Do you ever get the feeling that you're doomed? Not "doomed" in any specific sense, like you'll die tomorrow. Just a black haze that can mean nothing but general, life-wide disaster. I hate moments like these.
I think, for me anyway, it's mostly just a sign that my body is tired and my mind is exhausted. I'll sleep it off and feel better in the morning. But could it, does it, mean anything?
I have never had to look so hard for employment. Ever. I've always been a few steps ahead of myself with plans spanning the horizon, not jumping ship until the next stage was ready to launch. It worked great. I was willing to accept rather sucky and poorly paying jobs simply because someone was willing to pay me to learn a few things I was dying to learn. They accepted my curious novice status, I accepted a meagre paycheck for the privilege paid learning. It was awesome and eventually, through careful budgeting and frugal spending, paid my way through months and hard, draining, colorful, spectacular, unbelievable months of overseas travel. An absolute and long-standing dream realized, a burning itch scratched, a hopefully lifetime journey finally launched. But my long lists of two and five year plans aren't working so well anymore.
I knew this was coming. I could sense it at the farm even two years ago. I had quit school with the goal of working and travelling and learning a few things along the way. And I did. I became, fulfilling a minor dream, a bike mechanic. I, partially satisfying a nagging curiosity, worked on an organic farm for a while. I absorbed an unfathomable amount of information during the past five or so years. I now know a dozen kinds of wrenches - and how to use them. I've taught myself to knit and quilt. I can build bicycle wheels, straighten bent frames, and adjust any derallieur with the best of 'em. I've read hundreds of cookbooks and can make anything from gluten free pies, endless stir-fries, a half dozen risottos, baguettes. Seeing as how I grew up on TV Dinners and I had never before purchased fresh produce before I was an adult, I consider this a major accomplishment.
The past five years have been a blast. Bunnyholes heading off in a dozen directions and enough enthusiasm to chase them all to their ends. I could hardly go fast enough, learn quick enough, read enough, try enough new recipes or ethnic grocery stores.
But I must admit I'm sick of shitty paychecks. I'm tired of moving every few months on the tail of a new occupation. Of never unpacking all my hard-won kitchen stuff and using those baguette pans again. The life of the nomad is romantic. And exhausting. A bone wearying exhaustion.
I said in the beginning I'd do this until it wasn't fun anymore. The trips are still fun and I still have trip ideas bursting out of my brain - a self supported bike tour to Maine, months WWOOFing in Ireland, France, Spain and Greece, a bike tour through New Zealand, more SCUBA in Thailand. I could go on until the cows come home. But it's the in-between stuff that's not fun anymore. I'm tired of living in crowded boxes full of boxes, of riding a bike all through sloppy frigid MN winters, of always buying the least expensive item of dinner menus.
Most importantly, I'm tired of the nonexistence of opportunities for someone of my skill set. First, I'm a woman, with no secretarial training, and that leaves few options for the under educated. I'm a bike mechanic by trade with some experience in organic farming and nanny work. There is no room for advancement, little room for growth. It seems like all that's left is to keep doing exactly what I have been doing - fixing flat tires or picking broccoli or changing diapers. It's not that there aren't jobs to be had, it's just that I don't want to do any of them. I'm experiencing a general malaise, an over arching unhappiness with the situation I've created for myself. It's time to think in new directions and that keeps pointing one direction - back to school. Eeeek. But even that has no guarantees. Most of the people I've worked with in shops were doing the exact same thing I was doing for the same paycheck - only they had degrees. Let me tell you, there's not a lot of motivation for taking on more debt simply to prove I can do it. But I'm tired of my other options. Are there more opportunities I'm missing here because I feel really, really stuck.
I want a house. I want a garden - a big ass garden - and chickens. I want to comb the farmer's markets and freeze enough locally grown tomatoes, peppers, broccoli, leeks, sweet corn, blueberries, and strawberries to get me through the long winter months. I want some predictability, some continuity, some stability in my life. I want a better life than the wages of the perpetual novice can afford.
Is this wrong?
And more importantly will I regret leaving the life of the nomad behind?
This is my first Sunday Scribblings. My motivation to write, once potent and unstoppable, has waned dramaticall in recent years. As I wrote this I did not intent to post it. But when I finished I liked it so much I decided to anyway. It still has rough edges, the grammer is nowhere near perfect. But it's honest.
Deepest, darkest. Ten years ago that would have evoked a putrid, slick black fear. Just that phrase - hinting at something frightening and unknowable - would bring fourth a nausea, hard hitting and thorough; it would make me want to simultaneously shrivel from existence and burst with unspoken need, urgent and bleeding, gracelessly plowing into the listening space of anyone who would stop long enough for me to erupt. I had a lot of secrets that I had been oh-so-carefully trained to keep. Secrets that burned me from the inside. Secrets begging to be known, secrets bursting forth in coded messages. Didn't the doctor see it in my consistent high blood pressure when I was eight years old? Didn't the teachers get it when they complained of me being "socially inept?" Didn't anyone get it when I was made to listen to subliminal tapes telling me I was a "giant, red balloon" in order to correct my cryptically named "self-esteem problems" when I was still only, merely six years old? Wasn't anyone listening?
In my middle teens, when permission was grudgingly granted, I attempted to put those secrets into words. I made stuttered, halting, embarrassing in-roads to the lair of those deep, dark secrets. Those who took the (paid) time to listen did so valiantly, patiently filling in the words I simply could not not speak. They waited as my throat would temporarily unclog, as I wiped the steady river of tears off my checks. Most of what I remember from those long sessions is the tired weight of my head hanging off my shoulders and the look of non descript grey industrial carpeting through the longest, heaviest stream of tears that could possibly come from me. I also remember leaving those offices, exhausted, spent, in the lightest of air. I remembering feeling as though I had never seen the sun shine until that day, feeling as though suddenly the whole world felt possible. Of course, it was many years, many more tears, and many, many more long tiring sessions of speaking, remembering, diagraming to put those, the deepest and darkest of my memories, into a state of suspended animation. I had to learn to live my life without the constant burdening weight. To unfold my spine and erect, for the first time, an identity apart from the darkness. It was a long process learning to live in the sunshine I was only then learning to see.
But deepest, darkest no longer elicits those experiences. It pans by them, offering a trip down memory lane should I need it (and sometimes I do). But thinking isn't gobbled up by those experiences anymore. Ironically, deepest, darkest gives me a warm feeling, an enveloping sense of comfort. A gentle reminder that my deepest and darkest places have been reclaimed, have become hermitages into which I can retreat should the outside world be too much.
My deepest places are my best refuges and the darkest are where I rest without worry. It's all very nondescript beyond those vague feelings, the general impressions. But I know it exists and I know it's mine and I use it often. I have claimed my life, my memories, my being - even the deepest and darkest places.
The only appropriate thing I can think of for a first post is defining why in the hell I'm here. So here it is:
I've blogged for a few years now. One is mostly to keep up with friends I don't really call (and who don't call me). The second was a blog I started for family when I was traveling mostly solo around Asia two different times.
But I've been longing for something more... anonymous? I've (ok! I admit it!) lurked for a long time on blogs whose writers have a lot of interesting and valuable things to say. I've been hesitant to iteract mostly because I didn't have a blog I felt comfortable linking to. So here it is, my little corner of the web, where can I be more wholly myself than the compartmentalized, socially acceptable versions that are no less me but are more segmented depending on who I am interacting with.
I won't fit neatly into a blogger category - cooking or sex bloggers - instead I'm a curious one who will try most things once. And if I'm intrigued enough to try it again I'm likely to form some opinions on the matter. So I'll probably blog about cooking, food, sustainable agriculture, sex and relationships, ethical living, leftist politics, and a whole lot more.
Signing off,
Meg
