All the World

The plan is to write a new post every week, finding the blog’s center as I go. I’d started yesterday a piece about my health anxiety, which has a long history that I’d like to explore as it relates to this, um, moment in time. 

But then I got furloughed. I’m a remote contract worker, like so many of us are, especially so many of us moms, especially so many of us writers who are moms. And the work just dried up. The niche my company operates in is actually kind of recession-proof, but as we all know this isn’t just any recession. I am grateful to my employer for contacting me quickly, speaking kindly, and laying out my options clearly. Etc.

That doesn’t change how shitty I feel. The money is a little stressful, but unemployment will make it ok. It wouldn’t be ok just 2 months ago, but now gig workers are included in unemployment so, it’s ok. These are just the circumstances.

I should probably just stop there. 

Given the obvious: there are many people for whom this is NOT okay. I’ve been those people. My parents have been those people. During the aftermath of the 2008 recession, my parents in rural Massachusetts didn’t have hot water for an entire winter. My father surreptitiously slept overnight at his job so they could save on gas. I tear up every time I look at our Costco pack of toilet paper, because for my entire life up until I started working as a Lecturer at UC Irvine when I was 30, which was around the same time my parents finally found some economic stability too, no one in my family could afford more than one or two separately-wrapped rolls of Scott at a time.

The fact is, too, that even relative poverty is deeply scarring. Just like going to school, at a time when my parents were both employed, at one of the top high schools in the country. This alone is incredible privilege. BUT. I would hide in the backseat when my dad pulled into the parking lot, in the beater with the squealing belt. BUT I could go to this school because he worked there, where kids were driven in Bentleys until they were given their Porsches, in a blue polyester polo shirt, maintaining the grounds. 

And BUT. I am almost 40. The job itself paid much less than I should get paid, as an Ivy League graduate with a masters degree who’s…almost 40. I’ve been trying to publish a book for almost 10 years, gaining little traction in the career I chose 20 years ago. 

So last night, I felt expendable, invisible. Subpar and shitty. Disposable. Just like I’m supposed to feel in late capitalism, really. Unless I’m one of the captains (why are you not one of the captains? asks my vicious ambitious self).

In so many ways, we are simply products of our circumstances. Isn’t it the most frustrating thing in the world, to realize how bound we are to them? (And then again, isn’t it the most humbling)?

I told this to a group of women writers I’m in on Facebook. Here’s where I was last night:

I want to like radically accept my vulnerability or totally re-imagine my life or something but instead I’m just eating pierogi and drinking wine and watching TV as per usual. I can’t help thinking about all of my unfinished writing projects and my seemingly totally unmet potential as a writer and how much my depression and other mental health issues have restricted me in life and just...I feel like such a loser. 

On top of it I wrote my first blog post this week and not even my husband has said anything about it which makes me feel like it was absolute crap. 

Thank you for attending my pity party. I did still submit poems to 2 places today, at least.

Advice or inspiration regarding a writer’s midlife crisis is welcome.

The responses I got to this post were typically incredible for this group, which is one of the least braggy, most genuine, most vulnerable groups I’m in (for the uninitiated, there are A LOT of groups for women writers on Facebook). I felt seen, heard, and genuinely of worth. I woke up this morning feeling, again, like my voice was worth it. I wouldn’t be writing now if I had stopped myself from posting in that group last night (which I’ve done many times before, inveterate lurker that I am). Isn’t it wonderful how formed we are by our circumstances?

The other thing that makes it easier: H. I was nursing him to sleep last night and crying silently. It was dark and I thought I had cover, but then in the semi-dark I saw him looking at me, confused, eyebrows furrowed. So, I stopped. I don’t cry as much as I used to, and I thought it was a side effect of the Zoloft I’ve been on since my third trimester. But maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s how every moment of my life now, even “down time”, I’m reporting for work. I’m completely beholden to his needs, his routines. 

This morning was easier for it, at least. I woke up, made him his favorite veggie sausages (“chachees! chachees!”), and am forced into attention by his needs: grabbing him off the dining room table, fending off his feet in my face as he clambers on me, investigating the cause for his latest complaint from the other room. I can barely remember, but there was a time when here’s how this would have gone. Last night I would be on my couch, drinking far too much, eating far too much, waking with a hangover and not getting up until noon, and generally just…

Actually I can’t. I really can’t recall. And it doesn’t matter. Because here comes H, disconsolate because he isn’t in the shower with daddy right now. And here he comes again, crying that his Lego doggie…is a Lego doggie? And here we go, negotiating consent and autonomy as he insists on nursing.

And here we go reading the favorite book of the moment, All the World. It tells us “Slip, trip, stumble, fall / Tip the bucket, spill it all / Better luck another day / All the world goes round this way.”

And here we go out, for a walk, where H will strain past the boundaries of our neighborhood. The heart never constrained to its circumstances. Looking for spring.