the costs of my new roof sooner rather than later. And I continue to choose to show up here every week because, to put it bluntly, if I’m not creating something on the regular I become a miserable human being.
But when combined, it all adds up to an exorbitant amount of time (60-70 hours a week on average these days). Which, quite honestly, is too much, especially when you add parenting and partnering and trying, admittedly only occasionally, to not be a totally shit daughter and friend.
I know there are plenty of people who work this much and more all the time. Some, because they have chosen professions that demand it, and some because it takes that many hours, given inflation and shit wages, to put food on the table and keep a roof over everyone’s head. But whether it’s a choice or necessity, working this much isn’t good for anybody as a permanent state of being. Luckily, I keep reminding myself, it’s not that for me. It’s just a season, a few months of pure insanity, and then I can go back to only two jobs. That’ll feel positively luxurious.
Have you ever felt like the weight of your choices was too heavy? Like the only way you could bear it was to offload the blame for them onto someone else?
My ex-husband and I moved here, to Upstate New York, largely because he inexplicably announced that he wanted to be an organic farmer. We had been planning to move from Seattle to Pittsburgh before that. Pittsburgh was equidistant to both his folks and mine. We could afford to buy a house in the city there. There were food co-ops and interesting communities and diversity. It was a sort of place that made sense to me— funky, affordable, and transforming. And I had people there. Friends from my life prior to our relationship who had also settled in that former steel town in the midst of reinventing itself.
A college town in Upstate with no real economy aside from the university to speak of, where I knew no one at all? Then buying land to “farm”, except he didn’t know what and neither of us knew how? That made no sense to me at all, and it continued not to for the whole first year that we lived here until we got married and then for the next ten years until we split up.
But I could not, for the life of me, admit I’d made a string of bad choices— wrong man, wrong house, wrong job, wrong life. So, I just blamed him for all of it. We ended up here, I told myself repeatedly, to feed his dreams. All he wants is a happy helpmeet. Everything else gets punished. He’s trapped me in this small, small life on purpose! Selfish! Narcissist!
Was he often an unpleasant enough piece of work that it was easy to lay blame for the entirety of my unhappiness at his feet? Yes, he was. But had he forced me to do anything? Not a single, solitary thing. I actively participated, I can admit now, in the construction of that life. I took the shovel he handed me and buried myself for a million different reasons, but every single one of them was mine.
To be clear, coercion happens. People get forced into making bad choices for themselves and their families. Violation is also real, and steals victims’ agency and peace. Social and institutional systems also conspire to constrict many people’s choices to either bad or worse options. Those are facts. But it’s also true that many of us are in complete control of our lives, and yet the responsibility for our own fates is more than we can bear. So, we let other people decide our direction. Or we let the destructive, selfish, or fearful parts of ourselves drive the bus. Then we wonder how we got where we ended up. What the hell happened?
We happened.
We chose.
There are three moments in the tv show Tiny, Beautiful Things (Remember how I told you to watch that last week? I was right. Watch. It.), which struck that point home for me over the last week. The first is in a fight the main character, Claire, ends up having with her best friend, Amy. Claire desperately wants to be a published author, but has never gotten her act together to actually write a book. Finally, after twenty years of work, Amy gets a book deal and Claire is envious and shitty about it. They get into a painful argument, Amy calling Claire out for refusing to be happy for her despite Amy having stuck by Claire through marriage and motherhood for decades. “You got the book deal!”, she yells, “But you never wrote the book. You didn’t write the book! You didn’t become the writer you imagined you would be! And it’s not my fault! And it’s not Danny’s fault! And it’s for sure not Rae’s fault!”
Ouch… but also, yes. You can see the truth of Amy’s words smack Claire right between the eyes.
Then there is a scene where Claire’s screaming at her brother, Lukas. He’s brought their formerly abusive father back into his life and back into the home that had been their mother’s. Claire is crazed with anger and fear, and for what is probably the umpteenth time she accuses Lukas of keeping her from their mother’s bedside in her final moments. He didn’t do that, he angrily shoots back. Was he acting out in a shitty, irresponsible way in the midst of his grieving? Yes. But neither he nor their mom asked Claire to leave to go find him and drag him to the hospital. That was Claire’s choice. He didn’t make her miss those final moments of her mom’s life. She did.
Finally, there is a scene that’s much earlier in the show, though it reverberates from the first moment to the last. Claire is in middle school and having a hell of a time— getting bullied, feeling awkward and alone. Indignantly, she proclaims that she’s never going back to school. Her mom sympathizes with her pain but insists she’s not going to become the person she wants to be if she doesn’t go to school. “If you let the worst thing that’s ever happened to you keep you from what you want, that’s your fault. Not anybody else’s.”
It might have taken Claire 50 years, but in the end she’s finally listening to her mother. She’s taking ownership of her own life. She’s going for what she wants. And she’s learning how to love and let go. For some of us it takes that long [raises hand].
It’s not like going for what we want guards us against consequences, though. Even when we practice integrity. Even when we prioritize ourselves, our dreams, our creativity. Even when we try to be as loving as we possibly can be in the midst of it all, we don’t get out of the fact that all choices have consequences. Every road taken means another not taken.
In a beautiful recent essay in Esquire, The Unbearable Costs of Becoming a Writer, author and editor Nicole Chung talks about the choices she has made over the years to prioritize her writing career— the passion jobs for little or no money, the months spent developing pitches that came to nothing. Eventually, the classes, the writing, and the connections led to bylines and book contracts. Eventually, she made some money. But it was never enough to take care of her parents the way she had dreamed of, and she lost both of them to the vagaries of our for-profit healthcare system.
In the end, she can’t help but wonder if it was worth it. Her regret and sadness are palpable. And her questions about how our system silences voices who can’t afford even the small amount of privilege she has are worth all of us considering:
I continue to grapple with the instability of this industry and what kind of opportunities will be available to me in the years to come, as well as larger questions about whether my editorial work was valued. Whether it was worth it, especially given my family’s needs. I think about who gets to be a writer or an editor, who can afford to wait for that livable salary or that higher advance. Who can choose to prioritize their creative goals, take potentially career-making risks, invest precious years in this work without the guarantee of financial stability. And I think about whose work we may be losing—whose stories we aren’t reading—because they, and perhaps their families, simply cannot afford for them to hang around and wait.
Chung wonders if she could have done more for her parents if she’d chosen different work, but the reality is there’s no way to know if those choices would have netted her more time with either of them. Those are the sorts of questions none of us can ever answer. We can only ever embrace all that is ever ours to do— make our choices, shoulder the consequences, and keep trying, as Strayed/Claire/Sugar admonishes us, to tackle the motherfucking shit out of love however and whenever we can.
I’m working on it. How about you?
Oh yes...how can I turn the stumbling blocks, of my younger self, into stepping stones? I’m working on this too.
Thanks for sharing your words and double thanks for sharing the visual gifts you encounter as you walk to and from work. I'll tuck each into my human computer and pull them out when the time seems right. Keep sharing! J. Confer