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.

Photo Graveyard

Photos are scattered across my living room floor. Piles, slightly askew, marking different places in my life- be they time or geography. Me with straight hair smiling and scar-less. Me as a toddler, chubby legs and the same fat cheeks. Me in South Africa, wasted down to bone after my car accident. 

Me post-accident, in Swaziland

I pulled them all out with the hopes of bringing order to the chaos. For years my mother has tried to coax me into making scrapbooks. She bought one for my high school graduation, I bought one when I returned from the Peace Corps. They both have strong beginning, they have pictures and journal entries pasted inside. But a few pages in, and the glue stopped, there are photos slipped between the pages with a hint of my intentions. And then at the end it all tapers off…first to a page filled with photographs without a common theme or message and then no photographs at all. 

I grow bored. I become irritated, limited by my horrendous handwriting and too lazy to transcribe everything to the computer so it can be printed neatly. So the books sit on shelves, a half memory of a time long ago.

My mother encouraged the scrapbooks because she understood I wouldn’t remember things forever. I scoffed to myself, how could I forget such important events. But important as they were, they have been crowded out by so many other things. Other events, other cities, other people. Hell, some of it was knocked clean out of my head from an accident – some blotted by a desire to forget.

My high school bestie

I pulled out the photos on my floor the day, and traveled back for a moment, into the space of the places that are captured in those glossy squares. The ones I remember clearly. The ones that hit me roundly in my nostalgia. Sitting with my head on the shoulder of my best friend in high school. We spent so many hours on that couch. More hours talking…about what…we have no idea now. 

There is a photo of me dangling by a bungee cord over the Zambezi River.  I remember the exhilaration of actually jumping off a bridge- ignoring every survival instinct in my body and hurtling myself, arms spread like wings, toward the horizon. I remember the exhilaration morphing to pain as the cord settled and I dangled from my ankles while I waited for them to pull me to safety. And of course I remember the Egyptian man who told me, as I walked back to the starting point on the bridge, “you have the most magnificent scream.” And I did.

There are so many photos, my first boyfriend hugging me close at New Year’s, 10 years after our first kiss, my college friends, my Peace Corps ones. My family. 

Staring at them I understand and don’t, why we take them. I love the moment of love and joy and even the tinge of sadness that is embedded in each one. The memories that shock me back in time and then propel me back to exactly where I am, sitting on my couch flipping through pictures.

I don’t know what to do with them all.

Arranging them into books feels so strange. I heard an article on NPR a few months ago that talked about how in a recent year we took more photos than had been taken in all of the years before. All of them. 

My grandparents, back when folks dressed for photos

We used to arrange our photos into books because they were select and special. We arranged them because they were, if not quite few, at least precious. A smattering of baby photos, some family shots on vacation.

Now I have pictures of a friend sitting on the beach, a bunch filled with sand dunes (trying to get the perfect angle), one of friends piled on a single chair for no particular reason at all. 

I can’t imagine who will look through these. I can’t imagine they will be cherished like the two black and white photos I have in frames of my grandparents. Pictures taken back when folks dressed for the occasion. Or like the school picture I have of my father when he was 14. We have so many pictures to choose from how will any of them stand out as special?

Partly I feel lazy. Some images I have seared into my heart, never to be forgotten even years later. There is no picture of me saying goodbye to Ess at the airport. But I can see it so clearly. Too clearly, it hurt so badly I can recall not just the image but the pain itself. Palpable. No camera was necessary.

But you can’t share a memory the way you can share a picture. The exactitude is lost in a sea of metaphors in speech and the pieces of the moment we tuck away and reserve just for ourselves. Photographs tell a seemingly whole story- even if it isn’t always complete. 

The reality is these photos will go back into a box. A little more orderly. Possibly with some notations of dates or geography, but back into the box where they belong.

Celebration Beside Grief (from summer 2014)

I've always hated graduation. Long speeches delaying the gratification of hearing a name called, listening to stilted speeches. I could do without them. But under the clear sky and blazing Saturday sun I watched a handful of the kids I work with graduate. And I watched them with enthusiasm and joy and a smattering of proud tears. 

There is a reason I have a renewed fondness for graduation.

Last week we lost someone. Lost is the wrong sentiment. He was taken. He was murdered. It wasn’t peaceful. It wasn’t his time to go.

If you measure death in the number of headlines, the number of stranger-attended memorials, then his death was quiet. Weighed in reporters and his death seems undeserving of spectacle and broadcast grieving. His death does not evoke the wrenching of hands about gun legislation or discussions about how mental health did or did not play a role. If you measure his death in the 8 inches of newsprint space he shared with another lost life and two others shot and injured over the weekend, if you measured it like that, you could miss it.

But that is a dangerous way to measure death. 

His death will not warrant news stories beyond the weekend laundry list of shootings that already ran. Journalists will not travel to his home to ask people to share their favorite stories of him as son, or boyfriend, or father. No politicians will lament the loss of an innocent victim.

But I remember him. 

In the wake of his death, graduation was exactly right. The jubilation. The wider world just a few waiting steps away. And these students are ready for it; so eager for their “what next”. And these kids have one. They have a next thing. They could have college and jobs and marriage and kids. They have possibilities. They have nothing less than today. They already know, too well, tomorrow is not guaranteed them. 

The purple and white robes look new under the glare of the sun. The kids look jubilant the crowd ecstatic. And we need this. I need this brief celebration of as it is supposed to be.