What it Costs

America is obsessed with time. Obsessed with not “wasting” time. All over the world --in countries America likes to compare itself to in terms of GDP, 9th grade math scores, and life expectancy-- students take a gap year, a time between high school and “what next?”. They travel.

Of course there are financial limitations to this rite of passage but it occurs to me that even among the wealthier in America, those that likely could afford such a luxury, the gap year has never caught on.

You could argue that Americans don’t "gap year" because we don’t travel overseas but I could argue that travel doesn’t have to be international, especially in a county as large as the United States. Maybe we have it reversed and we don’t travel because we don’t do a "gap year".

Whatever the reasoning order I think that logic is wrong, I think the issue is time.

Americans don’t take that year because then we’ll be “behind”. Behind who or what I am uncertain, only that whatever or whoever it is chases Americans throughout our lives. It is the reason people don’t take vacations even when finances allow, the reason we don’t take time between jobs – god forbid we have a gap in our resumes.

I fight the increasing volume of this narrative in my head everyday. A year out of the conventional job market while I traveled the map gorging on food and meeting interesting people, I worry I'm behind.  If I am, does the “lost” time trump the past year?

Fourteen countries this year: Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Japan, Netherlands, Croatia, Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, and Taiwan. A year of experiences. Was that really less valuable than a 9-5 that is really an 8-7?

I don’t think so.

I’m just ending my trip and beginning my job search. In a few weeks, maybe a few months, I'll begin to see if my decision to change up my life for a bit must be weighed not in the joy of the experience that I currently view it in, but instead in the context of loss...such a deficit-approach to living.

No matter what greets me on the other side of this year of living differently, I know that the “loss” Americans fear is double edged. The promotion, the job, the salary, are all potential losses...but I lost my dear friend Shoes, nine years ago. He was there one moment, laughing and drinking and making my life and the world a better place – and then...he wasn’t. Then he was gone. Medical school and studying and all the responsible things he’d done knocked off a motorbike taxi in the middle of Kampala.

Except he was in the middle of Kampala, Uganda; he’d traveled throughout India; he was living the life he wanted to live and not simply following the prescription counselors laid out before him. And so while I still grieve the loss of his unique brand of brilliant beauty in the world, I am also comforted that he hadn’t waited,  hadn't feared lagging behind...hadn’t waited to see or do or experience the world that was taken from him, that he was taken from, so suddenly.

This year has given me grace and laughter and perspective and friendship and challenges and tears and time and distance away from what is expected of me.

Back in America, searching for my "what next", I hope I remember what this year gave me instead of buying into the easy narrative of what it cost.

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.

Want Makes me Guilty

“Come back tomorrow.”

The woman who had been “supervising” my work that day followed me out of the office and into the hall. I’d just said goodbye and was headed home when she stopped me.

“There’s no need,” I assured her, “I finished the job today.”

“I know,” she said, “but I’ll find something for you, just come back here tomorrow.” She was insistent.

I shrugged but agreed reluctantly. I’d spent the day folding and stuffing envelopes. When I’d arrived they’d told me it was a three-day job but I completed it in one; intent on not returning to the tiny windowless room I was working out of and wondering why they thought it would take more time in the first place.

The next day that woman found something for me to do, and the day after that, and within a very short period of time I was holding the temporary place of some middle management position in the marketing department. The subject was boring but it was better than stuffing envelopes and so I stopped substitute teaching (my other hustle in the world of temp work) and dedicated five days a week to my office job. 

By the time my Peace Corps application finally landed me a placement in South Africa I was more than ready to leave. The folks I worked with were great people but I had my sights set on something different. 

The company had other ideas.

Once I gave my notice my boss offered me a permanent position. Fresh out of college, the amount he was offering was nothing to sneeze at; in fact, it was the same amount I made working for the government two years later with more experience.

My mother was ecstatic, as much about the compliment to my skills as to the idea that I might not go gallivanting halfway across the world; but I never even blinked. The money never tempted me; I was ready for something new and different. 

Looking back it is strange that I was so unmoved by the paycheck, growing up I’d had an affinity for money that translated into a thriving babysitting business flush enough with cash that my mother made me open a savings account in middle school. 

Babysitting magnate ways aside, Peace Corps was not a cush gig…in any way. Payment was a living stipend. Hell, I didn’t have electricity the first year I served and my water was pumped up from a borehole, coming up clear and cold for bathing. The work wasn’t lucrative but it was rich. 

A little more than two years in rural South Africa led to working for the government and then graduate school and I’ve been wed to non-profits ever since. On more than one occasion I have returned to my “living stipend” roots and shrugged at the idea that I should pay attention to paychecks. I shrugged, that is, until recently. 

In the last two years I have found myself preoccupied with how much money I make, how much I should be making, how much I need to retire, how much I have in my retirement fund at the moment. For the first time in my life I’m thinking at least as much about how much money I could be making as the contribution my work makes to the world.

And I feel guilty.

I feel guilty that I am distracted by such an inconsequential thing as money…but then, money isn’t exactly inconsequential. 

My logical brain understands that I am the only thing I can count on when I’m too old to work. Longevity runs in my family (my grandfather just turned 99) and I’ve long since let go of the dream of recouping anything from Social Security. That leaves just me. And these are my prime earning years so now is the time to be fixated. 

Still, it feels foreign to want money...daydreaming about work not for love of anything other than the paycheck attached.

I know the desire for a secure(ish) future isn’t criminal. Still, it is space that in my many decades of life, I have never occupied. Maybe if I had fixated on this earlier there would be no reason for it now. But, there is no looking back to undo only to lament and so I look forward. I am looking forward to a future with more money in it without the guilt that warranted or not, taps lightly on my shoulder.

Prompt courtesy of The Daily Post: The Guilt that Haunts Me

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.