Another year arrives

In Boston last week, or rather the suburb where I grew up, I found my old travel journals. As I get ready for New Year's Eve, I've been picking them up occasionally and reading bits and pieces. And I am reminded just how amazing time is, with every passing year turning us into new people. Our personalities are really just the filter that we stream our experiences through. Reading my old writing, I can hear my voice and recognize myself. But, of course, that voice is saying things I would never say today because of all of the experiences that separate me now from me then.

One thing that I was glad to be reminded of was just how terrified I was to study abroad, and how much of a challenge I found it. It's easy to look at the world now and find it so simple to hop on a plane. I forget so easily that this is something I had to work at.

It's good to look back and look for the achievements that we don't give ourselves credit for. What used to frighten you? I think you deserve to take a few minutes to remember, and to reward yourself for the work you did to overcome it.

Below is the real-time preserved record of a terrified 21-year-old Meredith leaving to study abroad. Read on if you feel like jogging your memory about what it feels like to be young and scared, but determined. A happy new year to you! I hope you do many things that frighten you this year, and succeed.

8/29/04

After a two hour delay, our plane takes off under a yellow moon. Boston moves away slowly, glowing like golden brocade against the cool, dark Atlantic. As we move up the coast, dark clouds are silhouetted against the blue and yellow gradient of the nearly-night sky. I see a flash of pink light, then another; yellow and pink exploding amongst the charcoal clouds. The passenger seated beside me confirms that it is a thunder storm. I am leaving home; I am taking on the biggest-yet challenge to my strength, my independence, my ability to be the person that I want to be. The sky seems to indulge my sense of weight.

Last night I was a nervous wreck. The anxiety was electric up through my sternum and into my throat. I am very rarely scared to go out on my own, but all week that burning feeling of tension has erupted at random. For so long, a year abroad has been a vague plan, something to fantasize about and talk about but no more concrete than my vague aspirations towards PhD's and published books. Then it became something real, but distant: not even when I enrolled in the programs, when my French visa cleared, when I received my housing assignment; not even when my plane ticket arrived in the mail did the plans turn into impending action in my mind. This week, as I packed up my new clothes into new suitcases, as I said good-bye to this summer and all that happened within that space of time, and all the spaces before it, as I turned to look at the mission I have given myself, this week I became afraid. Again and again I have said, I must be afraid. If I am not afraid, then I am not doing what I need to, I am not breaking down the fences that I feel safe behind. I am not growing. To become bigger, and better, one must leave safety and comfort and become afraid. I have said this again and again. I say it still, and I still believe it. But this week has been the sharp edge of that philosophy, and it has been exhausting, even heart breaking at times.

Now, though, I feel strangely calm. The inside of an airplane is tranquil, inevitable. All the good-byes are over. I know that I will begin to miss the people that I care about. I know in particular that I will miss [redacted]. But, for now, there is that vital sense of pause that we spoke of in Greece. The fluorescent lights on the white plastic interior of the cabin are strangely calming, although it is the same combination of elements that makes me hate malls. The white noise of the engine joins the white light and the white walls and I am afloat alone in my thoughts, interrupted only by the flight attendant coming by with carts full of cokes and pretzels and ambiguous chicken, and by the loud laughter of the man sitting beside me as he watches "Friends" on the tiny TV screens attached to the ceiling.

The sun is coming up as we fly closer to Dublin for our transfer. The horizon line is liquid fire, orange and red. As the light spreads up and across my tiny plastic portal, I discover that what I took to be land or perhaps ocean is in fact clouds; the city skyline on the horizon is illusion. For some reason I feel like crying. I look at my watch and see that I will almost certainly be missing my flight to Paris. I begin to worry about finding my luggage. Then I consciously put the brakes on my thoughts. I take a deep breath.

And I feel that terrible freedom of uncertainty. And I don't want a career track, I don't want a husband, or children, or a home. Fuck grad school. Fuck Cezanne. Fuck Hemmingway. And instead I watch the sunrise and the way it separates into lines, and I try to figure out if the effect is real or a trick of the eye.

I am trying to 'be here now.' I am trying to let go of the past and the future, and allow myself to float the way I always try to tell myself I do. I will not allow myself to be crushed under the weight of a year. I focus only on the thin backlit clouds as they pull apart like taffy. Then the first sliver of sun breaks over the expansive field of clouds and we begin our descent into Dublin.

I notice that the Aer Lingus seat fabric is covered with stitched scrawling handwriting. On the back of the seat in front of me, I make out: "Americans, she would say, are lost people where're they see the fairest... .... they live between two worlds. Their heads are in the clouds."

Urban Dystopia

On Sunday afternoon, I waited at the main San Francisco public library to meet two of my friends. I was hungry, so I bought a crepe, knowing I'd probably only be able to eat about half of it before our meeting time.

I sat on the wall abutting the side-entrance plaza, with at least 20 people around me. Within about 5 minutes, a man came lurching (I wouldn't say this word if it wasn't appropriate) towards me.

He grabbed my arm. "I like your dress," he said, deeply, scratchily. "Myself, I don't like purple though. What are you wearing purple for? Are you a Sagittarius or something like that?" His tone was serious, menacing.

I backed away slightly, but he grabbed my arm again, strongly. I know that the thing to do in situations like this is to tell the person to Not Fucking Touch Me! but I never feel comfortable telling people off unless they are aware that what they're doing is inappropriate. This man clearly was not. So I told him,

"I'm sorry to be rude, but I need to go. I'm meeting a friend."

He grabbed my wrapped crepe and said, "Good, then, I'll take this! I'm just around the corner so it's easy."

Having gotten myself free of his hand for a second, I jumped at the chance to exit. I said, "Perfect! That's easy then!" and walked towards the next group of people along the wall.

"POIFECT!" he shouted, with an intentional affect, and began mimicking, at shouting volume, the other things I'd said in the conversation as he walked away carrying my food. The other people on the plaza stared at me, curious but without sympathy for my nervousness.

I didn't mind giving the man my food, other than the way that it happened, since I'd mostly finished what I could eat of it. But I mind that he's on the streets. I mind that he, and the countless people like him in this city, are receiving no help. And I mind that I feel either depressed or unsafe most places I go here because the streets in the less posh neighborhoods (like my own, even though it's already pretty much gentrified) are full of people who have been abandoned to their mental illness.

Tonight I rode my bike home from Downtown to the Mission along Market Street. The people along the sidewalk had no connection to reality. They were waving their arms, shouting, gurgling, slumping over. And alongside them, the middle-class workers of downtown switched through their playlists, rearranged the things in their bags. It was as if the two groups of people could not even see one another.

I had been to an amazing event about transit alternatives, where I met many people who told me their ideas for how we could improve our community here by fixing the urban planning. This is an area of thought that I deeply believe can have impact. The transition from the excitement of those conversations to the bike ride home was like a bucket of cold water over my head.

A city cannot function like this. The sane ignore the insane, the insane notice and develop an angry, defiant attitude. It's two cities, one on top of the other, the one for the stable and the other for the unstable.

I am aware that the terrible winters in Boston, where I grew up, and New York, where I most recently lived, are the reason that more people are in shelters there rather than some brilliant policy decision. I don't claim to know everything about this overall situation. I don't know how you help these people, and seeing how many of them there are here makes me realize how much I need to learn.

But it is disturbing to me that the city here goes about its business without even acknowledging the countless people around them who have fallen off of the edge. Most cities do this. But in all of the cities that I've lived in, I've never seen so many people who clearly needed help walking around unaided, invisible. There are enough here that it's almost a parallel city. I waited to meet someone at a subway stop the other day and after about 10 minutes I had to start riding my bicycle in circles around the block, because the 20 - 40 people who were hanging out there started noticing me and heckling me. I was invading their city, it felt like.

People tell me that they would never raise children in New York, because it's too busy. I would never raise children here. It seems that to function properly in this city, you need to ignore the sea of ill people who are constantly around you, in need, in danger. That is not a trait that I would like to develop in any child that I might have. Cities should inspire your curiosity about other people, not blunt you against empathy.

I am afraid of the people around me who are unhinged. And I am even more afraid of the fact that the majority of people do not seem to be concerned about any of it. What's next on the playlist? Oh, I hate that song. Look for something else. Ignore the woman screaming behind me.

The other day I was on the bus and a man sat down a couple of seats next to me. He had a deep, rasping voice. He began to describe the process of murdering a woman.

"Sluts," he said. "Fucking sluts. You get near them, don't matter, get near them, you get behind them, you take your arm and you put it around their neck. And you squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. Don't matter. Whatever they fucking say you squeeze and they push at you but you squeeze until they stop."

I sat there, rigid, with my headphones in, acting like I couldn't hear. Everyone else on the bus did the exact same thing. We didn't try to find out if the man was talking about a fantasy or about something he'd done. That will haunt me. He hissed away, unstoppable, and we did nothing. We waited until we could go back to our Victorian apartments and our alternative social events.

I love the people in San Francisco. I love the culture. But I think about Saramago's "Blindness" every day, here. There is something uniquely dystopian about this crowd of the invisible unwell. I can't ignore the person several paces away from me making strange sounds and leaning to the side. It seems in a way that to live here, I will have to be able to do that -- the ignoring. I don't think that that is the person I want to be.

Midnight Bike Ride

Say good-bye to your friend at Grand Army Plaza; the grand piano is gone from the stone gazebo. You've been to see the neuroscientist speak and there are things to think about that can't be properly considered indoors.

"Imagine a football field, filled with a rainforest. Each branch is the width of a hair. That is something like the complexity of your mind," said the neuroscientist to the crowd.

Later he said, "the data we will compile will be more than the project to map the skies."

"Your inner starscape is quite complicated," he said.

A word like "starscape" can't be brought indoors, so you say good-bye to your friend by the absent piano and bike off around the plaza.

Cruise out down Vanderbilt and gain momentum; rolling stops at the lights. Then ratchet up the gears and push your way back up to speed as you descend past the shuttered shops.

It takes 10 minutes or so to gain the ascent to the Manhattan Bridge. The slope begins blocks away, by the apartment houses that always have a group of people howling around a set of speakers. Once, someone threw a basketball in front of your tires, but tonight they laugh and no one pays you any mind.

The men in the fancy biking gear pass you from time to time, calf muscles sliding up and down beneath their skin along tight tendons. Let them pass.

The bridge begins to lift you gently out of the city. The Jehovah's Witnesses' Watchtower goes by, glaring. Parking lots slide beneath you.

Slip the gears down and settle in to the pulse of moving up the bridge. The air cools and the East River opens up beneath you. Every pedal gains you a broader view of the city skyline, measured and complex. Lights on and lights off. Signifiers, some whose significations you know -- this building, that building -- some which are mysteries. Some which may not signify anything except to the people within, with their hands on the light switches.

Up this high over the water, this late, it is possible to feel both alone and together, each in the most satisfying way. The lights blaze out from the rooms filled with thoughts. Every small spot of light reaches out to you and repeats, "I am here, I am here."

The cars rumble on the raised roadway above you. If you stopped for a moment, you could feel the bridge shake. But you don't.

The D train clatters along beside the bike track. Returning to Brooklyn, you can race it to the land. Once, you kept pace for nearly three quarters of the bridge. There was an old man in a fedora leaning against the window, and you kept your eyes on that hat as the speed brought you closer and closer to giddiness.

In this direction though, towards Manhattan, you meet the trains head on and they pass quickly, screaming vessels filled with ruminations, and newspaper articles, and shopping lists, and conversations whispered and yelled.

And as the bridge lifts you up, you are lifted by this tide: the lights on and off, the heavy cars, the minds on rails.

On the bike path, though, you are alone with the air, and your starscape mind. The East River moves beneath you. From this height, in this darkness, it seems stately and silver.

As you pass the apex, you move up through the gears and push the bike faster. Soon you catch the descent and your momentum grows.

The overhead lights are spaced a few meters apart. As you pass under and beyond each one, you see your shadow appear before you, poised as if jumping, delicate, one leg raised. And you move faster, and the shadow self lengthens, and fades. You, dancing larger, leaping further, until suddenly you disappear; mirror self pulled back to substance, only to appear again, as if drawn back like Peter Pan's needle-pointed shadow, to begin growing and pulling away again under the glare of the next light.

Coast down. Gain speed. Ignore the bumps, take them bravely. Square your shoulders and curve your back, and feel the wind filling your torso like a sail. Keep your eyes on the skyline.

If a single mind is like a rainforest, what is a city like this? If a mind is a starscape, then how many universes exist here, where the lights go on and off, and each one is unique?

Swing down off the bridge and up into the East Village. Catch the snippets of conversation on the street. Sit down at a cafe, order a beer, and pull out your notebook. Write down what you can of the feelings you've had -- keep what you can. Time looks slow and stately, even silver, from afar. But when you're in it, it's far too fast and far too murky. So catch what you can, there in the middle of the night.

Sardines

I was at the Monterey Aquarium a few weeks back and decided I really, truly love sardines (the live kind):




Schools of fish are fascinating and beautiful to watch. Certain kinds of fish have an instinct to school, but it's not entirely effortless. Changes of light affect their ability to school, so vision is involved. But the most interesting aspect, to me, is something called the lateral line -- a sensitive area on the sides of the fish that allow them to detect heat and pressure changes from their neighbors, giving them a constant read on their position in the group. This is how the movements of a school can be so quick, with all of the fish reacting instantaneously.

The individuals within the school have two competing needs: to be on the inside of the school, where they are the most protected from predators; and to be on the outside, where there is more oxygen available. And so they weave in and out as they swim, pursuing their own goals, but with an overarching awareness of the group they are a part of and their role within it.

I always wanted to be a fish like that: getting air, getting comfort, never straying too far. But I'm usually halfway across the ocean before I notice I've gotten out of synch. By that time it's generally best to just swim on. And I've found that if you go for long enough, you always find your way back into one school or another.

I love you, New York

There are few things as intimate as a subway ride.

In the veins of the city, we as strangers share our most quiet moments. We relax into ourselves. As Virginia Woolf described the relief of solitude in "To the Lighthouse,"

For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of–to think; well, not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.

The incredible beauty of a subway ride is that we all, as strangers, share a silent agreement to allow each other to be visible and invisible at once. It is an aloneness that is different from withdrawing and shutting oneself away. Instead, sitting comfortably in our own cores of darkness, we keep the world in our gaze. And from that vantage point, a deeper kind of compassion is possible.

In this shared solitude, there is little to judge in others because their being requires nothing from you. You can let them all wash around and past you: the loud, flirting teenagers; the little girl swinging from the bars like a gymnast; the little boy watching her quietly and intelligently; the nearly-sleeping woman; the man checking his phone repeatedly even though there is no signal here. All that is required of you is to be there with them, and let them be.

It is impossible to ignore the mystery of other people's lives when you live in this city. You talk to five strangers a day at the least; five more who verge somewhere between acquaintance and stranger. At every moment, you are surrounded by people with names that you will never know. It puts the wonder in you. If you start imagining ideas as clouds of words, you realize that you would never be able to move in a city this thick with human thought. If you visualize love as threads tying one person to another, you realize that you are moving improbably through the most layered cloth.

Every time you walk down the street or board a bus, you feel how deserving people are of your effort to understand them. Their faces tell you that their lives are as thick as yours, because they are, for the moment, not caught up in the effort of mirroring your ideas back at you. The way they hold themselves and the things that they hold show you how complex their worlds are, as complex as yours and probably more so.

Even the places and the objects are full of human meaning. There is nowhere that you can find that is not significant to someone, living or dead. If you start to imagine the layers of attachment, it can become unfathomable. The very same building is the spot where one person fell in love, where another lost someone, where another tripped and broke the grocery bag. In a landscape so full of meaning, you don't even need to have your own connection to a thing to feel its importance. It can be important to you just because of the surety that is has been important to so many others.

And how many others! People different in so many ways that it's like looking through a prism. Even the insecure can hide their weakness here, because you can't look at a person and tell what race they're running.

I know there are dark sides to it. There are the materialistic, and the vain, and the shallow. The man I met who I asked why he decided to pursue his particular line of work, and he looked at me like I was crazy and said, "So I could make money." The people who can't explain satisfactorily what the company they work for does, exactly. The women with the purses that cost as much as a semester's tuition at a private university. The club kids who think that social networking is a worthy way to spend all of one's time. But I love that there's room for that too, here, that there's room for everyone. I don't understand these people, but New York challenges me to try. It doesn't allow me to hide from things I find foreign. It doesn't allow anyone to hide from anything without paying a huge premium for it.

And if I had the time, I would ride the subway for hours for that crazy combination of the strange and the intimate. I would ride it in loops, just watching the people come on and get off, have their private thoughts and look out at the public world. Recently I saw a woman cry, as silently as she could, with a hand lightly over her eyes, across from me on the subway. Just seeing the way that the people around her tensed up with compassion, glancing towards her now and then to see whether they should say something or let her be, reaffirmed to me how good people truly are. It was not indifference. I watched it, and I saw that it was not. It was respect. It was a group of people present as a woman hit a sharp point in her life, and respecting her right to either visibility or invisibility. I know you won't believe me, but that is what I saw in people's faces.

Maybe I'll make the time for that endless subway ride. Because I'm going to have to leave, and I need to take my leave well. A person's life isn't just one story, it's many stories, and sometimes those stories don't fit together the way they should. Leaving here is going to break my heart, because I've never loved a city as much or as long as I've loved New York. But there's another plot line and it says I'm out of here in August. New York, I love you. I'll see you again.

A note on sad blog posts

Emotions take up space in your life, and if you let them, they'll do it without compensating you in any way. They can be loafers who hang around, paying no rent, taking up your mental energy.

I'm an emotional person, and as such I believe strongly in making my emotions work in exchange for the space they use.

For instance, take anger. Anger is an excellent worker -- you can use it to get a good workout, or to give your apartment a good cleaning.

And sadness, I find, is a good writer. I like the imagery that sad thoughts create. And I like to share them, because often I'll hear from people who had some recognition and felt companionship with my words.

So don't worry about me and my sad blog posts. If it were something truly awful, I'd be protecting it and hiding it away. If it's up in the blog, it's because I've been thinking and thought I had something to say that might make sense to others.

Hugs to you! I'm very happy these days, and I'm sure happiness will do some writing for me, too.....it's just that melancholy seeks visual expression, and sometimes I like the ideas that I find there.

Adult children of divorce

This is the way that I think of families, after a great deal of thought: I think of individuals, standing near one another, tied together with string. Great amounts of string, all different colors. From my arm, to your leg, to his ear, to her wrist, back again around my waist and curling around your ankle. One line of purple yarn; one of turquoise sewing thread; yellow macrame floss from her nose to the tips of his hair.

Each of these pieces of string and thread and rope are the stories that everyone knows but repeats anyway, for the joy of it, without someone saying "Oh yes, you've told this one before." They are the rituals and repeated behaviors that comfort everyone. They are even the teasing and sometimes the bickering, the things that can be said safely. Every little bit of shared, recognized behavior, goes into the knotted mess of associations that is a family.

There are two major losses that can occur in this arrangement. One is the worst: the loss of a person. The other is lesser: the loss of the unit. I've experienced both in the last few years, but I want to talk about the second right now.

I suppose I want to talk about it because, as an adult, one does not seem to be expected to feel very much about it. There's quite a lot of information out there about what a child of divorce may experience. There is not very much, or at least not very much that rings true, about what an adult child of divorce thinks and feels. There's even less about what all of us adults experience again and again when we lose the assumed families we create for ourselves. The fact of the matter is that the loss, though different for an adult than for a child, is there.

When a family is taken apart, the people remain intact. It's those strings that take the damage. Imagine great hands pulling the people, like dolls, away from one another. The strings snap, tear, unravel. The remnants will remain attached to whichever person was tied most strongly to them, but there's no longer anything at the other end.

When a child loses their family, we all recognize that they are experiencing something that will remake them. They have no independent agency in the adult world. They will have to change habits, routines, likely even homes. Beyond this, they have to try to apply a child's understanding of the world to adult problems.

As an adult, we have our own lives and our own agency to return to. The dissolution of a family can't force an adult to live in a city they don't want to live in, or spend half of their week in one home and half in another. It's a better deal, I'm fairly certain, and clearly a different one. But it doesn't mean that an adult doesn't feel the ripping of those threads. And an adult is acutely aware of all of those remnants tied to their limbs, the ones that were once a source of reassurance but have become annoyances, reminders of loss.

I am, of course, only speaking for myself. Blogs are not known for their sociological research. But I feel somewhat authoritative on the matter because I have had the experience of losing two families in as many years.

When my family, the real one, came apart, I happened to be volunteering with an organization in an arrangement that caused me to live with my coworkers in order to share expenses. I had already become fairly attached to the people around me, but the situation thrust me into it further. When I got the phone call from my parents, I was days away from leaving the country for work. I returned as fast as I could, but not soon enough to say good-bye to my childhood home. By the time I was able to get back, it was sold, all the family's things sorted through, divided, perhaps donated in my absence.

I suppose if I'd been thinking clearly, I would have cancelled the trip and gone back. Things are just things, but also, they're more than that. A space is just a space, but it is also a home. When I allow myself to think of that house, it's only to imagine what the floorboards felt like on my bare feet -- first, little feet, later larger. I think about what the bathroom counters felt like when I was almost the same height as them, and then later when they only came to my waist. I think about the little change in level between the different floorings. I allow myself to see the furniture, the way it was laid out, but I stop there. I don't open drawers. I don't ever think about the small, incidental things that were important to me but probably didn't make it into any storage units. And just like I don't think about those things, I try not to think about the rituals that I will no longer take part in. I try not to think about the photos that are suddenly dated. I try not to think about the stories that used to be the surest way to a shared laugh and are now somewhat awkward, melancholy.

I didn't fly home to say good-bye to those things. I don't think I realized it as a possibility. Instead I laid low and tried to do what adults do: get on with my life. In my case, that life included a large group of friends and roommates. It was like a new family to replace the one I'd lost. To help me forget those remnants of strings around my ankles, I had new ones tying me to a brand new set of people.

I won't create false suspense; of course the new strings were pulled apart, too, about a year later. It is surprising to me how the two events feel somewhat similar, despite their completely different levels of importance. I imagine that, if you are able to anticipate the change, it's possible that at least some of these threads you are able to untie, freeing yourself from them deliberately. If you don't see it coming, though, they stay knotted to you with dangling ends. In several years I know the ones that will still be attached to me are the ones from my real family, but in the aftermath of the ripping apart, I can still feel the sting from the second set.

But what? The options are to resist every tying strings again, for the ultimate protection against damage....or, of course the only real option, to go on offering up my wrists and ankles to knots. It's life, and there are no pat morals. We keep doing the things that we do, because to stop would be to die while living. And by the time we reach old age we may be entirely obscured by the knotted ends of strings that tie to nothing, but at least then we know that we lived, that we loved, that we tried.