The wretched irony is, when I was living it, I may have yearned to be where I am now—alone at a campsite on this lake. But today I wish the kids were here again, nestled in the tent with me. I wish the friends I hadn’t seen in years and who happened to be camping across the lake were going to ride over on their boat and pick us up as they did then—friends I suspect I lost in my divorce.

But it's just me in this new, two-year-old life. In dog years, that’s 14. Like my son is now. Feels about right.

I don't like this loneliness, regret, and sorrow. I wish I’d gotten to keep my family, even while knowing it would have cost me my life. In some ways, it already had.

So here I am now on my solo journey. Totally comfortable camping here, yet lonely. Confident but craving company, good company, loving company. I feel so alone, in need of new friends and wanting a partner too.

My tea bag this morning says the only constant is change. Yesterday, driving here, my solar plexus bore loneliness. I put my hand over it, held it there until the sensation shifted to a tightness in my throat: fear and sadness and fear of always being sad. This morning, however, on the shore of the lake, sun shining brightly, wildfire smoke minimal, I’m neither lonely nor scared nor sad. Sandwiched between families on either side of me, I still miss the feeling of being part of a family, but I recognize that I gained too. I gained me. I lost a husband and a family, but I got myself.

The wind is picking up, and little waves are rolling in. The sound soothes. How could it not?

*

“Shoutout to my ex,” the song by Little Mix goes, “you’re really quite the man / you made my heart break, and that made me who I am.”

While I miss the life I don't get to live anymore, the one in which I’m a member of a family of four, I'm grateful to have had it, and sometimes, now and then, like right now beside the lake, I'm grateful for this version of my life too. Because I get to live. And right now I'm on a break from the loneliness and sadness that plague me nearly every time I slow down. However, nothing is permanent: not a feeling, not a marriage, not the smoke in the sky or this particular sound of the waves.

Sometimes I'm still ashamed to be me. The ground was probably made fertile for this feeling during my childhood, but it was my former husband who tended the seeds, encouraging them to grow into weeds that choked me for years. Although I'm no longer struck by an overwhelming sense of shame at being alive, sometimes a wisp of the feeling comes back in unexpected moments, and I remember. I remember everything.

I remember being a stay-at-home mom so desperate for reprieve and mentally unwell that I begged him one morning to stay home from work, a day he could have gotten paid for anyway. He said nothing, just walked out.

I remember the time I sat on the kitchen floor crying and telling him I wished I was dead.

“You need to figure something out,” he said before turning away.

Sometimes there are moments in relationships that there’s no coming back from. They show us just how little the other person cares for or considers us. They make us feel diminished, like we don’t matter, like we should be ashamed to exist, and with enough of them we start to believe it.

Rebuilding after divorce is, for me, in part an exercise in exorcising that shame. It happens when I allow myself to mourn the past and the future I won’t have and to acknowledge that what felt like shitty treatment was, in fact, shitty treatment. It happens when I own my part: staying for as long as I did, which is embarrassing to my current self, but my swift cutoff game now is making up for it, as is the ongoing process of reconnecting with who I am. It’s hard to feel shame for existing when I remember how much I like myself and how satisfying a time I can have with myself.

*
I finish my tea and consider what to do next. Do I want to inflate the SUP and take it out on the lake or explore the park’s short trail system? I choose the trails.

Hiking along, looking at fox and coyote—and was that bear?—scat, I think about what my decision to hike instead of paddle says about me. Had I been next to the ocean (at least a warm-ish one with few waves) instead of a Montana lake, I would have chosen to paddle. My heart and my body belong to the ocean. Second to that, I belong to a trail through grassy slopes and open woods, so that’s what I chose.

Thin-slicing myself like this shows me the intricacies of my personality, my preferences, my desires, minute details buried for decades under the weight of a marriage. As I (re-) meet myself in these ways, I like myself more, and the loneliness, grief, and shame fade. I look forward, not back, spotting the fox scat from farther out now, feeling my awareness of my surroundings buoy me instead of the churnings of my mind pulling me asunder.

Don’t go away, I tell myself when my mind starts to loop. Stay right here, here on my scat walk.

Oh, the oddness of being a human observing animal shit.

As I walk, I wonder if there are any great memories in which I’m by myself. Or are my best memories only ones in which I’m happily with others? After consideration, it seems my best memories of being alone aren’t ones in which I felt happiness or joy but rather strength, fortitude, determination, or really, simply, the need to survive and meeting that need.

Alone is where I go to build myself up. Together is the by-product of that building.

Alone, writing this, requires scraping out my insides and putting the bloody lump of them on the screen before you. Maybe spraying them with a hose a bit to make them slightly cleaner. But it’s a solo journey. One that brings not joy or happiness, but a cleansing and respite, a creation revealing what’s felt trapped on the inside, proof of my having lived.

And living is change, and living is sorrow, and living is sorrow that changes to joy or happiness or peace or satisfaction before changing back to sorrow.

My babies are high schoolers now. In a year, one will be starting her own one unique life. I’ll mourn what was and what will never be and what will never be again. And I’ll camp and paddle and hike and remember who I am and that I got to be here for all of it.

“I’m in a casual relationship with jobs,” I said to a friend the other night.

I’d never thought about it before I said it, but it’s true. I give each one my all while I’m with it, but I don’t want to be with any of them forever. Even if I were paid a million dollars a year, I wouldn’t want to commit to working for someone else every day, year after year.

Now, as my main spring/summer job winds down, as I head to an interview for a fall job, and as I consider my options for winter work, I wonder if I’ve put in place a way of living/working that I’ve wanted for so long.

My first job after college was seasonal, and I did it for one fall season, 3.5 months. My second was a one-year AmeriCorps term. Then, following a brief period at a daycare, I took another seasonal job, in California, one in which my coworkers, almost all 20-somethings, were devoted to a lifestyle of seasonal work. Outdoor education in the fall and spring, ski resort work in the winter, outdoor guiding in the summer, and maybe taking a season off in there somewhere and traveling for a few months. I envied them. Living in their vehicles, with no real roots, no rent or mortgage, most single, but some with partners with whom they lived this life. On the banks of the Colorado River or beneath a Joshua tree, I yearned for the same. However, I had a husband and a rented home back in Montana, and he’d likely never uproot his life or the business he was building to follow my whims.

I now have two high schoolers, so I’m not going anywhere, but I do have the opportunity to move with my natural, and sometimes seemingly subconscious, desires from one type of work to another throughout the year. I can’t say this arrangement will be permanent—it likely won’t—but I can see how it opens me to more and more possibilities for the future, especially in four short years when I become an empty nester.

This is what I’m building for myself. It’s unconventional, especially for an almost 50-year-old, and I’ve long wondered if something is broken in me, if I’m missing some element that makes me want to commit to a job long-term, but this arrangement suits me just right.

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I cried when I saw the blue patio table umbrella.

It belongs to my new nextdoor neighbors, a young couple I haven’t met yet. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is the first place they’ve lived together.

They must have just bought the umbrella this morning. It wasn’t out there last night when I closed my bedroom curtains.

It’s bright blue, yet to be faded by the sun. Like the sky on the day my daughter was born. Like the shade I imagine my dad having in mind when, on his deathbed, I asked him what his favorite color was and he said blue.

If hope has a color, I think it’s blue.

Sadness’s color.

I hate hope. It makes me sad, so blue is fitting.

Bright blue though, like hope that hasn’t soured, hasn’t become a yearning we’re doomed to live in, and is instead one shiny with promise.

I’ve spent hours today scouring the local community events page, Facebook groups, and Parks & Recreation’s website looking for things to join. Summer here is so fleeting, and I’m alone, needing new friends and to participate in activities I can’t or don’t want to by myself.

I’ve been thinking about that lately: What are the things I’d enjoy on my own but have been too afraid to try? What are the things I enjoy but would rather live without than do alone? What are the things I could do on my own and might even enjoy but would rather do with others?

Because my life is alone. Just me. I have two kids, but they’re teenagers who have their own lives and are only with me half the time anyway. Two years and three months ago, I was flung out of the nest of a family of four and into the life of a single person and pseudo-empty nester.

The umbrella made me cry. Patio table umbrellas are made for multiple people to gather under, not just one. Of course, one can, but the elements of summer—sunshine and an outdoor table call for the gathering of loved ones.

I drove an hour out of town to the stateline at a mountain pass yesterday. Walked around the interpretive path behind the visitor center there where, long ago, I worked for one summer. Then on my way back, I stopped at a state park, walked by the creek. It was a forced outing. I made myself go do something out in the beautiful, short summer, for there is nowhere more beautiful than Montana in the summer.

I used to know most of the trails in the area. I couldn’t guess how many there were then—dozens, a hundred, who knows—and more have been built since then, but my mental map was well defined. I could trust myself to pick one, hike it, and make it back out, if not with my then-husband, then with our dog.

As I consider going for a hike now, I realize I don’t have that same confidence. I don’t know if it’s just the loss of the mental map, or if it’s something greater, like knowing that no one would know, or care, where I’d gone, and no one would notice if I didn’t make it home, until Sunday when my kids would come back for the week.

Single life has been nothing like it is for the women in movies who live in their cute little apartments and have a close group of friends who’d smell their disappearance and search them out immediately. Of all the fantasies movies sell, that’s the one that hurts me the most.

When I was married, I found it so appealing. I thought this path not taken might be better than the one I did take. Now, I have a black-and-white version of it, far less warm and colorful than that depicted on the screen.

It’s hard to hold on to both the realization that this is my life now and the hope and of it being better in the future because what if it’s not? What if this is as good as it gets?

I know it’s time to again let go of the future I imagined. Just as when ending my marriage, I had to free myself of the vision of spending a long life with the man I’d built one with, I must free myself of the burdensome vision of the single woman with the tight knit group of friends or of having a partner again. Not because these things aren’t possible, but because my grip on the idea of them is hurting me. A friend once pointed out that we can’t receive when our fists are clenched trying to hold on to something, and that’s how I’ve been living.

I remember sitting in the dark in the Target parking lot before a soccer game I was playing in deciding it was time to let of the hope that my marriage could be better. I’d already hit my breaking point, but I hadn’t yet started owning the thought that I was getting divorced. I texted a friend and told her. That helped loosen my grip on hope.

Months later, under the moon, I burned letters he’d written me early in our relationship, yet another phase of letting go.

It occurs to me now, that we must continually shift the focus of our hope. We’ll never be rid of hope, and we wouldn’t want to be; it keeps us alive. But we must update its focus to that which is the healthiest for us at the time. So letting go of hope for my future to look a certain way means shifting to hope—and not even hope, but belief—that it can be better than I ever imagined. This is the most freeing thought I have access to in this moment, far more freeing than being hopeful of a specific outcome, which is, in fact, not freeing at all.

My life can be better than I ever imagined.

Thinking this, the blue umbrella loses its significance and becomes, once again, just a blue umbrella.

My life can be better than I ever imagined.

Our lives can be better than we ever imagined.

I wish this for all of us who are struggling right now.

Hope starts bright blue then fades with disappointment. Redirecting hope refreshes the dye while protecting us from burns.

We can’t rebuild our lives in one fell swoop. Although I wish we could, it has to be incrementally, toddling step by toddling step, putting in place pieces that may be temporary, stepping stones to the next piece, the next place. It means being okay with this being the way it goes, that everything is in flux, and nothing may stick, and we may not want it to anyway. It requires being open to growth, following our curiosity, and being uncomfortable and uncertain a lot of the time.

Two years ago, and in the midst of divorce, I started a part-time job that immediately became my sole source of joy in an otherwise terrible time. During my first two days of work, I interacted with members of Pearl Jam, including Eddie Vedder, who gave me a handful of guitar picks. On my second day, stationed near our then senator Jon Tester, I accidentally propositioned him with a comment about how if we were going to be spending the night together, meaning a few feet apart at the Pearl Jam show, I wanted to say hi. (He laughed. We took pictures.)

I wondered what magical life I’d arrived at or stumbled into. In the years since, the job has been less magical but has continued to bring me great joy, allowing me to see concerts and sporting events I wouldn’t otherwise.

Tonight, I’ll again be working at a concert in the stadium where Pearl Jam played. However, this time, instead of being a member of the event staff, I’ll be bartending for the company that serves drinks. Further, my daughter will be working with me, not as a bartender because she’s a year too young, but helping keep the bar stocked. The girl who for several years didn’t want to be seen in public with me will go to work with me.

It’s the minuteness of the things that go into rebuilding, the smallness of what constitutes a shift towards a better life that strikes me.

Outwardly, my life looks similar to what it did two years ago, but inwardly I’m worlds away.

I’m listening to Pearl Jam as I write this, trying to bring myself back to who I was then. I was still crying every day, and I remember a song about love or lost love nearly bringing me to tears. At a Tyler Childers concert I worked at two days later, I remember watching all the couples holding on to each other as he sang “All Your’n.” Again, I had to fight back tears, wondering how it was that I had no one to do that with, that the only person I wanted to do that with I never would again. Even now, I’m crying as I put myself back on that concrete, looking at the stage, looking at the crowd, looking at the couples.

But I’m okay. I fluctuate between exhaustion and loneliness, need to develop new friendships, have debt to pay, and my full-time job for the spring/summer is now only half-time, so I need to find another one, all of which feels overwhelming if I try to put it on my to-do list for this week, but I know it’s possible, over not days, but months and years.

There’s also the unyielding sense of wanting a partner. No matter how much I wish otherwise, and even if/when everything else in my life lines up, I don’t believe I’m going to be content without one. It’s almost embarrassing to admit, but I don’t want to lie to myself about that. Besides, I trust myself to choose well and not to choose anyone at all if there is never a healthy choice, no matter how sad that makes me.

Rebuilding is moving more towards oneself. It’s about the choices, activities, contributions, and people who support us in doing so. It’s ugly and messy and sometimes as hellish as divorce itself, but there’s unfathomable and indescribable power in it. To burn down one life and, by hand and without a blueprint, construct another is a massive undertaking. No wonder more people don’t do it, or only do it when it’s foisted upon us. But sometimes it’s the only choice we have because anything else would mean death.

Bold and strategic. Those are the first words that come to mind as the traits necessary for rebuilding. However, this doesn’t mean fear isn’t present or that obvious strategy doesn’t fall away at times for the inexplicable following of one’s curiosity or gut instinct. One has to be bold enough to look messy, unhinged, chaotic, reckless, or any of the other words used to cast women in a negative light. Because, for us, anything less than buttoned up is seen as unsuitable, no matter how necessary it is for our wellbeing. One also has to be strategic at times, in my case particularly meaning to get out of my own way. There really is only so much self-pitying one needs to do. Then we can look back less and look forward more.

I’ve believed for years that if I leap, the net will appear. It may be delusional, but in the way some people hold onto God, I hold onto this belief, and somehow it always works. The ship always rights itself. So delusion is another quality I’ll add to the list because it helps us broaden our imaginations, believe anything we dream up is possible, and do things we probably wouldn’t otherwise to get where we want to go. Delusion means believing big things are possible, but also that small things that don’t make sense or others wouldn’t approve of are the path to get there.

Tonight I’ll be slinging beers while Post Malone and Jelly Roll perform. Their stage will take up a significant portion of the football field. Mine is much smaller, existing only between my ears, but I step onto it day after day for the view it affords and as the platform from which I can build a new Ashley-sized world.

I think that’s the best any of the many of us in this situation can do.

I’ve been walking this path to the beach since the summer I was 14. Now we have golf carts we drive to the access points, but back then, back when my grandmother bought a house, which is now my mom’s, on this little island, walking was the only way to go.

The way was, and still is, suffocatingly hot in the summer, and sandspurs sometimes hitch rides on your skin, maybe even poking through your flip-flops. The path is public, and I get on it across the street from my mom’s house, follow it a block until it crosses a road, and then continue on it to the beach. The first part is shaded with scrub oaks, their dead leaves covering the sand, and then it opens up, unprotected from the sun.

I don’t walk this path every visit to the island, but probably once a year. What used to be a daily route during the week or so each summer we’d spend here, I now use far less frequently even though I spend far more time on the island.

Now I have my own house here, a little further from the beach, the only routes to it by road. I don’t walk but drive a golf cart or my truck and park it at the nearest access point, walk on the boardwalk to the off-white sand and Gulf waters.

I remember sitting on the beach by myself in the evenings as a teenager, thinking about boys and boyfriends and love. I didn’t know what it was like to be in love, and I’d never had a boyfriend, rarely even had a crush, but I thought about it a lot, as, I suppose, most of us do at that age.

In the past two and a half years, I’ve again been that girl on the beach thinking about love and relationships and boys. My thoughts are much more stress-inducing now, as my life experience far exceeds what I had as a teenager, but I’m still the same girl, still wanting, still yearning.

I was 17 and visiting my aunt and cousin when I dreamed a boy put his hand on my bare skin over my heart. I wanted his hand there. It was warm and comforting and loving. In all the years since, no moment has ever replicated that imagined level of tenderness and care.

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One of the strangest things about being a heterosexual woman who’s dating after divorce, and doing so in a world with dating apps, is how much I’ve thought about my appearance. I’m not thinking, Do I look good? or not any more than I thought that during my marriage, which probably wasn’t much. Rather, I’m wondering how other people view me, how my appearance situates me in society. Being thin, I have considered how people see or interact with me, but this is different. This is about my overall appearance and how desirable I am to men.

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I can probably count on two hands the number of times I’ve ridden in the passenger seat of a vehicle since separating from my ex. I’m almost always in the driver’s seat now.

It’s one of the many things I’ve gotten used to over the past two years. Another is that no one ever prepares a meal for me, except the fine folks at the various drive-thrus around town. I also wash every dish and item of clothing. (My kids no longer do chores. It’s like their consolation prize for having divorced parents.) I pump every tank of gas and am responsible for every oil change. I keep going and going, an adult without another person to share even some of the load.

If I were to ask for what I need right now, I wouldn’t know who to ask. I’m not sure what I’d ask for either.

After this week, I’ll be down a job. That will bring my total to three, and I’m very much looking forward to it. I’m merely existing now, but in a different way than when going through divorce. This is more robotic and far more physically exhausting than emotionally. I’ve worked until my body is strong but suffering: my right thumb is always a little swollen; my Achilles tendons are sore. I left work early today, came home, and slept. There’s never enough sleep, yet I rise again.

This is not the vision I had for my life. I’m living the effects of having spent so many years with an unhealthy man. (I started to write “in an unhealthy relationship,” but at this moment I prefer to aim the dagger at him.) I’m even too tired to read or write, the upside of which is that I’ve become clearer on how important having the energy to write is to me.

In four days I leave for vacation. It can’t come soon enough. I’ll be with my extended family at the beach. I’ll be at the house I own but don’t live in. I’ll take naps on the screened porch. I’ll feel like I’m where I belong.

Right now, otherwise, I don’t know where I belong. I encounter hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people a week through my various jobs, co-workers as well as members of the public. None of them are “mine,” and I’m not theirs. Besides my kids’, I’m not anybody’s. I’m not sure I even have friends in this town anymore. I have no shortage of acquaintances, even ones I really like, but friends? It doesn’t feel that way.

Having been so busy with and tired out by work, I haven’t had the time or energy to reach out to anyone, and no one is reaching out to me. It’s clarifying, and I’m not sad. It seems that one of the sicknesses of modern society is underinvesting in relationships, like we don’t want to make the effort to have people.

Of course, this is rampant among men who are “dating,” meaning looking for quick sex, but it also seems to be the case amongst people who might otherwise be friends, or might be closer friends than they are.

So I’m on my own.

I’ve been on one of the dating apps again recently, using it as a drug to zone out with. It’s highly effective in that regard, but it’s not the reason I’m here. I’m not here to wear myself out during the day, then zone myself out with meaningless chats at night. I can’t be.

So what do I want/need, and who do I tell?

I need rest. I need money. I need to be away from traffic and large crowds and music that’s piped in. I need nature. I need people who are mine and whose I am.

I was about to add that I need to express myself, but oddly, through the work I’ve been doing and despite its physical downsides, I have been. I’ve been expressing myself consistently. (But still holding back when it’s in everyone’s best interests, like when I want to tell a co-worker they’re being controlling or manipulative or so fucking dumb.)

My self-expression has been through following my gut, even when the path makes no sense, following what gives me joy, following what allows me to engage my body in challenging ways. And by cutting things off when it’s time, like the job I’ll leave after this week.

And who will I tell all this to?

I’ll tell you because you’ll hold it—which is, in a way, just telling me because I’m the only guaranteed reader and the person who needs to hear it most.

My brain is tired, and I feel a migraine coming on. I’m out of my medication, so put getting a refill on my list of needs.

I used to imagine crawling inside the most painful point of a migraine, which would be the inner corner of either eyebrow, and asking the pain what it needed. It always said the same thing: love.

For years I thought this meant the love of another person, in particular my then-husband, who didn’t seem to love or like me very much. When I got divorced, the migraines drastically decreased in frequency and intensity. They stopped being debilitating and life-altering and became just an annoyance I can live with, especially since I have drugs for them.

It was then that I realized the love they’d been calling for wasn’t love from my husband or anyone else. It was love from myself. Specifically, the kind of big, big love that we show ourselves when we leave a situation we’ve been in a long time but that’s making us miserable.

I think now that maybe all of my needs can be summed up as love: rest, money, nature, people, self-expression. Those are all ways of loving myself. As is being the one I can tell my needs to.

I’m almost always the one in the driver’s seat now.

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I sit in my bed with my newly adopted emotional support shrimp, Shrimpy, whom I must protect from the cat, as he’d love to bat it around and dunk it in his water bowl. It’s Saturday, 7:35 pm. I’ve been here for five hours. The kids are with their dad, and I’m recovering from a six-day work week, three days of which I worked two different jobs and one on which I worked three. Chocolate cookies from the grocery store deli are calling from the kitchen, but Shrimpy tells me to write one more paragraph before I heed their voice.

One more paragraph, one more day’s, week’s work. One more month out from the end of life as I knew it. One moment closer to whatever is next.

There’s something about doing physical labor to the point of exhaustion that feels just right in this rebuilding period, as though there’s no other way for me to re-grow myself after divorce. I have to break myself down, wear myself out to build back better. Because this isn’t the arrival point; it’s a temporary phase on the journey. Life’s all temporary phases, of course, but this one I know to be, have planned it to be.

I’m too in it to know, much less write about what I’m learning or how I’m changing. However, I’m dedicated to following the pull that says this is what you must do now. I’m trusting this pull, seemingly with my life, as it gives me life, my life, the one meant for me.

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During my divorce, I pulled this picture out and stuck it on the fridge to remind myself that there were things I loved long before a man. It was also a promise to my younger self to make my way through the pain and uncertainty and build a life that would make her proud.

*

Miley Cyrus recently released a remake of her song “Younger You” as a duet with Lainey Wilson:

Hey, you, it's younger you
I know your story isn't done, but do you love who you've become?

This is the question I’ve been asking myself lately. Seized by the belief that I’m meant for something more, I grapple with both the sense that younger me would be proud of me and that she’d think I still have a ways to go.

I’m currently struggling with the exhaustion of giving everything I have to my jobs and wondering if it’s leading me anywhere, and if so, where?

I spend around 35 hours per week in a place that constantly reminds me I don’t belong. Having moved past my ego’s insistence that I shouldn’t be a plant merchandiser stationed at Walmart, even though I enjoy it, I now feel like I don’t belong simply because I know I’m meant for something more. It’s not a new feeling; I’ve had it for at least as long as I’ve had children (17 years), but it is the newest iteration of it.

I worry too that I’m becoming like many women whose work I’ve admired online. They reduce their efforts or step away from it entirely for physical, mental, or financial reasons. I missed my last self-imposed publication deadline because I’m too tired to write. After work, if I’m not going to one of my other jobs, I go home, take a shower, get into bed, and stare at my phone until I fall asleep around 8. Then I get up at 6, go clean a dive bar for an hour and a half, and return to the plants. I have little energy for anything aside from the grind, and I’m afraid surviving will take me away from my purpose/passion/true work here.

I don’t think that’s what younger me had in mind for us.

Also, as lonely as I am at times for friends and/or a partner, I’ve recently become more lonely for myself. Where have I gone in this quest to make money, to make myself so tired that my mind stays in check? I’m not doing the things that most make me feel like me. And newsflash: the exhaustion is no longer keeping my mind in check. Anytime I slow down it gets busy wanting and worrying, signaling that it’s time to move on to the next phase, whatever that might be.

*

I’m drafting this from my bed, in my basement apartment, on my daughter’s 17th birthday. I look around and see nothing that looks like what I imagined for my children’s lives. I haven’t given them an intact family, or a cozy home they’re proud to bring friends to, or even a yard they want to spend time in. When it comes to tangible items, I’ve given them so much less than what I had as a kid. Part of that is simple math: socioeconomically, I married down, and now I’m single, so considering these factors, it makes sense that I’d be where I am. It’s something I didn’t know to consider when I was young. I only knew that when my then-boyfriend referred to himself as being from the wrong side of the tracks, I didn’t care. I still wanted to be with him.

Older me thinks that however openhearted this was, it was also shortsighted. I think now that I shouldn’t date “beneath” me, but where even am I? Where I identify as belonging and where my tax returns say I am are two different things.

And is this really all about money?

Yes, but also no.

It’s about potential and squandered opportunities and how men succeed because of women, and women, if they do succeed, do so despite their relationships with men.

What would younger me say about this? Would she be disappointed? Wasn’t she the kid her class, in their final year of elementary school, voted most likely to succeed?

Yet here she is. She cleans a dive bar, schleps flowers around Walmart, bartends for a catering company, and works at college sporting events. This may be someone’s vision of success, but it’s not mine.

However, she also owns a house half a mile from the beach and is, occasionally, one hell of a writer. She probably can’t swing a bat anymore without hurting herself, but she can physically labor all day long and get up and do it again the next day. She can drive a stick shift and install a car battery and happily travel to foreign countries all by herself. She freed herself from marriage, surviving the hell of divorce, and knows she didn’t go through it to ever again put up with a man’s nonsense. And maybe too she’s a good mom.

So is she a success? By traditional measures, sort of. She’s got that house after all. But beyond that? She’s on a quest to redefine success not as money made or accomplishments that garner public praise, but rather as becoming more and more herself, regardless of how unimpressive or even unsightly it may be. Success as getting out there, getting feral, and getting back to who she is.

When I ask myself now what I want, here’s what I come up with: To have enough money to pay bills, pay off my debts, and pay for fun things. To have close friends with whom to share life. To have the physical and emotional comfort of a partner. To feel fulfilled by being alive.

*

Does my younger self love who I’ve become? She does. She loves how freely I express myself, how what she could only do physically, through sports for example, or academically, I now do physically, verbally, written-ly, emotionally, and socially. That’s probably what she’s most proud of, my ability to be me.

And where does she think I have more to go? She doesn’t. She’s too busy being proud of how far I’ve come to consider how much farther I may go.

But I pick up where she leaves off because I know I have further to go. I get to go further.

*

“Don’t chase,” I heard a high school softball coach call out to a player the other day at the state softball championship game at which I was working.

She was at bat, and he was reminding her not to go after bad pitches. I thought too that he was reminding me not to go after the wrong men, but while that’s a good reminder, I think his words stretch even further, to not chasing anything that isn’t meant for us and who we uniquely are. His words call for us to define success for ourselves, to set aside others’ opinions, and to take swings at what feels right, which is oftentimes also what comes easily for us.

Younger me would want more than anything for me to keep taking swings.

My quote in my high school senior yearbook was from the Dire Straits’ song "The Bug”:

Sometimes you're the Louisville Slugger
Sometimes you're the ball
Sometimes it all comes together
Sometimes you're gonna lose it all

These lines depict what can happen when we take swings at life: we can lose, or we can win. Each will happen at different times. Meanwhile, the lines preceding these in the song meant little to me when I was 18, but now I’ve lived them:

Sometimes you're the windshield
Sometimes you're the bug
Sometimes it all comes together, baby
Sometimes you're a fool in love

I’ve been a fool in love. Now I hope I’m becoming a fool in love with her life.

Maybe that’s what younger me would want most.

*

Recently, I tended bar at a wedding. It was the first wedding I’d attended since getting divorced, and I wasn’t sure I’d be the best person for the job. I knew I’d have a lot of feelings, including the desire to shout out to the bride not to do it, that marriage benefits men at women’s expense, and she deserves a life of freedom. And while this couple seemed to like each other, there was a moment during her vows in which I did want to try to stop her. In the midst of gushing over the groom, she said she promised not to get annoyed when he ate all the snacks. I’ve lived enough life to know this means she has repeatedly been annoyed with him for eating all the snacks, he will continue to eat all the snacks, and if they have children, she’ll grow frustrated, angry, and resentful because she buys snacks for the children and he eats them. This is no small thing and indicates his general lack of consideration for her and her labor.

Of course I didn’t say a word. I was just there to mix drinks.

More relevant to the topic at hand though, is that this wedding was for two doctors, and about a third of the guests were doctors. At one point I was standing behind the bar, a circle of guests in front of it, one asking the others if they were all doctors. All but one (a nurse) were.

I’ve shared before that I was pre-med in college, and that I don’t regret not going into medicine. But looking at and listening to these guests while I stood on the “wrong” side of the bar made me uncomfortable, and it took a while to realize why. It was an issue of ambition. They’d demonstrated theirs, and I hadn’t. This is partly due to devoting my efforts to a man’s career, but also because I’ve struggled to develop a clear idea of where ambition could or would lead me or where I’d want it to.

So I come back to the girl I once was and how she sunk herself into things she loved: practicing pitching in the backyard, tromping around in the marsh mud, doing tricks off the diving board. She was ever-ambitious in expressing herself, including her power, simply for her own enjoyment and satisfaction.

Above all, I think that’s what younger me still wants. Older me too. So I’ll continue to look for and create opportunities to do so, especially right here, down the dirt road.

There was a lilac bush in the backyard of the 100-year-old house that used to be ours, the house where various friends roomed with us over the years, where we hosted countless impromptu parties, and where our daughter was born. It, like the other lilacs in town, would bloom around Mother’s Day, sweetening the air for a brief moment before its flowers faded.

On the large parcel of State land where I regularly go for walks, there’s a row of lilacs. These are the current lilacs in my life, but Mother’s Day was two weeks ago, and I haven’t been to see them. I wonder if I’ve missed the pinnacle of their display, this harbinger of my favorite season here: summer.

*

On the day I sat in my attorney’s office, signing my name on the Petition for Dissolution of Marriage, I loved my husband. By the time our divorce was finalized five months later, I no longer did. But on that April day, I did; I loved him.

I got on Facebook this week and saw that a friend from a previous place and stage of life, the one in which I had two very young children, was widowed last month. She posted about her husband’s unexpected death, “the loss of the person [she] loved,” and what must come after it: learning to live without him.

The experiences of being widowed and getting divorced overlap, at least they do in my case. I lost the person I loved, and ever since, I’ve been learning to live without him.

Where our stories diverge though, my friend’s and mine, is in what she wrote of the village that has risen to support her and her two daughters. I, on the other hand, lost the person I loved, but there was no village. As my aunt said, “When your husband dies you grieve, and people bring you casseroles. When you get divorced you grieve, but no one brings you casseroles.”

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How to rebuild your life after divorce:

1. Fall into despair because you have no idea where to start. Cry, feel sorry for yourself, blame the man you used to love or maybe still do, rage at and sob over the younger you who had so little sense, get on dating apps as though the answers lie there, as though a man can lead you home.

2. Get hurt by a man again when he says, “It’s not you; it’s me.”

3. Declare the start of your slut era because somehow you need it.

4. Find a crumpled piece of brown paper that you wrapped dishes in during your last move and smooth it out.

5. Get out the markers you’ve had for 10 years. The brightly colored ones that used to be scented.

6. Use them to write down as much as you can conceive of a vision for your new life. Also, (badly) draw pictures to go along with your ideas.

7. Tape it to the back of your bedroom door.

8. Wait for the vision to come into being.

9. Fall into despair again because this isn’t a vision at all, just some words on crumpled paper, and what are you doing with your life, and why have you wasted it?

10. Continue with dating apps, but now with less sluttery and more intention.

11. Decide that’s never going to work and quit them.

12. Devote yourself to making money because, not only do you need it to survive, but it will never let you down.

13. Quit, for good, finally, the job you hate, and acquire multiple others. Perhaps you’ll have four. That’s doable, you’ll think. Maybe even ideal—so much variety, and even better if some or all of them are physically demanding.

14. Put your ego aside and take (almost) whatever work you can find because you know that forward motion comes with movement of any kind.

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My kids left the house early this morning, Mother’s Day, giggling and under the guise of going for a drive. They returned a short while later with tulips and chocolate.

They’re roughly the same height and build now, with the same shade of brown hair, and dressed in complementary outfits, one in a gray University of Georgia t-shirt, the other in a gray University of Montana one.

How far we’ve come, the three of us. It’s always felt like it was the three of us. Even for all the years of their lives that their dad and I were married, the kids and I have been our own unit. We’ve spent our days together, traveled together, cuddled in my bed together. We are each other’s people.

I took a picture of them after they gave me my Mother’s Day gifts. Usually, it’s the recipient of gifts, the one whose holiday it is, who’s photographed, but I didn’t want a picture of me. I wanted to capture them in an ordinary, unscripted moment, pleased with themselves after a successful mission to buy me stuff.

We miss so much of our children’s lives merely trying to survive. I wonder how different things would be if I got to do it all over again, if I made different choices, ended my relationship with their father sooner, took greater responsibility for my wellbeing. How might that have changed my experience of motherhood? How might that have improved their lives? How would our lives look now, and would they be better or just different?

They say that when it comes to raising kids, the days are long but the years are short. Having two teenagers, and with only one year left with one of them, I can attest to this. Where did the time go? Those deep, dark struggles of the early years, the ones in which I was adapting to having children and trying to establish or maintain my existence as an individual and not just a mom (and wife), the ones that, at one point, I wondered if I’d actually survive.

But I did—we did. Their dad and I raised them, I raised them, and they raised me. We’ve all raised each other, and here we are now, on the cusp of their adulthood, on the precipice of being finished with this part of parenthood, the one of being a part of their daily, or ever-other-weekly lives, the one in which I’m making supper and asking how their day was, the one in which, regardless of how independent they’re becoming, on some level, we’re still a unit, a three-legged stool. How will I ever stand without them?

The time is coming soon. It will be here before I’m ready, but also when I’m very much ready. Because, despite being in a rush in those very early years to get them to the age of being less needy, I’m now in no rush at all. But I’m not holding on either. I suspect when the time comes, I’ll feel just as I did at 18 and leaving for college: that it’s time. It was time for me to move on to the next chapter then, and it will be time for me to move on to another chapter again soon. They’ll be ready, and I will be too. That doesn’t make it any less tragic, however. The great tragedy of loving and tending to and caring for and then letting go, letting them—encouraging them—to move on and live their own unique and independent lives, which they’ll inevitably do.

My children are old enough now that I can attest to the effort of the early years having been worth it. When we’re mired in childcare, unsure if we’re helping or harming them, we can’t see the effects of our efforts; there’s no immediate return on investment. Eventually, however, they get old enough that we can look at them and see all that they’ve become, both in spite of us and because of us. We know then that it’s all been worth it—we’ve done a helluva job, and they are amazing young humans, whose lives we’re supremely fortunate to be a part of.

All the work was worth it. All the uncertainty was worth it. All the tears were worth it. We’ve taught and fed and bathed and clothed and driven and cheered on and worried over and been frustrated by these wonderful humans we get to call ours.

Though they never were and never will be ours, not truly. They are their own, just as each of us is. They belong to themselves. We merely midwifed them into existence. They’re art we didn’t create, born of us but not by us, a joint project we’ve—at most—ghostwritten.

I have few more answers than I did when they first came onto the planet, but it was never about the answers. It was and is about the experience of love, family, grace, and forgiveness afforded by being a mother. It’s about the exceptional gift of being a mother: that our children’s existence isn’t for us, but it’s the greatest blessing we’ll ever receive.

Happy Mother’s Day. We’ve held up the sky for these beings, and one day will never sufficiently honor that, but the honor, I think, is all ours.

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My ex and I were together for twenty years before he apologized to me for the first time. Maybe he would have learned on his own, or maybe it was because of me that he finally got there.

Either way, first wives devote years of effort to making their husbands better. For women, marriage is a long slog, a pause in our lives, in which we expend ourselves pouring into our husband, a bottomless pit of need. We help them build careers, make friends, develop manners, etc., but it’s never enough. These men don’t rise to the level we need them to, and they often become resentful of us trying to pull them along. Eventually, the marriage ends.

We tried so damn hard, didn’t we? A massive private yet social project in which we improve the men of the world, picking up where their mothers left off. We take them on like children, students, apprentices, mentees, and pour into their development, never reaping the full rewards of our work.

Many of them will go on to new relationships, their next partner never knowing the work the previous woman put in behind closed doors to make the man (more) partner-able. No one will thank us for our service, no matter the extent of our devotion and tutelage.

We’ll walk away, or be left, the product we built sturdier than it once was, albeit perhaps still far less than ideal.

We did it though, y’all. We trained up these men. We made them better for the women who come after us. And hopefully, yes, they are coming because we may have had to teach these men how to do that too.

It’s the saddest project I can think of being a part of. At the same time, I’m proud of us. We made the world a better place, however overlooked our efforts may be, and however undeserving we are of having the task foisted upon us. We’ve improved our little corner of the world, improved one person in it. We took part in the Great Man Improvement Project, and to some degree, I need to believe, we succeeded.

Thank you for your service.

*

Women who don’t know better, particularly those who haven’t been married, may follow us into these men’s lives never realizing that if a man shines it’s likely due to his ex-wife’s polishing. If he’s got degrees or professional success or friends or hobbies or separates colors and whites in the wash, it’s probably, in large part, because of her.

They say that behind every successful man there’s a woman. I’ve also heard that behind every unsuccessful woman is a man—because she’s given herself to his cause at the expense of hers.

I like us though, this community of first wives, the teachers and trainers raising the men of the world, leaving them a little better for the women who’ll follow in our footsteps.

I hope my ex will freely apologize to whoever follows me in his life. I hope he’ll consider validating her feelings instead of dismissing them. I hope he’ll be more of the man I always knew he could be. I got him part way there, and left him for the next woman to reap the fruits of my labor. You’re welcome, and good luck.

This collective man-raising project is not for the faint of heart. In fact, it comes with inevitable disappointment, sadness, and heartbreak. I’m glad to have done my part, but I don’t want to take part in the project ever again. I want my men to come ready to be suitable partners, which may mean reaping the benefits of the labor of the previous woman in their lives.

United with our fellow first wives, we’re changing the world.

Let’s maybe not sign up for a second tour though.

I’ve sensed for a while that I’m returning to who I was after graduating college, when I started doing seasonal jobs or work with a specified term of service. I loved not being stuck with one thing forever, and I would have kept doing this for much longer if I hadn’t gotten married or had kids.

Now, I’m divorced, which means I’m free. I still have the kids, but that’s not an impediment. There’s so much freedom in simply being a single woman, so much potential—and realized—opportunity and joy that it doesn’t matter that I can’t just be gone round the clock or pick up and move somewhere.

It’s in the world of work where I most notice this return to where I left off. Having moved in with my then-boyfriend, now ex-husband, as a 21-year-old college student, I embarked on a world almost identical to marriage. While my first year of college was one of the best in my life, and my second held challenges that led to me dropping out for a while, it was during my junior year that I moved in with him and lost the fun and freedom I’d previously had, just as tends to happen to women in marriage. It came with, among other things, the mostly unspoken expectation, which I often failed to live up to, that I’d have dinner waiting for him when he got home, whenever that might be, because he might not let me know he was going to the bar with his coworkers after work.

I guess I thought that’s how it was supposed to be. I also inexplicably thought it would get better if we were married. I’d grown up witnessing my mom’s eternal and futile struggle to get my dad to contribute to housework and child raising. He ignored her yells and pleas. I knew by the time I moved in with my boyfriend that I never wanted to live that way, so I told him off the bat that I wouldn’t be his servant, and he, from a very conservative, traditional family, went along with it, at least on the surface. I always suspected he wanted me in the servant role, and I did, particularly after kids, slide more into it, but it was never what I truly wanted. Because the other thing I saw in my family when I was a kid was my mom as the owner of her own CPA firm, with extensive connections in our small town, involvement in the community, friends, and an ability, which she still possesses, to refuse to let male nonsense—even when directed at her personally, say in the local newspaper—throw her off, except when it came to my dad, of course.

I’d say, however, that I did largely avoid being a man’s servant. I wouldn’t say the work in our marriage was equitable, but so much of that was my choice, and nowhere on the list I made of 50+ reasons to leave him is there anything about housework or childcare. I also suspect he realized early on that I really would leave if he treated me the way my dad treated my mom.

However, I didn’t safeguard against other issues. For example, the imbalance of labor required to maintain the relationship, and I never assessed or ensured that he’d be supportive of my feelings, experiences, dreams, and goals, especially beyond the point at which they might start to inconvenience him.

*

For probably 20 years, my dream job—but not real dream job, more like if-I-could-do-any-random-thing-for-a-week dream job—has been to be a bartender. One time when I mentioned this, my husband said, “But then you’d have to actually work.”

That was it. No support, just letting me know he thought I was lazy. (Meanwhile, I was always supportive of his one-week dream job, which was to be a cook at Waffle House. (I was also always supportive of his actual career, to the tune of moving to different states for it.))

Now, Reader, let me tell you something: the weekend after I publish this, I’ll work my first bartending shift.

It doesn’t matter that I rarely drink anymore and have never understood what about the job appeals to me. I want to try this thing I’ve been curious about for a very long time (and I want to get tips—this is still My Year of Making Money after all), so I’m doing it. End of story. No need to discuss.

*

In the absence of support in the form of action or words beyond “OK” or “That sounds intense” or even just a blank stare, and with my commitment to supporting my former husband’s goals, professional growth, success, and well-being, I put so much of myself on pause for so very long.

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My son razzes his friends over Xbox. Sometimes I wonder if he likes them at all, but I’m guessing they’re doing the same to him.

My ex texts, interrupting my thoughts about my son. He’s confirming something I sent him about the kids.

I’m in my bed. It’s 7:27 pm. My body is sore from today’s work in the world of plant merchandising. I’m too tired, I think, to be creative or focused enough to write something worthy of your inbox.

Just a couple of weeks ago, I called what I was experiencing depression, but I’m past that now. It’s fascinating how naming something out loud can sometimes remedy it or put us on the way to remedying it. “It’s a non-issue,” I used to say to a friend when she’d follow up about something I was struggling with, like just telling her about it had allowed me to release it.

I watched the new Netflix documentary about Noah Kahan, and he pointed out that knowing what he’s struggling with and sharing his struggles with others doesn’t mean he knows how to solve them. I find the opposite, that little by little, the truth does, in fact, set me free.

The cat has joined me at my feet. There’s a layer of black fur on my comforter here, which I vacuum between washes. It took him a year and a half to want to sit next to me. Now he’s my shadow.

It’s specificity that’s important, they say, in writing a good story, or even, I’ve learned, a dating profile that repels the wrong people and attracts the right one. To paint a picture of a moment, an experience, or a quality one possesses is to delineate the abstract and make it alluring or relatable.

Show, they say, don’t tell.

The lights are off, the curtains are open, and the daylight is fading. The windowsill is wide enough that I can sit on it, soaking up the late afternoon sun on spring days not like today. Today has been cloudy.

I don’t feel cloudy though. I’m floating as though on a cloud. As if floating on clouds were possible and not scary. We don’t imagine ourselves floating on a blanket of stratus clouds like those coating the sky now. Instead, we see ourselves on a puffy cumulus cloud, blue sky around us. It seems like we could bounce there, like in a trampoline park, no special socks required, however, or a liability waiver.

We can’t waive the risks of life. We can only assume them.

Which risks are worth it? Which are not?

Despite never again wanting to spend eight months crying as I did in the process of divorce, the risk of heartbreak in pursuit of a great relationship is worth it to me. The risk of skydiving, on the other hand, for example, is not.

But aren’t I a mental and emotional skydiver? Don’t I leap hoping a parachute will open? Doesn’t it always? Isn’t this the best form of skydiving, the one that reaps the greatest rewards? Attempting the unknown and not just not dying, but flying?

Aren’t we all doing this to one degree or another? To exist is to take leap after leap into uncertainty, the opposite, perhaps, of specificity.

We’d like the picture or the path to be laid out before us, but it never is. It can’t be. Any that appears to be is a false prophet or a trail into the abyss, and abysses are no place to make a life, at least not for long.

My son stands in the kitchen, leaning over the counter, taking a bite of a burger. He looks like his dad in this moment. I love it, a physical reminder in human form of what was, and loathe it, a physical reminder in human form of what was and never will be. Now he opens a cabinet door and straddles it, and the moment passes.

The moments keep passing. We all know this, but how often do we feel the weight and the blessing of it? We’ll never again be where we are. This is a gift and a curse. We straddle both sides, wanting to hold on at times, yet also wanting to get where things are finally good, or better than they are now.

I’m locked into the present now, too physically tired (in the best way) to be anywhere else. Not looking back or beyond the next few hours. Not straddling, just planted. Not worried, just worthy. Of what, I wonder? Existing.

There were moments in the final years of my marriage that I’d be struck with shame that I existed. In hindsight, it’s a normal way to feel after decades of being treated like you don’t matter. My ex didn’t yell or call me names, but he was emotionally neglectful to the point that I learned I didn’t matter.

It’s strange how we don’t necessarily need people to make us feel like we do matter. Instead, we need to avoid those who make us feel like we don’t.

There’s no one in my life now who makes me feel like I don’t matter. No one who makes me feel like I shouldn’t exist. No one inside or outside my head razzing me like my son does his friends.

There’s specificity to my existence, a “clear and exact” (thanks, Cambridge Dictionary) reason I’m here. I don’t know what it is, but I sense it. I believe that’s true for all of us.

Recently, I read somewhere that in determining our purpose, a good question, maybe the best question, to ask ourselves is: What’s the thing I can’t not do?

You know what my immediate answer was? New things.

That’s it.

New things.

It’s concise and specific and feels like me.

And I love that. I love that I visit new places and try new jobs and take on variety within one job and move to new states and sample random new hobbies, like that one-afternoon acting workshop I took. I love this for and about me.

If I exist to do new things, then I’m on the right path and always have been. Maybe there’s no way not to be.

And what about you? What’s the thing you can’t not do? Maybe it’s even something you razz yourself for. I bet it’s specific and engaging and feels like you.

I bet these are the things that show us we matter, if only to ourselves.

I was sitting on a bench in the town square in Cabrera, Dominican Republic, where my family and I had spent 2½ months the year before, our intended 3½ month trip cut short due to COVID. This time, I’d returned alone for a week to stay with the woman who’d hosted us. It was my first time out of the country by myself, and before arriving, I’d decided on the posture I’d adopt for sitting on benches in this park.

It’s a strange thing to consider, how to sit on a bench, but as a woman, I’d decided it was necessary to try to deter men through my body language. Because that’s the thing about being a woman traveling alone: men are a threat. Always, all over the world. It’s something we’ll never not consider, but also something I’ll probably never let stop me, which is revolutionary, a rebellion against men and their beliefs and actions, conveyed in a single statement: You may hurt or even kill me, but I’m going to live up until the very moment you do.

*

“What would a man do?” I’d thought, before deciding on my bench-sitting posture.

Here’s what I came up with: Arms spread out across the back of the bench. Legs crossed if wearing a skirt or dress, but spread apart somewhat if in pants or shorts. The arm thing is most important though. It confidently claims territory on the bench, but also, with the chest wide open, conveys openness instead of defensiveness or hostility. Or that’s how it feels to me. I’m no body language expert. But it feels right. Give it a try.

We’re not showing vulnerability or weakness when we sit like this, and if I’m not showing vulnerability or weakness, then it seems less likely a man will try to prey upon me. Further, judging by my time in the park in Cabrera, it doesn’t just work to repel the wrong people, but it invites the right ones in.

While I was largely left alone, some women did sit beside me (I’d move my arms to allow them more space), as did one awkward but seemingly harmless man who wanted me to teach him English, and a man who was passing by but stopped to talk. Striking up a conversation with, “Where are you from?” I sensed no threat, so I rolled with it. He sat down beside me, and we spoke for a few minutes in Spanish.

“I speak English too,” he said in Spanish before switching over.

The next words he uttered were in accented English, but yes, I could tell he did know some English. Then, suddenly, his accent changed completely. He went from speaking American English with a Dominican accent to sounding like one of the Beatles. I cracked up in surprise.

“I spent 16 years in Liverpool,” he said, “including going to university there.”

It was flawless Liverpudlian English as best as I could tell.

“I want to speak like an American though,” he said, explaining why he’d started out sounding totally different.

Because English-speaking Dominicans generally sound more American, which makes sense considering proximity and that there are so many Dominican immigrants and visitors, I’d never expected a Dominican to sound British, which I didn’t realize until this exchange.

We spoke for several minutes, and then I excused myself to continue my walk around town. 

On my last day there, I was sitting on the same bench with my host, Rosa, and he passed by. We said hello to each other, and I introduced him to her. After exchanging pleasantries, he continued on, and she asked how I knew him.

“I met him right here a few days ago,” I said. 

*

I imagine my time sitting on the brick wall in New Zealand, sick with a migraine, made me look incredibly vulnerable, which is why a man came up to me and asked if I was okay. I didn’t sense a threat from him either though, just genuine concern, but I’m always assessing. Aren’t we always assessing? Because we never know when the potential threat may become actual.

*

In the town square, cars and motorcycles zoomed by. The Caribe Tours bus arrived and departed again. A guagua (bus) carried people traveling in town or between nearby towns. There was the ice cream shop. The restaurant next to it. The bar and dance club. The sports bar. The building under construction on the corner. The Catholic church across from me. The dentist’s office behind me on the other side of the square. The Caribe Tours office, where I’d buy my bus ticket out of town, straight south to Santo Domingo and the airport. The gazebo in the middle. The landscaping throughout, contained by low brick walls. The big tree. The large wooden carving. I could take it all in from my bench as I attempted to use my body to send a message and stake out space in the world.

At the beginning of my sophomore year of college, I lived in a sorority house with 60 other girls, four of us in the same room. Having no time or space to myself, I became depressed and eventually dropped out of school for the remainder of the semester. What I’ve learned since then is that for me, depression is what happens when my outer world doesn’t align with what my inner self needs. In other words, depression points me in the direction I need to go.

I made it through the end of a marriage with much grief and devastation, but no depression. I think that’s because I was shaping my outer world to be the way I needed it to be: free of my husband. Now, however, in this rebuilding phase, I wonder if I’m experiencing depression—zero energy, even after a long night of sleep or taking a nap, inability to focus enough to read a book, and a lack of desire to do anything, not even go for a walk, which is a near-daily practice under normal circumstances.

But these aren’t normal circumstances.

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As I did last spring, I’m again going to work for a plant merchandiser that stocks plants at big box stores. Last year, I was stationed at Walmart. I could be there again, or Home Depot, or both. Most of the time, I worked by myself, which I enjoyed. The role was physically tiring in a good way and pleasurable because I got to be with flowers all day. However, working at (though not for) Walmart required putting my ego aside. I’m middle-aged and have a Master’s degree; working at Walmart was never part of my vision for my life.

It’s not the only job I have that requires setting aside my ego. I also work on an event staff, which is often very fun, but also often requires picking up trash. Then there’s the other job I’m about to start, my dream job, in the “If I could do any random job for a week, what would I do?” way. In my case, this is, and has been for ten or twenty years, bartending, so I’m going to start working for a beverage catering company. My mom tells me bartending would be a great job for a college student. I agree. However, it might also be a great job for me if I let it be. If I set my ego aside.

I’m pretty sure ego blocks a lot of our happiness. I don’t know who I think is judging me. Okay, well, maybe I do, and one of those people, the loudest judge, is me. It’s not that I think I’m too good for the work, but that with all the advantages I’ve been given and with the education I’ve attained, shouldn’t I be doing something more prestigious? I was pre-med in college, setting myself up to be a child my parents bragged about, but here I am now, having accomplished next to nothing. (Fortunately, my brother is a lawyer, so my mom can brag about him if she wants to.)

I feel like I’ve failed myself and others around me. I also know, and have known since high school, that I struggle to do work that isn’t meaningful to me. I don’t care about making money enough to feel otherwise. I remember in high school my mom telling me to go get a job at the mall, and my rebuttal was, “But the mall doesn’t have windows.” I didn’t want to be stuck in a place where I couldn’t at least see outside, which makes me think now that it’s good I didn’t become a doctor, specifically a surgeon, as was my goal, because that would have meant spending a lot of time in rooms without windows. Instead, after college, I started working outside as an outdoor and environmental educator. Later, I worked with moms in various capacities because that was incredibly meaningful.

Here I am now wanting to do work that has meaning and/or makes me happy. I write for the meaning of it. I work events, work with flowers, and bartend for the joy of it (and to be paid, of course).

If I set my ego aside, what else might I experience? What joy or happiness might present itself? What else is ego keeping me from? It wasn’t until my event staff job that I began to experience regular joy. Isn’t that sad? But better late than never—I don’t think I could have ever experienced joy, at least not regularly, if I’d have stayed in my marriage.

Our egos try to keep us safe, and I’m grateful for that, but sometimes we don’t need to be safe. Sometimes it’s in our best interests to put our egos aside and experience life.

My ego doesn’t like to be wrong though. It doesn’t like to mess up. I accidentally reprogrammed a scoreboard at my events job one day recently and had to call my boss on his day off and ask for help. Fortunately, I was able to fix it quickly, but my ego struggled with telling him I messed up because I want to be thought of as reliable and capable, and while I’ve been showing I am for a while now, and one screw up isn’t likely to change my boss’s perception of me, it still felt yucky. I’ve always struggled with messing up or not knowing something. I’ve been aware of this since high school, when I preferred not to give an answer rather than give the wrong one.

So I worry that the things that bring me happiness are the wrong ones. Something more acceptable, something respected or praised, should bring me joy instead. But as it turns out, we don’t have control over this. We only have what we have—our own unique preferences and pleasures. And what’s considered acceptable is shaped by the whims of society. Society could shift in a way that means schlepping plants around Walmart is admirable work. It’s really all just made up, a part of the script that tells us what kind of life is a good and right life. But if we go off script, what might we discover? What would we be pleasantly surprised to find waiting for us?

I think too that it helps to take some of the pressure off by saying that just because we enjoy something “inappropriate” now doesn’t mean we’ll enjoy it forever. It could be permanent, or it could be a stepping stone to something else, something better, something acceptable even. Although at that point, the curiosity and excitement may surpass the ego’s need for acceptability, leaving us free to no longer care about what others think and no longer tempted to judge ourselves because we’re just looking forward to the discovery.

There’s irony in my having gotten divorced, which comes with judgment, yet lacking worry about judgment in this area. Meanwhile, my ego is concerned about what work or other activities make me happy. Divorce is larger and more laden with cultural opinions than a simple job. It’s also more life-altering. Then again, the simple work that makes us happy can be life-altering too.

Years ago, a friend from high school said, “It’s great you can reinvent yourself.” I suspected that she didn’t feel she could do the same. She’s a doctor, and I imagine if I’d gone that route, I’d probably feel like I couldn’t reinvent myself either. However, that’s unlikely to be true. We can always reach for what our changing, growing selves want, which might be very different than what the previous version of us wanted.

There’s nothing wrong with doing what lights up our spirit at the expense of our ego. It’s probably healthy for the ego to watch while we do the things that make us happy because then it learns of our capacity for courage, novelty, and survival.

I don’t want to turn against my ego; I want to question its wisdom and go in the direction my higher, simpler self is calling me, which is always towards happiness, joy, and fulfillment.

“That’s fine,” I said. “I like cats. I have one at home.”

I was envisioning my cat though, who’s actually my son’s cat, or the cat we had before that, who lived to be almost 19. I didn’t expect this cat or her person.

The room was small and drab, with two sets of bunk beds end to end along one wall, and metal shelving and a sink on the other. I sat on my bed, Angela on the floor across from me, the cat roaming the room as we talked. She was originally from Taiwan but had lived in New Zealand for a long time. She shared her Chinese name (Mei Ling) and that she was recently divorced with two grown daughters. The cat belonged to one of them, but she’d ended up with it, and they were traveling north to spend time with her parents because her father was sick.

She told me her ex-husband had said she was too close to her parents and that she needed to either choose them or the family she’d built with him. She said her daughters had turned against her in the divorce and that her therapist thought her parents had abused her as a child. She said she’d talked to her pastor, raised concerns about her faith, and he’d gotten angry at her for doing so, told her to listen to what he said and not ask questions.

We spoke about religion. I told her I wasn’t religious, and she talked about God and how he’s real. I didn’t mind. I liked listening to her, not as a potential convert but as a student of people—what they think, what they feel, how they operate. She seemed tethered to little but the figures that had power over her—ex-husband, daughters, pastor, God, even the cat—except when she spoke of her work and the studies she’d done, papers she’d written. Then she was more animated, more alive, more, it seemed, herself. (She was working on a PhD in something science-y.)

I liked that she wasn’t young, that I wasn’t alone there in being middle-aged. I liked how freely she spoke, processing her life with me, yet without making it burdensome. There was something comfortable about her, even familiar. She seemed smart and troubled.

Then night came. The cat was up all night, stalking around the room and jumping up on me. Angela was up too, talking to the cat, putting her in a harness, and taking her out for walks multiple times.

In the morning, I saw Angela in the communal kitchen.

“How did you sleep?” she said.

“Not good,” I said. 

Since we were both staying another night, she asked the owner if we could have separate rooms, and the owner obliged. I was glad to be reassigned because I liked Angela. I’d enjoyed our conversation and didn’t want to stop enjoying her company because of our sleeping arrangements and her relationship with her cat.

Angela was a lone woman making her way in the world, a precursory glimpse of what I’m doing now: divorced, two kids, albeit not grown, and with my child’s cat, making a new life for myself, sorting out fact from fiction, wondering where I’m heading, growing, sometimes against the grain, leaning into myself.

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I had just stepped inside my Airbnb host’s apartment in Mexico City when she insisted on spraying me with disinfectant. She then showed me around the place. It was in slight disrepair, a little dirty, and reeked of cigarette smoke. When she implied I was dirty from my travels and should take a shower, I did, my tears mixing with the water running down the drain.

I couldn’t spend three weeks in this place. A night or two, maybe, but not three weeks, so I got out of the shower, got dressed, went to my room, and frantically searched the Airbnb app for something available that day and within walking distance. I found an apartment and booked it.

Then the uncomfortable part: I had to tell my host I was leaving, that the place wouldn’t work for me because of the smoke. I did, and she understood. No hard feelings. I left stressed but also relieved. The total time between realizing this situation was wrong for me and getting out of it was less than an hour.

*

I’m disappointed by a man once again. Not in a crying in the shower kind of way, just in a Why are men? way. There was a lie or two (the pre-date messaging didn’t align with some of what he said during the date), the yawning that signaled disinterest in what I was saying (dude didn’t want to get to know me), and a post-date text interrogation (rapid-fire questions, for reasons I’ll never understand, like he was data mining). Why are men?

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