Overwhelm and Gratitude
Learning to leave materialism behind.
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I have three weeks left of school.
In three weeks, I will have completed the first year of my PhD program.
In three weeks, it will be a little over a month since a surgeon split open my spine and removed two pieces of bone, which slowly restored function to my left leg.
I still do not have full use of my left leg. There is still pain. But I walk every day, and for that I am grateful.
It’s difficult for me to maintain my focus in these last three weeks,
especially because I began this program in a different house, and in the span of less than a year I’ve moved twice; once across the country and once in town. I began my first semester while working on book revisions, and then my second while working on book revisions. When this semester ends I will revise again, hopefully for the last time.
I’ve been thinking a lot about my child-self lately. About the ways I was framed by others and the ways I adopted those frames as my own. About my transient child-life; apartments and apartments and schools and schools. I’ve been holding my child-self closer as I get older. I’ve been parenting myself.
Where is this willow tree? Where is that ivy? Where is that dried grass and that bicycle? I can’t place any of it. I find my child-self in the same bedroom every time I visit. She is there, sometimes hiding under the bed. Years ago she wouldn’t come out, but now she does. I tell her she is safe. I tell her it’s okay. I hold her.
In the mornings my cat and I have a routine. She meows and meows and meows and I get up and crawl on the floor and she flops over so I can pet her belly. My cat is scared of most things, but with me she is vulnerable and sweet and sometimes playful. When she gets scared I tell her: it’s okay. I use my sweetest nanny voice. Sometimes when she is on her cat tree staring out the open window a sense of awe overcomes me: this is my life. I am alive. I have a cat. I pay my rent. I am okay.
Even when I am not okay, I am.
From every angle, than feels miraculous most of the time.
When the semester ends I will not have to conference with my students and I will not have to write anymore papers and I will be able to write here more. I think about writing to you often. I want you to know: I am so grateful to you for reading this; for reading anything I write, and I am so grateful that the words I write (and sometimes the words you write in return) connect us. We are connected through these words and that is magical. We are less alone through these words.
Above: The miracle of slime molds.
I am overwhelmed with what I have to do before the semester ends. In three weeks I must write a short story and two papers and teach my classes and attend my classes. But I am also grateful for having enough.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the strange goal of happiness.
Happiness cannot be my goal. Happiness is one note— a smile held so long it appears stretched and no longer makes it to the eyes. If I am not looking for happiness, what am I looking for? Am I looking for anything? Is there anything to look for once my basic needs are met? Once I have friends I can call? Once I have been kissed enough for a whole lifetime? Once I have learned to love myself? Once I can make myself lentil soup? Once I have adjusted to the noise of traffic? Once I have learned to let go of someone else’s road rage and process the imminent danger of being alive? Once I have learned to hold myself in the way no one held me as a child?
What is happiness?
I have been thinking about all the things I have bought.
All the things I have bought throughout my lifetime. The Staub dutch oven I bought with my covid unemployment. The Nespresso machine. Clothes. Furniture. Yarn for knitting I never knitted. Amazon gadgets. Small trinkets from Target. A nice yoga mat.
I have been thinking about these things because I have so few of them now. I left them all in Seattle, and before that, somewhere else. I have been thinking about my decisions and what’s important to me. My tiny apartment now; how I can’t fit anything else in here and wouldn’t have money to do so if I could. All those things I bought could have been other things, or nothing, or a bigger savings account.
I am not thinking of the things so much as the driving mechanism. My Prime account is cancelled and I haven’t bought anything but food in a few months now. I find myself asking: do I need that?
I find myself looking at a material thing and asking: who made that? Where does that come from? What mechanism do I trigger by buying it? How am I participating in our planet’s death?
These thoughts are not self-punishment. They’re not emotional at all. Something happened in me recently that made me understand my own culpability in a way I haven’t before. My attachment not only to comfort but to longing. My misplacement of that longing— thinking it was about something outside of me instead of my heart, and what my heart never got.
My younger self knew. As I got older, I forgot the letters I’d sent about sea turtles and the ozone layer and acid rain. How much I truly cared about the planet. As I got older my focus became on performing a class status I’ve never held, and may never hold.
When my mother died, almost thirteen years ago, she left this behind.
We both grew up poor. Her first, of course.
In my twenties I cared very little about other people’s perceptions of my class status. This was a point of contention for us. We had both grown up with very little, but somehow I had become accustomed to my poverty and learned not to mind what people thought about my falling-apart shoes or thinning stretch pants.
When she married, I was thirteen. My stepfather was upper middle class. We got our first house. I saw what came with that money. What she had signed on for. The fighting and lying and pain. I wanted no part of that life.
When my mother died, almost thirteen years ago, she left an entire house full of the possessions she’d collected, but the house was a rental and the possessions dead weight. Over the course of two years I sold or gave away almost all of her things, partially because they were all etched with the initials of her suicide. She had those things, but when she died her bank accounts were empty, and that empty bank account contributed to her death.
Somehow, although I took those things to Goodwill and had a garage sale and left things behind in houses and apartments until now I have almost nothing to remind me of her; somehow I couldn’t escape the inheritance of her values. This idea that looking poor, that being poor was shameful. I worked thirty hours a week through my undergrad and MFA so I could afford nice clothes and shoes. So I could feel abundant.
But that material abundance robbed me of time.
My PhD stipend will stop in three weeks.
It’s kind of criminal how little we get paid: $19,500 per year, or something like that. We teach four classes, and the university makes, at minimum, $1.2 million dollars off of our labor.
Because of my moves and my surgery I am living paycheck to paycheck, and I have no idea how I will pay rent in June, but I know I will figure it out. I always have. I am resisting the urge to take a summer nanny job, because I want the time, this time.
I want the time to write these newsletters and revise my book. I want the time to feel into my own rhythms. I want to trust that I will figure it out. That something will give in a way it hasn’t given before, because for the first time I am trusting that there is something holding me. I am trusting myself.
And I don’t need more than that. Not nice shoes or clothes. Not Amazon Prime or Target. Nothing but what I have. Health insurance and access to my medication. Outdoor walks. Electricity. Food. That’s enough.
Be on the lookout for The Round House annotated bibliography, Sessions on Friday, and lots more coming soon.
What are you working on, in your writing life or otherwise? I’d love to hear in the comments.
So happy to hear you are able to go on with your life and education despite the pain. Inspiring to all of us. Interestingly I once wrote a long scholarly review paper on Slime Molds. They are pretty miraculous.
Well, you've had quite a first PhD year. I hope the summer gives you some time to rest, and give yourself time to heal from your surgery.
Your discussion about getting rid of a houseful of stuff was interesting. When I lived in SE Asia, I realized the benefits of a simple life. Now, as I spend most of my time working on my book, I am appreciating a very simple life. Although I still own a house that my ex and youngest daughter live in, I live in a little 500 square foot apartment with very little stuff. The great benefit of this place is that it is across the street from the city park where I wrote much of my first book. Now that the weather is warming, I will be spending more time there. I regard it as my living room (I'll send you a picture).
I have a pretty minimal amount of stuff. I do still own stuff in storage or still in the house, but, except for my violins, I probably won't keep any of it.
As a society, we need to learn to live with fewer worldly goods. Most of the world's people live with far less than the average American. Life is just better without the burden of stuff. In Borneo, I had a tiny house with a few pieces of furniture, no air conditioning, and a one-burner stove. It was delightful.
So, race to the end of the semester. take some deep breaths, catch up on your sleep, and forge ahead.