Cast a Wide Net

My life has changed considerably.

Two months ago today, I walked off Chatham University property for the last time as a student. It was great, and it was sad. So ended the stress. So ended the process of getting where I wanted to go. So ended my immediate and easy ability to connect with a community of like-minded people.

And so began something new.

But that ending and all of its sweet relief was deceptive. Now, I'm adrift. Now, I realize that I have no immediate goals, no pressing deadlines. And more importantly, I have no one to direct me. It's been a long time since I was my own boss. On July 25, 2006, my most demanding superior was born, and until the day I began at Chatham in the fall of 2014, he (and his brother) dictated my every action. I met their deadlines. I did what they asked of me. I gave them what they required. So, while moving from that sort of environment to one in which I worked for teachers felt different, it really wasn't different at all. I still had to get things done. I still had to complete my job. Plug away.

Grad school taught me how well I work under a deadline. Now, I'm just sort of floating around out here. The kids are in their school. I'm left to gather the things I've learned about writing and about myself in the last decade and mold some sort of life for myself. And, being just a bit anxiety-ridden and a tad impatient, I'm not handling it very well.

Harumph

I decided to cast a wide net. I'm one of the blog editors for Literary Mama. I do freelance blogging. I help a friend teach third graders how to write personal narratives. I try to write on my own, too, while fighting off the difficulties of Sjogren's Syndrome that really flare up in the fall. I haven't seen other human beings for two years, so I'm trying to do that, and I'm a little squishy in the midsection too. So, yoga. Rather than a singular focus (thesis), I've divided myself up into many varied parts. I know I want to write. It took me 35 years to narrow my existence down to that singularity. Of all the things in the world I could do, writing was it.

But now that I've arrived in this place, I realize that the horizon has just expanded exponentially again, to a world almost as big as the one I knew three years ago. Do I want to stay at home and work on my book? Teach little kids? Teach big kids? Freelance for money? Focus on blog editing and publishing? The singularity exploded into an unexpected field of choices, all of which baffle me and tempt me. Thus, the wide net, or as my friend Amanda said, "Throw a bunch of shit at the wall and see what sticks."

The problem is that I've caught too many fish in the net. Some keepers, some trash fish, some tin cans. And now I've got this heavy-ass net slung over my back and not enough time to deal with the contents. I have fewer free moments in the day than I did during thesis time, and I'm getting paid for very few of my efforts.

Shawn tells me I need to pay my dues. Write, publish, teach, help out. Casually toss my name out there. Work on my book but not kill myself. Fight to stay ahead of my autoimmune problems. Go outside. He's right, of course. I stayed in my office, writing for school, for two years. In that time I amassed very few life experiences. The idea jar is empty. I need to fill it back up.

I fish. I know how many times I have to cast before I get a bite. I know how many lures I lose, how many snags take my rig. Fishing infuriates me. Some days I don't catch shit. Once in a blue moon, I land a whopper.

I may need a little help getting this jig out of the tree.

Graduation, Part 1. Before.

I'm about to graduate for the third time in my life. Well, fourth if you count preschool, which I hear was quite an event, and the graduates apparently passed out harder that day than they did 20 years later as new bachelors of arts and sciences.

But the big three graduations, once completed, will represent such vastly different chapters in a life that they can barely be compared to one another. At Linsly, graduation is a most serious business. There is absolutely. no. throwing. of. hats. Diplomas will be revoked should hats be thrown. At least, that was the threat. A similar threat was made regarding graduation attitude and behavior. The event was somber, and we were expected to remain similarly focused and serious. It's laughable, actually, because an 18-year-old is one of the worst examples of focus and the males in particular lack the developmental skill required to sit still for very long. Nevertheless, we graduated and kept our hats dutifully upon our heads and ate cake with forks and talked about higher education and academic pursuits. And it was a nice little bubble in which to exist, at the time. Had I known what college would bring--both great and terrible--I think I might have taken up a mantle of excitement and terror. But of course, the not-knowing is the deal in this lifetime. The not-knowing is the reason human beings do everything that we do. It's why we work hard and love hard and act carefully and carelessly, and it's why we have children and take risks and drink vodka and sail the Caribbean. It's why we show the best and the worst of our species on any given day.

That's a sidebar, though. It's too much abstraction and reflection for a second paragraph, particularly one that recalls a high school graduation, something that signals not an end of any kind but merely a start, as all graduations do.

When I graduated from Eckerd, I cannot remember if I threw my hat. That particular moment escapes me, because as promising as my future felt when I sat in Linsly robes, it felt entirely different as I walked in sandals in the Florida sun towards a stifling gymnasium where my family waited with pride. College was hard. Not the academics. Once I accepted that I was not meant to be a scientist and gave up pursuits like biology and statistics, I flourished. No, International Environmental Law didn't go down too smoothly either, but I found a calling in the field of Environmental Studies, a beautiful blend of politics and literature and art and science. But graduation from college had little to do with academics, for me. College was a wonderful and miserable time, and though I would look back and yearn sadly for my life in Florida for many years to come, the truth is that my life in Florida

I'm not sure how to finish that paragraph. During my four years at Eckerd College I came to know and love the dearest friends, a tiny handful of which would remain my dearest friends, who would stand beside me when I married my husband and hold my children when they were born. I would also love people who would hurt me so deeply that I would come to know sorrow and depression, who changed me so dramatically that I would never live another day without medication to control my moods. When I walked up on the stage at Eckerd College to collect my bachelor's degree, my family sat in the audience, as did a boyfriend who complained that he had to be there, who used my credit card to buy his alcohol and told me every day that I was nothing at all, that I was pathetic and helpless and weak. And by the time I did cross that stage and smiled at my favorite professor as I passed him, I truly believed I was nothing.

And so my graduation from college felt very different from my Linsly commencement. Whereas before I could envision nothing but a vast horizon, as flat and open and gentle as a midwestern plain, Eckerd College's graduation felt as though it channeled me into a deep ravine, a narrow path with walls so high as to be inescapable. Whatever lay beyond the ravine couldn't possibly be worth the journey, but deep in the grip of an alcoholic abuser, I couldn't see any path but the one I was already on, and anything that waited for me in the future was already tainted with sadness and suffering.

I wouldn't ever find what was at the end of that dark gorge, though. Somehow I found another way out; somehow I clawed up the walls and escaped that particular fate.

It feels like a lifetime ago. There are moments when the comfort and presence of my husband and children and parents living next door squash the memory of that time into little more than a page in a photo album, a page in which all of the photos are half the size they once were, edges cut at odd angles and the occasional phantom hand left on my hip or shoulder because the scissors and hole punch couldn't quite expel all of him from the picture. But I don't ever open those albums because I have so many others filled with tiny smiles and faces that look like Shawn's. And in the last 15 years, the weight of that life on my shoulders as I collected that diploma has evaporated, and now what I remember is my professor's smile and wink, and my friends hooting as my name was called, and the looks on my parents' faces that I know were there even though I couldn't see them.

Eckerd College graduation caps were decorated with words and glitter and googly attenae. People wore bathing suits under their robes and passed out that night almost as hard as the 4-year-olds. I would like to go back and enjoy that time, to see an open plain instead of a cold, one-way trudge.

~

Now, at 37, as I graduate from Chatham University with an MFA, the landscape of the horizon looks unfamiliar but inviting. It's not flat; I've no longer got a vague world of choices ahead of me. The purpose of graduate school is to narrow the focus, to choose one's field. Still, the road is by no means cloistered or tight. One might say I've picked the region into which I will walk, but the terrain will vary over time, and I look forward to what I will see and do. And, as a late 30-something with two graduations and two kids under her belt, I've learned enough about life to know that great and terrible things await me out there, and after each challenge will come blessings.

It's not like me to abandon humor when I write. I feel like we should take a break so someone can slip on a banana peel. This is uncomfortable.

Nevertheless, this graduation (though it has yet to happen) is my favorite. It's the one that I paid for myself, the one where I earned nothing but A's, the one where I alone pushed myself into success every morning at 5am. It's the one when I get to envision my parents' faces as well as the face of my husband as I walk across the stage. It's the one when I get to listen for a tiny voice shouting, "Yay, Mommy!" And it's the one where I know where I want to go when I take off my hood and gown, and whether or not I've thrown my cap doesn't matter, because I have work to do. The work I want to do. And however that shakes out, I've got five faces in the crowd.

Yesterday's Blog

Already I've fallen off the wagon on my 30-day blog-a-thon. I'm going to try to double up today, but it'll be difficult. We've got a road trip planned. Perhaps I can allow room for one day away from the blog each week. During grad school I always gave myself a day off.

That's not true, actually. When I realized, suddenly in November, that I only had six months left to write the thesis, I panicked. It sounds utterly ridiculous, doesn't it? Six months and you panicked? You freak of nature. I know. And I am a freak of nature. But recall, if you'll permit me some slack, that I have OCD (without the C) and an anxiety disorder, and those voices are far louder than those of reason.

But at the same time, I don't think I can possibly be the only thesis-writer to have sat up on Thankgiving night and said, "Holy shit, I have to turn this thing in six months from now! I'll never get it done." When I started the thesis in early August on my own, before the semester had started, I felt like I had plenty of time. The better part of a year. And it was only required to be 125 pages, and I had one solid essay written and chunks of others that would eventually morph into thesis components. But once I started assembling these bits, and writing more bits, word by agonizing word, I realized why it takes people years to write a book.

Writing is hard. It's tedious. And there are many, many days when the words just aren't coming. Now, in "real" life, when you're writing a book on your own terms, you can say, "Eh, today's not my day," and piddle around or just abandon the effort altogether. It doesn't make for writerly discipline, of course. It's frowned upon by uber-hard workers and the super prolific. And I can make the argument that even if you're writing garbage, at least you're writing, and that from the pile of crap you produce you may just dig up a diamond. (By that I mean a single decent sentence out of 4 shitty pages, or a salient idea worth pursuing.) In school, however, there's a deadline. You've got to write. If you write crap today, you damn well better not write crap tomorrow, because there are only so many tomorrows in a semester. The point is to get it done, and to do so largely on your own. Nobody pushes you in grad school; they just expect results on the appointed date.

One of the most valuable things I learned about myself in the last two years is that I function really well with a deadline. I'd never have thought that about myself, but it turns out that when I have no expectations placed upon me, I just fart around and dally in the daffodils and dream half-assed writer dreams that never come to fruition. This is possibly the most important thing I could have learned about myself with regards to a future career. I will never get anything done unless someone is expecting work by a certain date. Doesn't matter who. I just need a date by which a piece of writing must be ready, and then I'll be efficient and studious and hard-working. I need a second entity in my writing life, someone who's waiting for me to write. I alone am not enough to push myself to success.

That seems kind of wimpy, kind of weak. Perhaps, but it's what I know to be true. It's how and who I am. And I'm so glad I learned it.

When I realized I only had six months, I panicked. And I think plenty of thesis students have done this. Writing a book-length work in under a year is impossible, really. No thesis is book-ready. I could edit and rewrite mine for another year, and I fully expect to, for more than a year. And sadly, the manuscript will no longer be the laser focus of my existence. (Damn kids, always needing food.) It'll be a side project, one that gets my attention when I have time, when the stars align properly. That's a huge bummer, and a huge relief. The thesis and I need some time away from each other. I'm happy to devote myself to the pieces individually, but as a whole, it's starting to feel like a houseguest that won't leave and has been feeding my dogs table scraps and teaching my kids obscene gestures.

With that said, I'll cut this blog shorter than I'd like to (I can do that because nobody is reading it or checking it or expecting it) and go rouse my menfolk. We have moutains to find today!