I quit!

In the middle of life. A crisis. Some would call it a midlife crisis. By the purest of definitions it was

that. Someone marching through life, maybe skating, maybe barely sliding by…but getting to some mid-point and maybe expecting something. Anything. Anything more than what they brought with them.

I find myself at that point. The general milestones of career checked off the list. Kind of. The more personal ones, less so but not abhorrently so. It isn’t a matter of “if only…” except, “if only I knew what the point is.” 

I don’t.

Years ago my head went through the back window of a car. There are skid marks where skin clung to pavement and the constant irritating reminder that I was lucky. Lucky to only have 33 stitches. Lucky to have been taken to a hospital- no matter how scary the hospital was. Lucky to not lose my eye.

“You’ll shoot your eye out kid.”

And in the aftermath of that accident I was sick on antiretroviral medications because there was too much uncertainty about where the needles that sewed me up came from. I lost 15 pounds in a month, a patch of hair larger than my hand, and the symmetry of my face that I’d taken for granted.

I vaguely remember a change in perspective on the world. But at 25 my perspective was relatively new so how much change could there have been.

Now, in my 40s, I question my perspective and contemplate crafting a new one. 

The thing no one really tells you about bucking convention is that it pays to be brilliant at something if you take that route. Straying from the well-worn path is amazing when you have vision and purpose. I have frustration and disinterest- not really things you can forge a path with. 

Still, I stand with my toes peeking over the edge of some unknown decision. Some path not yet taken, and keep taunting myself. “Do it. Do it. Do it.” I dare myself. I say it out loud to people so their knowledge of my plans might shame me, inadvertently into making it happen. 

I texted my sister a few weeks ago, “if I leave the country I’ll have to ditch my phone”. “If?!” she responded, “when” she corrected me. And I need that because otherwise the lack of an alternate plan to my current distress falls away as easily as tentative brunch plans. A last minute cancellation with the promise of a reschedule that may never come. 

Fear and laziness are at the core of so many lives that wanted more but didn’t manage to get it. I suffer more from the laziness than the fear – though the fear of retirement and unemployment and returning to exactly this same feeling do persist. But the laziness. 

Just write. Just plan. Just imagine.

It is paralyzing.

Maybe it is fear masquerading as laziness. Fear donning a different face to keep me off balance and uncertain. Whatever it is…today I ignored it. Today I walked into my boss’s office and gave notice of my resignation.

Come January I’ll fold my uncertainty and angst into the battered travel pack I’ve had since 2001. The one that has been with me to every country I’ve visited except Japan. I do not know what this jump into the unknown will offer up…only that the fear that grips me is reason enough to jump.

The absence of "what next?"

The head space I’m currently occupying is frustrated or stuck or possibly just sad and I feel immobilized by it. I am generally a person of action, I have a problem and tackle it head on. I am nothing if not adept at crafting a two-year-plan and diving into what the next 24 months will look like. For most of my life I functioned that way, life carved out in two-year increments. I could do anything for two years, I conceded. And so I had one and two year stints (occasionally three) all over the world. I saw no reason to change my approach to life.

Oakland, CA- home?

But when I left Uganda in 2011, I left in part because the two year stints didn’t feel quite right anymore. A nagging desire to be rooted someplace emerged. A strange sensation for me to say the least, I have been a nomad since birth. Initially the consequence of my military family, the moving was a mantle I picked up for myself and continued to carry it forward to several states and countries over the years. 

There is something refreshing about being able to start fresh. Something cleansing about getting to reboot. Something challenging about starting from scratch and building a life anew. And I did that time and again. And I have sections of my life that trail behind me in journals and blogs and sometimes random memories of friends. Things I forget until gently reminded. Things that were possible because I was not married to a single location or even expectation for how my life should unfold.

But I came home from Uganda in search of something more familiar; and typing that now I can see the problem that has emerged that I didn’t foresee emerging, even though I should have. What the hell is home? More specifically, where the hell is my home? My entire life home has not been a place. I don’t really understand the affinity people have for hometowns or what that feels like. Home for me has always been at the foot of my parents’ bed. Not exactly the bed itself so much as it is the symbol for home that my heart conjures when people speak of their homes. 

When I’ve been away for a long time - back when I came home from college at break or later between countries- even back when I was in high school and maybe coming in after a night with friends, my sister and I would sit at the foot of my parents’ bed and we’d all talk. We’d talk until my mom fell or asleep or my dad was ready to settle in, and then I’d wander back to my bed feeling warm and loved because that was home for me. My family has always been home. 

My intention, upon returning to the United States, was not to return to the foot of my parents’ bed, or even to the city where my parents live…my intention was to create for myself the actual physical space of home that has always been mythical to me.

Oakland is as close as a physical manifestation of home that I can conjure. Oakland has a community of people that I care about, that care about me. Its architecture and coastlines and weather all appeal to me, the focus on food is in line with my own, the diversity of people feel right. Oakland, in a lot of ways, feels like my city. 

But home?

Home is elusive for me. Home falls into the category of seemingly simple and practical things that so many other people do and take for granted that are so elusive for me. Things like marrying and reproducing. 

This isn’t a lamenting of the life I’ve carved out for myself, so much as a realization that I don’t know my “what next?”. In the absence of a life partner and sans the desire to procreate, the world is limitless. Friends and family see it as wide open space. But right now…right now I feel small in it. Right now I feel untethered not in a freeing way but in a lost way. I am floating without a plan or even the simplicity of the spark of idea that, in the past, preceded the inception of my plans.

I have been discussing my lack of direction and confusion with my community for a while now. I’m tired of talking about it. Tired of holding the uncertainty and plan-less-ness in my own head, tired of unleashing it on those that love me. 

The truth is…I want to know what next? I’m not in flux but this state of mind feels very much like flux. I don’t want to be where I am forever and yet I don’t know where I want to be next. And in the absence of a “what next?” I feel stuck where I am…wanting but unable to send myself back out into the world.

I could blame Oakland, blame the desire to make tangible my intangible understanding of home. But Oakland is just a symbol. Oakland represents the first time in my life that I settled into the idea of where I am being the best place I could be. The first time I doubted the possibility that the unknown before me might reveal itself to me something not worthy of the effort of leaving. And so I cling to this place in a way I have never clung to a place before. Cling to the idea of this being the destination rather than simply part of my journey. 

Maybe I’m holding on to tight and what I need to do is loosen my grip…I’m attempting to loosen my grip.

Conspiracy Theory

I didn’t make the connection. I read about United being grounded before I left for work and saw the blurb about the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) going silent after I arrived. It popped up as an email email alert with a glaring absence of why it was offline. The lack of explanation for the closing of the NYSE (a deeply uncommon event) led me to actually click on the link. The Washington post included a quote from someone assuring America that the failure was not a hack, just a technical glitch. 

Move along nothing to see here. And if they hadn’t assured me there was no hack I probably wouldn’t have thought this might be a hack.

But someone said it so my imagination started jogging. Part of it was just an exercise in fun, a “what if?” game played out against real circumstances. After all, it isn’t unthinkable, I received my obligatory letter from Uncle Sam in the mail assuring me that my information had most likely been stolen in the government breach. It isn’t like a hack is an unthinkable thing.

My day was full though, and so my musings about a hack by anyone receded and United and the NYSE were back up and running (along with the Wall Street Journal and apparently Seattle’s 911 system), certain that they were unrelated technical difficulties. Just isolated unrelated incidents.

And they probably are. Isolated. Unrelated. 

Anonymous’s ominous message the night before it all went down is a coincidence (their words not mine). I hope we heed – fantastical conspiracy theory warnings though they might be. Something or someone will come for us...eventually. That is the way of war and domination, that is the way we play politics as a country. And unlike someone flying planes into buildings, what is coming for us now is something we can imagine- it won’t catch us wondering who thought up such a plan and marveling at the execution. Instead, we will have a list of breaches and breakdowns of the past.

We’ve been warned.

Yet Americans still lay about with our necks and belies exposed. The more we rely on technology the less we seem to protect the very parts of it that we rely on. Now, like some Star Trek (TNG) episode gone nightmarishly wrong, we have thrust all of our information, personal and state, into places we don’t fully understand with the silly assumption that the rest of the world doesn’t understand it either. In ignorance we are safe.

But we aren’t. And right now we have no Jean-Luc Picard to save us.

I’m very much aware that today’s technical difficulties were just that, technical difficulties. But those difficulties provide us with an opportunity to see how dependent we are on our constantly evolving technology. We could use it as a dry-run before the water is real and a rising tide alerts us to the holes in our boat. But we have to be willing to see.

The US Office of Personnel Management (twice) and the IRS, Target, Anthem, Chase (the list goes on)...they seem to come more frequently these days- numbing us into the sense that it is all inevitable. And maybe it is…

The thing about convenience (and our online lifestyles are nothing if not convenient) is it is easy to get accustomed to it and take it for granted. Easy to forget how to function without it. And then its absence feels less like an inconvenience and more like a crisis. 

Back some years ago when I was living in Auckland (New Zealand) there was an electrical failure of some kind, power went out all over the city, for hours. Certain kind of locks didn’t work, elevators in ridiculously tall buildings were useless, stoplights went dark, food went un-refrigerated. 

It was as if the population of Auckland was suddenly filled with children bumbling through the world. We were all wandering around confused about what we should be doing and how it should get done. Even my boyfriend at the time- from a place where electricity routinely goes off as a matter of expectation, and me-accustomed to living in places with no electricity at all, felt disoriented. We joked about how easily we forgot ourselves and all of the ways we know how to function without electricity. Just like that, placed in the context of flipping a switch and trusting that the current would be flowing, we’d become dependent.

Like everyone else (although probably for a shorter period of time) we looked at the dead elevators forgetting the stairs (all 11 narrow flights) existed. We marveled at our useless electric stoves and wondered how we’d cook. We commented on our lack of batteries and flashlights and candles. We were wholly unprepared. 

Right now, most Americans are unprepared. 

We have forsaken house phones for cellular ones, limiting the structural damage necessary for maximum impact. We are tethered to convenience –little boxes of information that light and guide us through the world. I tried to buy a key map last year. Tired of looking at turn-by-turn directions without a context of where I was turning to and from. The people in the stores and gas stations where I searched, looked perplexed and confused. Someone even asked, “Don’t you have a smart phone?” 

Of course I do. But a Gen Xer, not a Millennial, I came of age in a world where everything wasn’t uploaded into the cloud. I straddle the change in times and remember the pre and post digital age. I am close enough to the before and after (technology) to not be too nostalgic or overly and unfairly skeptical. I recognize our technological advances as useful tools. I also recognize them as convenient and not essential.

So I feel the need to throw up at least a whisper of caution. Not because I think the robots are going to revolt circa I, Robot or Battlestar Galactica (even with this recent news story), but because I’m a pragmatist. 

Understanding the strengths and the vulnerabilities of our technological lifestyle doesn’t require a rejection of it. It isn’t necessary to be a Luddite and forsake all of the comforts that technology provides. But on both a micro and a macro level, Americans need to be mindful that the world is filled with uncertainties. And while we shouldn’t live in fear- constantly raising terror alerts until we are numb to the changing color and the threat it implies- we should think about safety.

Safety now looks a little different than it used to. Safety now is hiring the best hackers to protect the secrets we no longer lock away in highly secured buildings, but instead, thrust into strings of 0s and 1s somewhere out in cyberspace. Safety is improving our technological infrastructure as ardently as we should be improving our more tangible infrastructure. Safety now is enjoying the ease of technological living but understanding how to survive without it…if only until the elevators in our really tall buildings start running again.