It’s been a while since I’ve written!
I graduated from graduate school in December and hoped to start a new job in a familiar place quite quickly, but things didn’t work out that way. As it turns out, nothing really went the way I thought it would go. I was expecting this year to be a blur of new job + traveling to different parts of the country for friends’ weddings before hosting everyone in my home town, just after a hopeful glimpse of optimism (aka a band-aid on a gaping wound, rather than a knift that keeps making the wound bigger– a metaphor, obviously, for America). I was expecting to be stressed about traveling all the time and doing too many things and also delightfully, deliriously happy because of all of the people I know (and me) celebrating their love for one another.
Instead I have become a Cat Mom who wasted spent the first few months of 2020, the ones before it felt like the world ended, sitting at home, playing video games, watching terrible television, cuddling with a curious cat, and not doing much of anything productive. It felt bad at the time, but in retrospect, I’m very glad to have a few months of rest. I eventually found employment and have struggled with how to talk about my life on the internet while maintaining a New Career that I can’t really talk about at all in public. I started making and donating (and selling) face masks To Clothe the Nation (but also to help me survive the long stretch before my first paycheck) .i started planning a wedding, then dropped everything as it felt like the world was ending. Now, as part of the country literally burns, and other parts reel from state violence, now broadcast in the open, I am attempting to take back up the things that I was trying to fit together before, though on a smaller scale. That’s really been a silver lining in all this– the slowing down. I think in my original conception of 2020 I would have had a hard time remembering things. These days going to the grocery store is an event. I cherish my friends and family, when I can see them in person, much more than I ever would have in the Before Times (as my future MIL calls them). I hope that this Slowing Down is something that we can keep with us, but I doubt that it will stick around.
I remember, when I visited Croatia in 2017, having the sudden realization that “things that happen somewhere else” could also happen here. It feels like that is happening now. I want this– the wildfires, the pandemic losses and deaths, the uncertainty, the angery and outrage and violence and chaos and fear of facism– to be the worst it gets, but that feels naive. I hope I am wrong. I do. I also hope that things will fundamentally change. I don’t know if the latter is possible without more destruction than we can currently imagine.
I have been finding myself looking to history– to the diaries of Sylvia Plath, to the (flawed) portrayal of one of our founding fathers in Hamilton, to Steinbeck and others who chronicled American pain long ago. I find myself wishing I could talk to my grandparents, feeling like I have a new and deeper understanding of what they might have gone through. I want to know how to prepare for when there is no more food, when you have to rely on what you grow yourself. I want to know how they knew when to run into the woods from oncoming troops, or flee their hometown because the alternative was unfathomable and horrible. I want to know what they said when they used words to get themselves to safety. I want to know what it felt like to know they were living in a failed state. I want to know, so that I am prepared, and so that I don’t feel so alone. I want to know, so that I know that I, too, can make it. Is being from them enough? Did I inherit the instincts for survival, or have I been made soft by 14 flavors of Doritos and childhood dentistry and 25+ years of relative comfort?
It’s not so dire as all that, not now, not for me, anyway. But I’m feeling a renewed appreciation for all that my ancestors, up until my grandparents, had to go through so that I could be born. I’d like to think they would have been glad to know that I’ve had a pretty easy life, all things considered. Wasn’t that what all that sacrifice was for? And, if my grandchildren are reading this from Mars, I want them to know that everything that is hard now, and everything that will be hard in the future, was worth it if things are better up there. Make sure you’re drinking enough water, kids– there’s a lot of dust up there and humans need to hydrate. Your Oma loves you very much.
weary traveler 