Where Have I Been, Where Am I Going?
It's been nearly seven months - seven months! - since my last letter.
I notice I ended my last one with, "coming soon...", and then nothing came soon.
Let us begin again.
From about this time last year to now has been one of the strangest, most stressful and scary seasons of life for me and my husband. At this time last year we were on year two of underemployment, nearly out of money with no prospects on the horizon, and no clear direction of what to do about any of it. The work on my book and its publishing schedule had trickled months and months and months past what I'd expected and planned for. My husband was in the midst of a sort of career crisis of his own. Both our situations were born of some combination of external factors and burnout and life stage and our individual limitations as far as available work we were willing and able and qualified to do.
It...was terrifying.
And for me, at least, it coincided with an ever shifting change of faith. Prayer was no comfort. I had no sense of "things will work out." I would find myself awake in the wee hours with no idea how this was all going be resolved. Unlike people in truly impoverished conditions, I knew we had a safety net of family (there is a huge difference between being broke and being poor) but it was not where we expected to be at this age and stage of life. I think this all was a little harder or hard in a different way for me, as I grew up in economic instability and have arduously dug my way out of it in adulthood only to see it on the horizon again.
I felt like we were failing. I felt like we'd made wrong turns, choices we couldn't undo. Many, many times I thought, I shouldn't have gone all-in with writing. Now, what if I can't or don't want to do that anymore? I've been out of the regular job market for 12 years for the decade before that, all I worked toward was writing. What have I done?
I share this now because perhaps someone is reading this, going through something similar, and feeling like a failure. We tend to look at each other's social media presence or list of accomplishments or lives from the outside and think, "Cool, everyone else has mastered adulthood and life must be great for other people, I just suck." No, you don't.
But while we were in the worst of it, I did not really share this with anyone but my husband who was in it with me - and I did not share everything with him because he had his own stuff to work out. This is my usual m.o. I don't tend to share until I'm out the other side of something, and while we're still somewhere in the middle of it in a lot of ways, we at least have found some ground under our feet. My husband found a job where he thrive again. I found a business writing gig (thank you, Carrie) to do along side my own writing. I did a little MFA teaching and have more of that lined up as I work with my friend and peer Bryan Bliss to develop a YA track for the Seattle Pacific University's Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program (it's low-res! you could apply!).
At the same time, so much is still unknown. We cannot afford to live where my husband's job is (the Bay Area). We don't feel stable enough to sell our SLC place right now and really move. I divide my time between SLC and SF. I miss my husband when we aren't together. When we are together, I miss my friends, I miss having my own kitchen, I miss the relative low-key vibe of SLC. We miss our furniture and our Google Fiber. We sit in camp chairs in my in-laws' downstairs and do our work in coffee shops and libraries.
Some days it feels like an adventure and a lifestyle choice and full of things to be grateful for. Some days it feels more like the 2 am "life is off the rails" anxiety of last spring. But we're here, we're alive, we have love and friendship and work in our lives.
And, an abundance of natural beauty to support us, both in CA and UT. We have come to love and need and appreciate the beauty of the created world so, so much. Watching the day by day and hour by hour changes of the color of the ocean, seeing a whale spout, watching a Great Blue Heron stand perfectly still, hearing birdsong, smelling eucalyptus, admiring a tree shaped by the coastal winds, feeling fog on our faces one day and sun on our skin the next, noticing the changing light as the day begins and the day ends...it's all an incredible marvel and the primary way I feel any sense of God these days.
My spring 2020 YA novel is about wrapped up and, as always, it feels like a miracle. Along with all the day to day practicalities of our lives, I feel my writing life in a transition now that that's done. I'm still in the middle of this feels-too-long process of moving from what was to what will be. I think this is what midlife is and I don't know where it will all come out.
And yet, I do feel an increasing sense of receiving or beginning to receive some of the gifts on my birthday list. The gifts are coming wrapped in a package I wouldn't have chosen, but isn't that just the way it is sometimes.