October: Mortality and Other Words for Death

When the news comes, the knock on the door has a certain hollow sound, the phone ring has a certain off key beep. There are too many missed calls and then finally there is a certain break in the voice. You know before you know.
As 30 creeps up, I think for the first time I am old. I fret about the wrinkles where I smile and more about the ones where I worry. I wonder about the years, feel the momentum of the blink of existence and how small a drop am I in that tidal wave of geological time. It's not enough. Yet, the seconds between when she called and when I knew he died stretched and took up more space than the seconds just before.
Friends die. Family members die. By the time you reach 30 that is not news and the idea of the end sits just on the edge of the periphery, there but lost somehow in direct sights, so every time it comes round, it does not feel old, it does not seem worn. Each time is a new heart break. The presence of wrinkles fall back to a rank less important, more where they belong. Mortality is just another word for death. Death, something that falls apart without life. Life then, seems both more fragile and more meaningful. Time seems too short for significance and too long to remember. Both, And.
My brother died unexpectedly. My sister gave a heartfelt speech at his funeral. I have some regrets. Perhaps I could have done more. What else is there to say?  

August: When I turn 30 will I grow out of depression?

Let me "should" you for a moment:

It shouldn't be hard to get off of the bathroom floor.

It shouldn't be hard to get out of bed. 

I should be smiley and happy.

I should be shouting from the rooftops.

All the time.

Let's be honest, my life is magical. I have a United States passport, and I have used it. A lot. I am white, I am middle class, I am able bodied. As a millennial I received trophies for participating in t-ball, for getting 5th place in the soccer league. I have just the right amount of familial dysfunction to seem interesting. 

Good things happen to me. My world is a beach, and I am constantly sipping from an umbrella garnished cup. And I know, I know, but sometimes there's this darkness and I just can't even...well, you know, get out of bed. 

No reason, except maybe for the fact that along with a trophy, millennials were also gifted with a constant gnawing belief that a financial collapse looms, threatening to spiral into a society wide apocalypse. Maybe the anxiety over this possibility has driven me into a state of the medical diagnosis blues. Or maybe I'm just being whiny and entitled?   

I doubt my voice. I doubt my choice. They say change is our one constant, but I also harbor doubt with the same constancy. I don't know if going to physical therapy school is the right thing to do. 

So why did I start?

1. Sometimes you just have to choose something. Along with trophies and paranoia, privileged millennials are also gifted with the optimism that they can be anything, if only they love it and want it enough. I have wandered for two decades, seeking some ultimate fulfillment at which to throw myself, some thing always around the corner that will cause me to leap out of bed in the morning like a caffeine drip. But I no longer believe that unicorn exists and I grow weary of dressing as a maiden waiting for it to appear. Seriously, I am almost 30. Can't fool anyone with that.   

2.  My brain is rebelling against a lazy supplication to my fickle heart, prone to breaking for no reason. I'm tired of the dark days. Where does the darkness come from? Perhaps I can just go choke it off somewhere near the source. So I moved back to my hometown, back to the house I grew up in. And it's not that terrible, and I can't explain it, but it is truly the last place I would like to be. I'm supposed to be cool and cool people do not move back home. People who have given up move back home.

There's an idea in yoga that involves dukha and sukha. Dukha is a state of suffering, in bitterness, and general awfulness. Sukha is sweet, lovely, and all the feel good feels. We all want some sukha in our lives. One way to get more sukha is to just be a chill yogi and meditate on love and kindness, save whales, and whatnot. But dukha is also translated as obstructed space. Something that is in the way. The kind of mountain pass you can't just traipse around by winding through the valleys. Sometimes you have to go through the dukha to get to sukha. Plus there are some sort of lessons to be learned in sitting in the dukha and surviving. According to one of my favorite teachers dukha can also be translated as a pile of shit or better yet, a diaper full of it. Here I am sitting in my own shit, waiting to bust through this obstruction.   

I am a couple of months into the program, studying physical therapy. How I wish I could tell you everything is wonderful now, that making a choice made me grow up and suddenly I am happy and shiny. The other day I was looking longingly at the coffee maker waiting for a brew when one of my classmates said, "Sometimes I just can't believe I'm so close to living my dream. I've wanted this for so long. Somebody pinch me!" I gagged and wished somebody would pinch me from this mediocre nightmare. She's here with her soulmate of a career and I feel like I'm just dating some guy who has a job and asked me to dance.  

And physical therapy school is hard. During the first lecture, I tried halfheartedly to follow a litany of soft tissues and structures around the shoulder, but I felt old, and dumb, and disinterested. When the lecture finally finished, I tried to read the related readings in a text book and I fell asleep on the pages. I dreamt of the well organized liberal arts lectures and socratic method classroom participation of my undergraduate institution. Because I fall asleep and dream over my books I don't learn very well, and I always feel behind. 

I make it through the summer by playing, "This Year," by the Mountain Goats on repeat, very loud, probably causing irreparable damage to my ears. "I will make it through this year, if it kills me," the lyrics say, and say, and say, and say.  

Now the leaves are changing way too soon and I know winter is coming. The grey and heavy skies haunt me more than any other hometown ghost. I know this. So I pack my toolkit: locate the sun lamps in the library, make a fitness plan, audition to teach yoga at a local studio, and schedule sessions with a therapist. 

I'm going to claw my way into some sweetness if it kills me.

Physical therapy school probably will.  

June: Leaving and Homecoming

A month ago I was literally falling in love with a tall dark foreigner on a beach off the coast of Vietnam. We had rented a tandem kayak and paddled across the cove to a small island for the afternoon. I alternated reading the pages of a book with allowing disparate glances to where our eyes met and my heart could go all aflutter. I was unabashedly drunk on it, I sent a message to my friend, "How disgustingly brilliant is my life?" 

I love traveling because on the road that scene above is normal. People who live in their backpacks, they measure reality in a different metric. We can fall in love on a beach--with a lover, a friend, a particular wave that falls upon the sand in perfect timing with the last rays of the sun. We can keep that feeling alive. I believe we can keep it alive.

Could I even keep mine past the beach? I had to leave, or rather, I had bought a ticket home, and I chose to use it. It was a choice, but it didn't feel that way. A series of seemingly inconsequential decisions had set too many things in motion and I was swirling, caught up in inertia just trying to hold my hands over my ears to protect my head, maybe my heart. I had to go home because I had a carload of stuff sitting in a house in Colorado that I was no longer renting, and I had to drive it to a school in Minnesota where I had told administration I was attending. Because I had told my family I was going to become a physical therapist and get a real job and a career and they agreed that was a good idea.

I cried at the airport when I left, but I left. 

My plane arrived in Denver at eight in the morning and I just, didn't know...so I went to the bar and I ordered a couple beers before walking to passenger pick-up where my sort of still and maybe again, but mostly ex-boyfriend waited outside in his new truck. We broke up for a few reasons, but mostly I grew tired of inviting him to join me in my wanderlust. He never had time, never had the money, but when I was gone he bought things like heliskiing trips in Alaska or a shiny new pickup truck. Momentum can't hide the fact that we make choices. Kissing him hello was weird, because I almost didn't love him anymore and I almost loved someone else, and we both knew I was leaving.  

A week ago from now and a few days after that, I packed the last of my things from the house that had once been ours, my mostly ex-boyfriend and me, and I drove back home to Minnesota. I hated the miles that sank below the tires of my worn out Subaru and I hoped that it would finally kick it, break down on the side of the road, or spin out on its threadbare tread and eject me high in the sky. I would never land. I would just float.

The defeat of moving back in with my parents in my hometown at the age of 29 is a kick in the stomach that leaves me curled up on the bathroom floor, listening to running water, filling the space with steam. I start my first day in a doctoral program for physical therapy tomorrow and I do not want to go. Advantage after advantage has been thrown my way, but I just want to escape. 

And I would run. Except, I can't tell if I want to run because it's what I need, or if I want to run because I'm scared I won't succeed. 

I chose to come home because I wanted to go to the source, to meet the ghosts where they live. I don't know if what I'm doing is right, but I know I'm always leaving and right now I am trying to go back. It is not a strong argument. I don't feel like a strong person, but I manage to get off of the floor and take a shower.