Going Back to School as an Old Person (Again)

Reckoning with societal expectations and accepting myself fully as I am.

I’m in Tallahassee, Florida right now, sitting in a vegan coffee shop called All Saints Cafe. I never thought I’d be in Tallahassee, nor did I think I’d prefer the name “Tally” to Tallahassee, but I do. I’m supposed to be sitting in on classes and meeting other prospective students, but I am here, alone, which is, as they say, on brand for me.

The night before last I stayed with my friend Annalise, who I met years back in NYC, at an event called Bindercon. I’d gotten a scholarship to go there, and Stephanie Land was the keynote speaker. It was about five years ago, which feels unimaginable, that it was so long ago and yet not too long ago. Annalise didn’t have a child or a husband, two things she has now. And I didn’t have my MFA, or a book deal, two things I have now. It was wonderful to see her, and I was reminded of the gift of social media, connecting us from far away to people who feel kindred.

I am here in Tally because I’m going to live here. Once again, I am moving. In the past five years, since graduating from my MFA program at Syracuse, I have moved so many times I can’t really count it. Do I count my travels in Nepal and Southeast Asia, or the month-long stint I spent in Hanoi? Do I count the four months I spent in Seattle after that, bopping around between several temporary living situations while nannying 50 hours a week and writing my book proposal? Or the eight weeks I spent teaching in Honolulu after that, or the four months after that I spent in the Czech Republic before I left and house-sat across Europe? And after that? My move to Seattle in March 2020? My flight from Iceland, settling into a new house with roommates I didn’t know, and then that autumn moving into my own apartment, which felt like a miracle? And what about the nanny job where I was underpaid and overworked? And all the writing I was trying to do in the space in between? And then my next move, into the apartment I inhabit now, whose lease I will break before it’s up in October to move to Tallahassee in June?

So much has happened in that time, but I have not found community in the way I had hoped to find in Seattle, nor have I found stability. I’ve been sorely disappointed by the “community” I invested myself into in Seattle, and learned a lot about the culture from which I come.

I heave learned that Seattle is no longer my home. I can’t afford to live there, though I was raised there and spent time living on its streets and sidewalks. But there’s more, too. I am still trying to understand why it doesn’t feel like home, and why I no longer feel a connection to it like I used to.

I also know this: were I to stay in Seattle, I would be okay, and I would find community. I feel that in my bones. I know there are lots of good people living in Seattle, and that the pandemic has hampered my effort to find community, as has my autoimmune disorder and health. I know I’ll miss Seattle dearly.

In a way it feels like, in order to feel good about leaving, I need to fully reject my hometown, because I am scared that if I ever want to come back, I won’t be able to afford it at all.

The Arboretum in Seattle, one of my favorite places.

Getting Old and Letting Things be New

Last night the creative writing and English program had a get together at a local bar and pool hall and then a reading, which was lovely. I met a lot of people, some of whom, I hope to get to know more. I was reminded of the awkwardness of my MFA program; the strange power dynamics; the privileging of certain people and rejecting of others. Prestige. Shit-talking. I felt all my insecurities rise to the surface. My clothes weren’t right; my body wasn’t right; I wasn’t right. How do I tell people I prefer they/them pronouns? Do I?

One prospective student, when they met me, automatically asked, “Are you one of the professors?” There it was, the easy assumption that I am not a student but a professor, because someone my age should be a professor, right?

The hardest thing about returning to school at 32, when I began my undergraduate education at Syracuse, was my age. My being older. And this idea that younger people had— that someone my age should be doing a certain thing, should have it all figured out. I don’t blame individuals for this idea; it’s a cultural assumption, but it’s toxic as hell. It prevents people from doing the things they’ve dreamed of. Because of this, I often avoided befriending my peers in my undergraduate classes, because I was so self-conscious about my age. Many of them later told me they had no idea how old I was. But these little comments about where I was supposed to be, these little assumptions, wounded me and prevented me from being my full self.

I remember when I first began my Fulbright, I felt this deep sense of self-consciousness because of my age; an extension of what I had felt as an undergraduate. (My MFA program was very good about accepting people of all ages and I am grateful for that). Despite several of my fellow Fulbrighters being the best and most amazing people I’ve ever met (Hi Jubes, Catey, Emily, Bethany, and many others), there were others who appeared not to see me at all, especially upon our first meeting. One of my peers, in the bathroom during our orientation, asked me if I was there to teach a segment. Embarrassed, I let her know that I was there for the same reason she was. I didn’t hold that against her, because why would I? In the same position, I may have said the same thing to someone older than me. But the comment reinforced much of the ageism I’d already experienced, and it and other comments colored my experience in the Czech Republic.

As an older undergrad, I didn’t understand why there wasn’t more support in place for people like me, or why there weren’t more people like me in general. During my three years at Syracuse I met two other undergrads that were my age or older— one of them even came into the MFA program after me (Hi, Keith). He was married and had kids. I was unmarried, unpartnered, and without kids. This was another point of tension. As a woman, or someone who appeared to be a woman, I was supposed to have achieved certain markers, like kids and a partner.

Luckily I have Edna, who I miss very much right now.

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So, last night, when that student, who has the possibility of becoming my peer, my equal, assumed I was a professor, I panicked a little bit. I felt all those feelings of not doing things the right way. I’ve done a lot of work in the past few years. I came out as non-binary, an identity I am still exploring and struggling with (mostly in terms of other people’s assumptions about me). I did my yoga teacher training (taught by two people I have lost all respect for). I started this newsletter and have been writing a lot, working on my book and FIRES and some other writing projects. I quit nannying full-time and started freelancing more.

But I have never been able to fully shake the feeling that I should be doing something differently. I see this as societal pressure. As someone who presents as a woman I am expected to be and do certain things. And for most of my adult life, I have not been doing those things. I worked as a wildland firefighter, which many men told me I could never do. I did it for a long time. I graduated college as the child of a middle-school and a high-school dropout. I have chosen to live with less money in favor of keeping some of my creative freedom. I have no partner, for various reasons, and haven’t had one for over a decade. I have no children and do not expect to have any. I don’t own a house, or anything of monetary value at all. I don’t even have savings right now. and I’m 41.

Damn, writing that all out, it’s a mixed bag, right? I’d like to have savings, but how was I set up for that? When my mom died by suicide she died in debt. I had to pay for her stuff to be stored. I sold it piecemeal and everything she owned combined amounted to about $25k. That’s a generous estimate and includes her car. She didn’t own property, yet my stepdad owns a lot of things. I didn’t and won’t inherit those things.

I can think about times I could have done better things with my money. Like, perhaps if I could go back in time I would have spent my book advance more carefully. I mostly spent it on staying in Europe after my Fulbright, so I could have time and space to write my book, which actually was pretty necessary. But yeah, I would do things differently if I could have seen what’s coming.

How did I get on the subject of money? Oh yes. Self-worth. Aging. They’re all tied up with one another, right?

What I’m saying is I’m a relatively broke forty-one year-old with a junker car and no property and two dead parents who left me very little materially and a lot of trauma emotionally. And I’m going into a PhD program. And by the time I leave that program I will be only a few years away from my mother’s age when she killed herself. She was only fifty-one.

So yeah. It’s a lot to hold.

Now for the good part.

Where I remind myself that I am doing the best I can.

Where I remind myself that this is my life, and that all lives have one thing in common, which is unpredictability.

And that if I were to take a job making a bunch of money doing something that didn’t feel ethically aligned with how and who I want to be in the world, I would not like myself.

And that I am a writer, who wants to keep writing.

And that I have always, always been one thing, which is an outsider.

An outsider in the context of my own family.

An outsider in the context of my childhood, where I moved so many times I can’t remember.

An outsider in the context of being a homeless person.

An outsider in the context of an addict.

An outsider in the context of someone who has gotten out of one way of being in the world and in getting out I choose to remain outside of all other conventional ways of being in the world.

I make that choice because it feeds my creativity.

I make that choice because it allows me to see things with clarity.

Things like systems and structures.

Systems and structures to which people subscribe without question.

And in seeing these things, and living outside of them, I question them and take them apart and ask: what does this do?

And in doing that, I am an artist.

Which is the thing I want to be.

Which means that everything I am doing is right for me.

There is something inside me that refuses to accept authority, full stop. I also refuse to accept that anyone is superior to me as a human, or vice versa.

And yet, I feel myself cringe and shrink when others are under the influence of the assumptions I’ve personally rejected.

Which is, really, my responsibility, and something I continue to work through. Because I can’t do anything to interrupt those assumptions other than to be my full self in the world.

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My first year as an undergraduate at Syracuse I was gifted a winter workshop with Dani Shapiro at Esalen Institute. This generous gift was given by a family I used to nanny for. I flew out to San Francisco in the middle of winter break. I was incredibly poor back then. My weekly budget was $40 a week and I hadn’t yet gotten a credit card because I was scared of being in debt like my mom had been. Because I couldn’t afford a hotel in NYC and didn’t know anyone there, I did what I used to do when I was homeless, which was to spend as much of the night in a McDonalds, then walk around in the very early morning until I found a 24/7 cafe and bought coffee and wrote in my journal. I’d packed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to eat.

At Esalen I shared a room with an older blonde woman who used Creme de la Mer and very sweetly shared it with me when I told her how much I loved it. I can still see her fingers and finely manicured coral-painted nails wrapped around the little white glass jar which was, to me, a symbol of wealth and success. In Dani’s workshop I was surrounded by mostly white women, all of them more economically successful than me, some of them struggling with their age as I am now, though many of them were in their fifties and sixties. Dani surfed Facebook while we did our free writes. I remember one woman in particular, a lesbian with curly white hair who gave me a ride out from San Francisco in her tiny car, telling me that she no longer recognized herself when she looked in the mirror. She also made comments about other women at Esalen— thin, young women with dewy fresh faces. As if they were superior to her, or lucky to still be in that stage of life.

I was thirty-two and just beginning to learn about how women go invisible to certain people once they get to a “certain age.” Because I loved Big Sur (I’d spent ample time in the Ventana Wilderness in my twenties) I figured out how to get myself out there every summer, mostly working on the landscaping crew. There was a weird culture there. Men who lived and worked there and essentially preyed upon any guests they thought they were attractive. On the landscaping crew we had morning check-ins and weekly gestalt therapy; a kind of therapy where things are shared in a group. The men tended to process their feelings around which women were hot and why they were hot, which was honestly pretty gross to have to listen to.

Once, when I was working out in the gym the next summer, a woman who appeared to be in her mid-forties came in and started talking about an encounter she had with one of the men who worked in the kitchen. He’d been eating, and she sat near him. He didn’t acknowledge her at all, even after she said hell. Then a younger woman came and sat with them. The man perked up and started chatting with her, asking where she was from and what she was doing at Esalen.

The woman was fuming. She’d gotten married at Esalen. This place was sacred to her. But she was invisible now that she was older.

What she didn’t say was that she was invisible to men, and that it only matters, that invisibility, if you need men’s approval in order to feel valuable.

Which many of us, raised in our patriarchal society, do.

I don’t really date men anymore and yet my social upbringing and my mother’s focus on men’s approval still lives in me, and sometimes I catch myself caring if they notice me or not, or how they notice me. But mostly I don’t. Not anymore. Because I know men very well. I have worked with (mostly straight and white) men very intimately. And their approval is no longer something I hold in high regard, or any regard whatsoever. I take them on a case by case basis, just like anyone else.

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Gosh, what the hell is this newsletter about today? Aging? Creme de la Mer? I looked at myself in the mirror today and, because I slept poorly last night and the night before, saw my age etched into my face. I feel my age in my rheumatoid arthritis symptoms (though anyone of any age can have RA). I looked in the mirror, naked, for the first time in a full length mirror in a very long time and regarded my dimpled white skin, my belly and breasts (which do not often feel a part of me at all), my legs. I told myself: you need to start working out. But not because I didn’t like the way I looked— because I know I need to stay strong as I age. That strength is good for me.

As I looked at myself in the mirror I remembered the woman at Esalen and several other older women in my life who have said “I don’t recognize myself anymore when I look in the mirror” and as I looked in the mirror I took myself in fully, without rejecting the wrinkles or tiredness or sags. I vowed to always recognize myself. I looked into my own eyes and saw in them: strength, resilience, sadness. Limitless potential. Tragedy. Hope. My body and face will continue to change and I will change with it. I am not going to grasp at youth. I am not going to buy that serum or get botox or get a tummy lift. Because to do so would be to reject a part of myself. And I have promised myself not to do that at all, ever again.

It’s in this spirit that I enter into this new era of my life. My mom gave up when she was fifty-one. In one of her suicide notes she wrote: It’s too late to start over. And yet, she was still so young. She could have started all the way over. I’ve done it. And maybe I’ll do it again. But the beautiful thing is that I get to bring everything I’ve learned with me, and do it with more awareness each time, in each season, and this time, this time, believe I deserve what is offered to me.

On a walk in Seattle to meet a friend, feeling myself.