“And Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.”
Greetings from Texas! My family and I have been down here at my in-law’s for a little over a week to celebrate the holidays. We have come down for the last three years in a row, and now it’s a bit of a family tradition. I really enjoy being down here—they have a gorgeous property in a town called New Braunfels outside of San Antonio—and the weather itself makes us briefly consider making the move nearly every time we visit. But alas, human attachments to our hometown, et cetera.
Moving along: I have always deeply envied those people who can just pick up and move to New Zealand or Hawaii or wherever else—I don’t know if it’s bravery they have, or perhaps lack of reason to stay put, or something else more magical entirely, but I intend to cultivate it one of these days. (My ultimate fantasy generally involves a tiny house and a rooftop vegetable garden—but fitting my husband and two small children into 400 sq ft of space seems a little less than sustainable. For now, I am resigned to living in a spacious house in the burbs with a beautiful kitchen and a massive deck. Poor me.)
I did live in Atlanta once, briefly, the year after I graduated high school. I’ve been thinking about my time there a lot lately, actually. It all seems kind of surreal—in retrospect, anyway. Storytime: In 2010, I managed to get myself kicked out of a small liberal arts university where I was studying art. My mom drove down to pick up my bedding and lamps and whatnot, and left me outside the campus (from which I had been banned) with a bag of clothes and a list of homeless shelters. I like to refer to this period in my life as “the time I was homeless in Atlanta,” but in reality I was only legit homeless for a few hours. A girl that I had met down there, Sam, offered to take me in. Her house wasn’t in Atlanta, technically, but in a little town outside of the city called Lithia Springs. Lil Nas X was born there, actually. Anyway, I lived on Sam’s couch for a few months. And when I say I lived there, I mean I was literally the guy on the couch. I’m pretty sure entire weeks would pass without me going outside. I had no place to go. No phone, no car, no money, no options. Six teenagers, plus me, lived there together—it was a strange symbiotic social network: two of the girls worked at Papa John’s and all of us pretty much subsisted off of the leftover pizzas they brought home, someone always kept beer in the fridge, Sam kept the lights on and the water running, and the rest of us tried to pitch in when and how we could. The details of my time here are kind of fuzzy in my memory—I did my best to keep the house clean, I believe. I remember that two of the guys who lived there were “rappers”—mattress foam bedroom recording studio and all. One of them had the full name of a particular brand of whiskey, and we had a remarkably brief and hateful romance. I remember being entirely alone on Christmas day, drinking Mountain Dew in the bathtub and burning myself with cigarettes. I remember that the cold followed me down to Georgia, and several of my roommates saw snow for the first time that December. I remember shaving off my hair in the bathroom with a pink Lady Bic. I remember tagging along to a New Year’s Eve party, and at midnight when everyone else was cheering and kissing I looked around the room and didn’t know a single person there… I think that this was the exact moment wherein I felt the most alone my entire life, and I think I vowed to myself that night that I would never be so alone ever again.
Tonight is New Year’s Eve again—nine years away from this memory—and very little about my life is still the same. This past decade has been a remarkable evolution in my life, to say the least. I vividly remember the house party I was at ten years ago tonight, drunk, ringing in this decade with my then-boyfriend. I was a senior in high school, and substance abuse and emotional turmoil were the name of the game. Tonight, I’m over four years away from my last drink. I’m married with two children, on Christmas vacation at my in-law’s house, looking forward to starting my new job as a hospital technician next week. I spent my afternoon carefully curating a financially efficient meal plan and grocery list for the upcoming week, and I very well might not make it up to midnight. I suspect that at some point in the middle of the night I’ll wake up to my oldest daughter climbing into bed with me, and if I’m lucky, she might even take off her pull-up beforehand and pee on me in her sleep.
Outwardly, I frequently laugh at myself and say that I must be old now—but really, I guess I’ve just finally reached a place of contentment and self-awareness that no longer requires all of the lights and thrills that I once needed to feel alive (albeit under somewhat forceful circumstances). Today, talking to my sister-in-law about books and making future vacation plans with my husband does it for me just as much as high heels and vodka once did. Although there is admittedly something mildly uncomfortable about saying this aloud—I feel like I’m announcing a premature retirement and throwing in the towel on my youth, even more so being as that I was the first of my friends to get married, have kids, or stop drinking, which no one (least of all myself) would ever have predicted—there is nevertheless a grace and simplicity to my life today that I never imagined I would have. Sometimes I struggle to live in gratitude for this life I have today, with all of its stress and restriction—and yet, this is where I always manage to land: there is nowhere else I’d rather be tonight than under this blanket, stone cold sober, using a pug as a footwarmer.
Still, I find it so easy to sink into a strange and sometimes dark place of remembrance. It’s like a ball pit that has no bottom, and eventually you lose sight of the daylight and forget where you are. I do that a lot, if we’re being honest—disassociate from the present and get lost in memories, so much so that my emotional reality gets stuck in the past. There is just such a stark contrast between the life I used to live and the life I live today that at times I find it difficult to reconcile that the same person has existed in both worlds. Sometimes it’ll take my three-year-old daughter running up on me and asking me to help her go potty to snap me out of it (sorry for the recurring theme of potty training, it’s a whole thing) and remember that I am no longer a quasi-homeless 19-year-old.
Thus, I have a deeply resentful relationship with my capacity for memory and my deep emotional attachments to it. It has been the cause of several fights with my husband, as well as the emerging central theme of my forthcoming collection of poetry. Deep down, I just want to be an entity that exists entirely within the present moment—someone who doesn’t get sad about things that happened nine years ago, and who doesn’t experience anxiety over things that are yet to come. (How idealist of me, yea?)
I feel that my generation in particular is the first to be put at such a grave disadvantage in this respect: I suspect that it was easier for our parents to grow up and focus on what was in front of them and let the past go than it seems to be for many people my age today—because, well, social media. I have instant access to photos of myself from that New Year’s Eve party ten years ago, and I’m still Facebook friends with more than half the people who were there. I feel like we all get so caught up in who we have been, and it’s so easy for us to not have to let go of anyone or anything—we wonder how and why we are this way, and I believe that this culture of constant self-review is the answer. Thus begins and ends my love-hate relationship with social media: I don’t have to lose any memory, good or bad.
It’s taken me a long time to see that the pain of my past wasn’t home—it was just a detour along the way. The trauma that I endured seemed to have had a Stockholm-like effect on me—I was determined to be strong, so I convinced myself that I was happy and belonged where I was and that the things I endured were normal. I made myself at home in every low place that I found myself. The journey to where I am today has been a largely psychological one, mostly of teaching myself that just because something feels familiar, it doesn’t mean that it’s where I belong.
For those of us that grew up in dysfunctional homes and watched people in dysfunctional relationships, that dysfunction feels more like a home than any sort of genuine peace or happiness or understanding. However, I am here to tell myself and everyone else here that we all deserve that peace, that happiness, that understanding—and above all, the healing that we need to truly believe and accept this notion.
Tonight, I think over the last ten years of my life. I hold each of them with gratitude for bringing me to where I am today, and for helping me to become who I am. And I lay them to rest behind me, to the best of my ability. Instead of looking back, as I so often do, I want to rewire myself to look forward. The future that awaits me is so much more full than the past which I’ve already lived—there is no revising or editing of the things I’ve already done and said, there is only the shaping of the things I’ll do and say tomorrow. I want to invest my energy into my future, my happiness, and my growth—throwing it blindly over my shoulder is a waste, and that’s what I’m doing every time I find myself living in a memory. So, everytime I catch myself being needlessly remorseful or reminiscent, I’m going to consciously redirect my energy into instead daydreaming about the future. I’ve read enough books about the power of energy and intention to realize the power of my thoughts, and so I’m making a deal with myself to steer mine in a more positive direction.
As I’m already a person that’s constantly setting grandiose and unrealistic goals for myself, I’ve decided that instead of setting “resolutions” for myself this year (to be a 130 lb vegan who reads a book every week and wakes up at 5am and goes for a run every morning), I’m simply going to hold space for intention. Tonight, I am holding space to be more grounded in the present—because, ten years from tonight, I’ll have a teenager and a pre-teen, and I don’t want to look back on this brand-new decade before me and see that I spent the precious days of their childhoods fretting over nonsense that was out of my hands either way.
So, this is the intention that I hold for myself and everyone tonight: to find both gratitude and gravity in the present moment. To spend more time looking at people’s faces than into screens. To find the strength to be more honest and vulnerable with myself and others. And to look forward instead of backward.
Mahalo.
A photo a year, my decade in review:
2010 — Atlanta, GA - I wore those pants for over a month. Few photos exist of this year otherwise.
2011 — St. Louis, MO, Luke & Johan’s old apartment - I got a chest tattoo and began the restaurant grind.
2012 — Webster University, Spring Break - everyone in this photo is on shrooms.
2013 — Pepper’s Bar, literally all the time. School, work, and vodka sodas.
2014 — Mandarin, CWE - still drunk, but pretending to be classy.
2015 — Dunaway Books, sober poet.
2016 — Three’s Company ❤️
2017 — I love you all so much 👰🏻
2018 — And anotha’ one.
2019 — Gulf Shores, AL - family vacation 🏖