My life has been moving in a certain direction over the last several years, although I didn’t recognize it till recently.
It’s a relief to realize there is a direction. To be honest, for a few years now, I’ve been worrying that I appear shiftless. My various pursuits seem unrelated at first glance, and I fret that that makes me look unfocused. Unfocused is not the way you want to look when you’re seeking new employment!
But the pieces of my life are related.
Let me recap my last few years so you can see what I mean.
Four years ago in 2011, I turned down a good job and decided to begin writing. It was your typical brave and foolhardy thing to do. It was a departure from the trajectory my life had been on, and was therefore the beginning of my seeming shiftlessness. I couldn’t pinpoint exactly why, but my heart was telling me to write—not later, but now—and I believe in following your heart.
So in 2012, I did begin to write…but then my father came down with stomach cancer and I put aside my writing to take care of him. By 2013, after he’d died, many things had changed. I was drained. I stepped down from the organization I’d been leading and from other hobbies. I wanted to curl up into a ball, and in some ways I did for a while. It was healing.
I didn’t go back to writing right away. Again my life’s trajectory had been altered; there were now several other things I wanted to do.
Here’s where I start to look really flighty.
It had been almost two years since I’d first turned down the job to Become a Writer. After Dad’s cancer, you’d think I wouldn’t want to delay that writing dream any further, but delay it I did. As Dad lay dying, various little tasks had risen up and nagged me, and in 2013 they suddenly felt urgent, again for reasons I didn’t understand.
One: I wanted to digitize all my journals. I have thousands of pages that I’ve written since I was seven, and I’ve always been afraid of losing them to fire or flood. Losing my journals would be like losing a limb: they contain essential pieces of me.
I unbound my spiral notebooks, ran the pages through a scanner, and rebound them. I made a backup digital copy for good measure and shipped it to my mom’s house in Portland, so that even if my whole building burned down or the city of Madison was destroyed—by a bomb, say, or a tornado—my journals would still live on. It gave me and my paranoia a feeling of deep relief.
Two: I made a timeline of Dad’s life. I didn’t yet know I’d be writing about him, but I knew that my memories of him were all fragmented and jumbled together. He had lived in dozens of places: apartments, friends’ basements, trailers, rehab programs, halfway houses. I couldn’t remember which of my memories were tied to which places, or how old I’d been when each event occurred.
I combed through my journals, talked to my sister and mom, and emailed back and forth with Dad’s brothers, sisters, and friends. Each time I pinpointed something in a place and time, I felt that same deep, abiding relief. I developed a detailed timeline—it grew to 40 typed pages—until at last, I felt I’d captured what had happened to Dad. I now understood him better than ever before, and I understood myself better, too.
Three: I caught up. I answered emails, purged my accumulated junk. I ticked off items on my to-do list until I got to the very, very end, the stuff I thought I’d realistically never do. I got to the last emails in my Inbox, which at one point was even emblazoned with the satisfying message that Your Inbox folder is empty.
It was amazing, this gift of time.
After a month or two of these projects had passed, I picked my writing back up at last. But I discovered quickly that I needed to write about Dad instead of my travels, which had been my original plan. So instead of writing about my years in Africa, I found myself writing about my entire life, from childhood up to the present.
I hadn’t known my Dad timeline would lead to this—that I had actually been conducting research for a book. But that was exactly what I’d been doing.
As I wrote, I came to understand just how much my life, past and present, was riddled with fractures. I felt myself to be broken into many separate, discreet pieces.
The first fracturing came at age seven, when my young world was split down the middle between Mom and Dad in the divorce. The two of them came to live very different lives, with my sister and me trying to fit into both realities at once.
At Mom’s, we were always comfortable. We had a big house, a cherry tree in the front yard, new clothes for school, gymnastics and theater and fiddle classes, and a colorful folk community full of contra dancing and music festivals. Men and women often showed up to our house with mandolins, accordians, and fiddles to jam with Mom and our stepdad in the evenings. Life with Mom was full and vibrant and safe.
Every other week, then later every other weekend, Dad picked us up in broken-down cars that smelled of cigarettes. We stayed with him in basement rooms in his halfway houses, my sister and me on his bed and him in a sleeping bag on the floor. Or we all camped in his friend’s rec room when he lived in places we weren’t allowed to visit.
Our weekends with Dad were filled with videos in his basement rooms, and with swimming, mall visits, and eating out, because we three couldn’t ever be alone together in the places where he lived, because there were always other people around.
Dad’s halfway houses were full of men with broken, hard, tragic lives. Men missing teeth because of meth addiction. Men who had been homeless and some who would be homeless again. Men whose eyes were full of pain and wisdom.
Dad was touchy and frustrated and always poor, and bitter about being poor. After he died, we discovered sheets of paper where he had painstakingly calculated how much each potential Christmas present would cost if he bought it for us, struggling to find the best gifts he could get within his meager budget.
It must have been all my back-and-forth that made me comfortable being different people at once. I became a shape-shifter. My fracturedness increased in middle school, when I developed an intense shyness and concocted various schemes to hide it. I became adept at reinventing myself.
I was first a devoted actress in a community theater, starring in musicals and plays while refusing to speak in class at school. I relished my secret: that after school I, the shyest kid in class, was singing and dancing on a stage.
Later, in high school and college, I abandoned theater to become a dedicated martial artist, working my way up to brown belt in two different styles of kung fu, sleeping on a bedroll on the floor with no mattress, sneaking out to practice in the shadows around campus while other students hung out at parties.
Then I abandoned kung fu to pursue a life in Africa. I tried my best to become a Tanzanian villager in the Peace Corps, or at least a gung-ho international development worker, wearing long skirts and a nose piercing and colorful bandanas on my head.
By the time Dad died, I had morphed once again, carving out a life for myself as a well-adjusted young Midwestern scientist.
Settled and well-adjusted as I finally was, in Madison I nevertheless felt fragmented, as well.
It wasn’t just all the former lives I’d left behind. In Madison, there were several different versions of me scattered around in the present tense.
I had two homes, Madison and Portland. I resisted rooting myself fully in the one place, because my family was in the other. There was me the professional scientist at the Department of Natural Resources, me the contemplative new writer at my desk overlooking the lake, and me the energetic community organizer who had only recently stepped down from political dialogue work and media attention.
So by 2013, while writing my book about Dad and my life, I felt like one of the aquatic insects I had studied in my job, the kind that molts many times before finally sprouting wings and emerging from the water. Each of my lives had involved a different costume, place, and set of friends. I was an expert at starting over and bringing only me with me each time.
But all my internal pieces were becoming overwhelming. It felt good to pause, in 2013. Writing, I could reflect on all the different me’s I had been.
Only now do I see how that pausing was actually a form of movement—of moving forward in my life. Looking back, I can see clearly that what I needed was to finally heal my internal fractures by making sense out of them, out of myself.
This is the direction I’ve been moving since 2011: toward wholeness. Toward integration. I needed to gather up the many pieces of my life into a single, rounded me who encompasses all of them.
This, I now understand, was why I needed to write instead of taking the job in 2011. I sensed I had unfinished business from my past. When Dad died, I discovered even more unfinished business: the need to make sense out of a brokenness that pervaded my whole life, my family.
I wasn’t ready to move forward with my career just yet, because I had the nagging sense that I’d forgotten something. It was like cruising down the freeway and suddenly realizing the tailgate is ajar. I needed to put on the brakes, or I feared the many pieces of myself might fall away and be lost along the roadside, and I’d lose the chance to examine them and learn from them, forever.
Last year, in 2014, I followed my heart again and moved Ron and myself back to Portland. Again I didn’t fully understand why, but now I do, and I am so grateful.
In this move, I’m not shape-shifting and abandoning an old me, as I did so many times as a young woman. This time I am returning. Reuniting.
Being here in Portland feels right. More tension inside me has fallen away, like it did when I digitized my journals. I’m near my family again. I live in the green hills of my childhood, the place that has always been my primary home among homes, the place of my deepest heart. This city is familiar. I know my way around here, still better than I ever did in Madison. I feel in place here. Comfortable.
I’m looking for a job, and the process of looking is what made me reflect on the last several years enough to write about them. I’m different, now, from who I was the last time I worked full time.
I used to think of my work self as separate from my writing self, which again was separate from my family self and all my other selves. But I resist that separation now. As I sit in these intense interview rooms and write these earnest cover letters, I don’t want to return to a fragmented life.
I feel fuller, more whole, than I’ve felt since I was a small child. I’m tired of being different people, gauging what’s required, and fitting myself into it. I want to let that talent go, and instead keep with me this new feeling, the feeling of wholeness.
It’s about authenticity.
I’m still figuring out who exactly I am when you put all of me together: the scientist who loves ecology, the writer who reflects on relationships, the daughter, the sister, the wife. But as I move forward, I treasure all these many pieces I’ve gathered up into my arms. I don’t want to drop any of them ever again.
