Why Here, Why Now?

Trying to figure out how I got here, part 1

If you’d have caught me on a bad day a few months ago and I think I would have told you I wasted my twenties. Not on anything nefarious or risky, but only simply wandering. I would have said I should have gotten it together—figured out what I was “meant” to do, knuckled down, and done it.

Sure, this is unrealistic. I realize that now. But I wanted to settled into something, feel at home in it, go deep with some kind of work.

That’s a part of what Peace of the Whole is about.

These are some small vignettes of my wandering. This is, in a way, a review of what’s led me here. To be honest, it hurt a bit to write.

It’s as much for me as it is for you.

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17 years old, an August afternoon

I’m in my childhood bedroom, all my notebooks and a laptop set before me on my desk. What I want more than anything is to be a published author.

This, I am convinced, is the most profound thing a person can be. Nothing tops having your work immortalized in print. So I am working on my novel, as I have been since I was thirteen. I have short stories going on the side too, because you have to get published in The Paris Review first if you’re going to be a novelist. I am very serious about all of it because that is what I think I have to be. I’ve learned this from having read about Dickens, Dickinson, Woolf and others.¹ I know this from having listened to best selling authors of our modern age speak in interviews and in TED talks. If I just craft my words and plot all perfectly enough, a publishing house will swoop it up, my novel will be on the bestseller list, and I will have Made It.

Every day that I am not working on my novel is a day wasted. Because, as I believe I learned from Liz Gilbert, the very worst thing that can happen to you is that you die with an unfinished novel in a drawer. I refuse to let that be my fate.

How I will make a living as an adult is unclear. I never attempt to make that clearer, even as college looms closer. I must do something of meaning, and nothing is more meaningful than writing.

At this time, I have no friends. Really, zero. Homeschooling makes this possible. I hang out with my grandparents and their friends and think my peers are absolutely ridiculous. I live completely in my head and cannot stand my body.

20 years old, a March afternoon

I’m in a building on my college campus called Hash. I’m too naive to understand why people snicker at the building’s name; to realize that it has any other meaning aside from something you do with potatoes. I’m on the the second floor, in an anthropology class.

Entering college as an English major, I decided an English degree would be too narrow a focus. After a semester, I switched to anthropology to broaden my knowledge of the world and its people. This is for the sake of my writing (I live for my writing, in a way), but also because people really baffle me. I seem to always be missing something when it comes to behaviors and social cues.

When asked though, I say I want to work in local agriculture when I graduate, because I’m (unknowingly) using a focus in food culture to cover my growing eating disorder.²

I’m in a class with a professor named Marlene. I don’t call her Marlene—that’ll come later, and never to her face. But I’m equal parts devoted to and terrified of her. She’s unlike any woman I’ve met. Marlene has been a professor, it seems to me, for her entire life and to me she is startlingly confident. Eventually, I’ll become her assistant.

That day in class we have our chairs with attached desks all set in a circle, as anthropology majors do. The early spring sun is streaming in the windows. Marlene tells us about her fieldwork in Greece, which was longer ago than I have been alive. Her fieldwork was on pregnancy and birth culture in rural Greece in the early 80s. She tells us about ways of thinking about menstruation, pregnancy and birth that run completely counter to how they’re handled in modern gynecology and obstetrics. She tells us about how this work influenced her so much that when she gave birth to her daughter at the age of forty she employed the practices she’d seen in Greece. She birthed unassisted, on her hands and knees, resisting interventions.

I am shocked. So much so that I will remember this moment more clearly than I will remember most other moments in college. I’m shocked that we can talk about this. We can talk about birth. We can talk about it boldly but also as though it is the most normal thing. We can talk about menstruation. In a class. With boys present.³

It’s around this time too that I’m in a little room I rent with my friend. My friend tells me about a couple she knows who’s getting married soon. The gal is as young as us and they don’t want kids yet. So, my roommate says, they’re going to be timing sex so she doesn’t get pregnant. The gal will just keep track of her cycle and, magically, some days she won’t be able to get pregnant. She will communicate this state of affairs to her husband not with words but by not shaving her legs at that time. She has to secretly say it. My roommate does not explain this further so I’m left confused.

I have two different things my head now—Marlene speaking boldly about pregnancy in a college class and this friend of a friend unable to say clearly to her own husband that she’s ovulating.

All of this gives me more to think about. My roommate never uses the terms “natural family planning” or “fertility awareness method” but when I Google “timing sex to avoid pregnancy” I get results. I buy a book. I start learning more, tentatively.

22 years old, a September morning

I’m sitting in my fiancé’s childhood bedroom, another job application before me. I’m a college graduate now—BA in anthropology, magna cum laude, and with departmental honors.

Before moving home, I quit my job in a cheese shop and I’m now unemployed. I never considered that working in a cheese shop might be better than nothing. I was graduated. I was supposed to get a “real job” now, but a real job has not appeared.

I’m sitting here with my laptop, five months on from graduation, and my head is too foggy to even figure out what else I could possibly apply to do. In the past several months I’ve applied for things and interviewed and (thinking about it now) bombed each interview.

The truth that I will only understand later is that I’m very, very sick. I’ve been sick since I was nineteen. Without the structure and security of college—without professors to brown nose and syllabi to follow—I’m drowning. The status quo that allowed me to keep things together has been ripped out from under me and, not knowing what to do, I’ve gone into a very dark place.

It feels as though I am constantly seeing doctors now, as I have been doing for years. I’m trying to get to the bottom of a litany of mysterious health problems: frequent urination, chronic fatigue, GI issues, hormonal issues, brain fog, depression, anxiety. These have become debilitating. I’ve had so many visits and so much testing (some of it invasive). But the doctors can tell me nothing; they say: “You’re fine!” I leave appointments and scream in my car.

I start on two different anti-depressants. Neither works. I stop them. I make another doctors appointment. I apply for another job. I never hear back. I make another doctors appointment. It’s a bleak loop. My fiancé and I have started to do our own research, since the doctors are failing me. They’re telling me it’s all in my head. But I know there’s something wrong and I know it can be fixed. We just have to find it.

I’m working on a new novel, or at least that’s what I tell myself. It’s inspired by one of my favorite college professors who played ELO before class. In truth, my novel is languishing, which is another bitter reminder of how much I’m failing.⁴

22 to 25 years old

I try doing freelance photography for small local businesses. I never charge enough and this lasts about a year.

I try to write my novel.

I get a job with a firm that represents local alcohol makers in the next state over. Within a month I’m underhandedly “let go” for my boss’ mistake.

I get married. Turns out, being married isn’t as easy as I thought.

For two seasons, I work on a hot mess of a little organic farm, doing fieldwork and running their marketing. I start to think that maybe farming is my calling. Maybe my husband and I will farm together someday…

When the farm season ends, I get a job in a cafe, unable to realize I’m wildly overqualified for it. I’m just grateful to be employed, never mind that the baristas are all catty and old men come in an objectify us all.

I try to write my novel.

I accidentally happen upon a listing for a job at a public library. I apply for it, expecting nothing, and get it. Immediately, I fall in love with it. No work has ever fulfilled me this much. I consider going back to school for a Masters of Library Science and working in libraries until I retire.

All the while, I get sicker. I’ve stopped going to doctors because there doesn’t seem to be any point and it’s too expensive. Now, my husband and I just research, striking at symptoms as they pop up, like whack-a-mole. But we are both starting to get an education on the human body, health and healing.

I fall apart. I pass out. I try this diet, then that diet. I start on Zoloft. I try CBD. I get off Zoloft. I wonder what the heck I’m doing with my life.

I try to write my novel.

26 years old, an April afternoon

I’m at my desk at the community college library where I work now. The space is bitterly cold and completely dead. Actually, it’s always dead. Though I’ve worked here since January, I can count on one hand the times I’ve checked out a book to someone. It’s a library and no one checks out books.

At the public library I had loved I thought I’d found my calling. Patrons loved me, as did staff and volunteers. It was a bustling, community hub. And it felt like a “real,” “grown up” job. However, I was paid $9/hour, with no hope of anything more. The library funding was cut and I would have been the first to get the boot. So I looked elsewhere and found this position at a community college.

I am now deeply regretting the change. Some people, I guess, would be grateful to have a job that requires nothing of them. But I have never been so bored in my life. I miss my friends at the public library, the patrons, the community, and the feeling of being needed.

My health only deteriorates more. I hardly make it through the day without falling apart in some way or another—a panic attack, crippling fatigue, GI pain, lightheadedness, confusion. I’m relying on massive mugs of very strong earl grey to get me through and it is not working. My husband and I both try to find things to help me. Once skeptics, we embrace alternative medicine. We try different diets, probiotics, supplements, herbs.

Just to have some kind of entertainment during my shift at the library I’ve started taking online herbalism classes. I entertain the idea of becoming an herbalist. But I also spend a good amount of my time on Instagram. And there, I find herbalist Sarah Corbett. She leads me to her mentor, naturopath and fertility awareness educator Clara Bailey. I take her free class on FAM and the menstrual cycle and it feels like my brain has cracked open.

My novel sits on the back burner. I feel the threat of having a novel left in a drawer.

But I have started to write about my health online, and people are responding, saying things like: I thought I was the only this happened to! The only one doctors ignored! The only one who had X symptom.

And I realize: it’s not just me.

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I had no idea the length this would get to when I set out. I’ll be back with part two next week.

1. From thirteen until maybe twenty-three I read pretty much only classic novels. Atonement and On Chesil Beach are the only non-college-required non-classics I can think of having read in that time. I was a little obsessed with Keats, Dickinson and Woolf. Oh yes, I was such a fun teenager to be around. Why do you ask? 🙃

2. Specifically, orthorexia.

3. Growing up in gender segregated evangelical churches will do that to you. Also I don’t remember what this class was actually about but it wasn’t pregnancy and birth.

4. I do want to give younger me credit: by this point I’d won multiple writing awards and had short stories published. At the time, none of it was enough.