The Climb

I am going to be a prolific writer tonight, which does not say good things about my mental state. I hope this post, however, will counteract the negativity in the last post. For I am askew at the moment not only because of the uncertainties elucidated in that post, but also because I cannot decipher whether those uncertainties are even important.

Today, before I drove to the Oak Island version of my home, I visited a friend. If you know me well enough to spend your precious time reading this blog, then you know who that friend is. Enough said.

As I sit here contemplating my life and as I sat with my friend today, it occurred to me that I am very lucky to be worrying about how I'm going to define my present "home". At this moment, I'm thinking what an asshole I am to be complaining about having to choose from multiple homes when there are people on the planet who do not even have one. It feels like I'm hoarding them. As I sat with my friend today, who fights a daily battle to conquer the mundane life activities which many of the rest of us take for granted, I once again thought, "How dare I depress myself over my perceived 'struggles'? If she's strong enough to wake up every morning and face this frustrating, utterly unfair bullshit, then why the hell am I walking around with my mouth turned upside down and my tail between my legs? Be grateful for all you do have, Megan. Be grateful for this friend, who unknowingly (and, might I add, knowingly, through her writing) reminds you of what is important. Be grateful for all the people who answer the phone when you call for help. Be grateful for the freedom to even worry about these things you're so worried about."

I could launch into several paragraphs about how this friend is an inspiration to me, my friends, her family, all of us. But for several reasons, I will not. Most of all, I might never stop writing. Secondly, it would embarrass her, and she'd destroy me at arm wrestling next time I visit. But seriously, the fact is that she never asked for her lot in life. None of us did. If I'm going to sit here feeling sorry for the privileges with which I've been blessed, then I don't even deserve to have those privileges. My friend perseveres every day so that she can overcome this horribly traumatic wrench that life has thrown her way - because she is the type of person who knows no differently. The point is that I have the choice to either follow her lead and battle through my own stuff or spend time feeling bad about the caliber of importance my stuff has in comparison to hers - or anyone else's.

So the point I'm trying to make, I think, is that things just aren't fair, and until I learn to accept that, I won't be getting anywhere. Feeling lousy because my battles aren't tough enough one second and lousy because they seem too tough the next is simply unproductive and results in a lot of...lousiness. This is where I take my cue from my friend. As amazing as she has been throughout this whole terrible ordeal, she's also been absolutely human. She's been understandably angry, indescribably confused, utterly fearful. And still, for the past 8.5 months, she has been uncommonly patient as she slowly rebuilds all of the pieces of her body that no one had ever thought could become so unglued. Through all of those unsettling feelings of weakness, she has fought.

It is THIS that I learn today. As nasty as things may get around me, I cannot afford to float. I don't have that luxury - none of us do. Life, in all its undulations, is at once beautiful and appalling. Things might not even happen for a reason, after all. Perhaps they just happen, and it's our job to figure out how to make it all work, whatever our circumstances. I think I like the latter approach to life better, as it suggests the necessity for active participation in determining our fates. Even if it's wrong, and we could just sit idly and watch the world go by, what's the use (or fun...or humanity) in that? Perhaps this is the reason we struggle so mightily, even though the payoff is never guaranteed and always limited to the remainder of a lifetime.

To the friend who is the subject of this post - I of course say thank you. Not just because you fight every day to regain life as you (and those who love you) know it. But because you do so honestly, and because while you grit your teeth in battle, you smile. You had a deeper understanding than any of us about the REALLY important things in life long before this ridiculousness happened to you, and you were already busy teaching us. You didn't need to fight a battle to become the person everyone looked to - you already were.

Come Home

My slacker self still has a few posts to make to round out the Japan blog, but life has unsurprisingly intervened in the meantime. And thus I find it necessary to resurrect this blog. Writing seems to be the best remedy when I'm on the verge of relocating to a hole in the ground.

I'm feeling particularly sorry for myself at the moment, and it sort of sucks, as I'd been feeling pretty solid over the past few days of familiar Durham debauchery and heart to hearts with Duke buddies. As my mom always used to say whenever I got my head down, "this too shall pass," (or, depending on the situation, "JUST DIVE ON THE FLOOR LIKE WOJO!!!!") and she tended to always be right. Regardless, it still sucks in the moment.

"It" is the fact that I just arrived at home. "Home" began to take on an entirely new meaning when I started my freshman year of college. Not only did my heart, mind, and thus...mouth...begin to confuse college as "home", but my family moved that summer from the only city I'd ever really known as home. Of course, we all went "home" for Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks, but calling Oak Island "home" was a matter of convenience for me. I knew no one other than my family and our rotating menagerie of animals, and thus more accurately felt like I was on vacation instead of home. "Vacation" was still good. I'd arrive at my house, sometimes just for a weekend, greeted by my dogs and cats and my mother with a margarita in hand for me. Unlike at school, I didn't have to worry about hunting down my next meal (not that Duke Food Points didn't make things brainlessly easy as it was). My mom, who complained bitterly throughout my childhood about the mountains of laundry burying her on weekends, would OFFER to do my laundry. I'd vegetate in front of our big screen TV, go out to a few restaurants and movies with the family, and otherwise do absolutely nothing. The house was basically a resort hotel, and I tended to get used to it pretty quickly and sometimes even dread heading back to the Gothic Wonderland (that feeling usually passed as soon as I'd get back and run into 600 friends, all ready to cause some trouble). Regardless, the house...what most people would refer to as my "home", was ultimately relaxing.

By the end of college, when signing my lease for my new apartment in Durham, I knew the city so well and had so many friends around that I had frequently started to confuse it as "home". Then Mom died, and I truly learned what it meant to feel slightly out of place...everywhere. Potential homes at that point included 1) Gastonia, a place that had not at all agreed with my parents and with which I was so out of touch by that point that it could only be described as "home" if one appended "town", 2) Durham, a city I knew well, full of friends and my dear alma mater, but also the location of Mom's last breath, and too recent an acquisition in my life to shake the "adopted" prefix from "home", and 3) Oak Island, the location of the house I loved but had never really lived in, the "home" of my father, sister and pets, but lacking too many connections to really ever become anything more than my "home" preceded by "vacation". And with the loss of Mom, the word "vacation" silently slipped from my vocabulary altogether.

Fast forward to December. I added another potential "home" to the mix, admittedly with the hope of making it fit into that four-letter word without any qualifying appendages. 4) Boston. Location of my attempt at jump-starting in the year AM 1.5, or A year and a half After Mom. Its most appealing initial quality was its difference from everything. Mom didn't die there. She didn't live there, either. I didn't go to school there. Or grow up there. Or vacation there as a kid. It was almost purely as Augustana croons, a place "where no one knows my name." I could have a fresh start off my couch in Durham, in a big city full of 20-somethings and opportunities. The Red Sox. The American Revolution. New England at my fingertips. Also bitterly cold in December, but nowhere's perfect. Boston was the Promised Land, and to top it all off, I was starting out with some friends, including one of my very best. Things were going to be perfect.

It seems to be a theme in life, however, that expectations are the root of much evil. Assuming I could dive headfirst into Boston...and postbac predental school...and snow shoveling...and "Masshole" abruptness...and come up swimming a perfect Butterfly stroke without first desperately treading water was STUPID on my part. I have, indeed, diagnosed a pattern in my life that involves blindly diving into things headfirst: Exhibit A - My first trip abroad, at 14, to play soccer with strangers in Sweden and Finland (couldn't I have just taken a nice family trip to Canada?), Exhibit B - My first job as a camp counselor, looking after a cabin of 8 severely disabled teenaged girls (shouldn't I have just done like, a soccer day camp first?), Exhibit C - My first trip to India, to the very southern tip, to work construction, in the middle of the summer (so many convoluted things about this that I'll pass on explicating...) I'd done all of these things on a whim, without really considering their consequences, and they'd all turned out for the best, enhanced my life, made me a more marketable, compassionate, interesting person. So, why not Boston, too? What I failed to recognize about Boston was that it required an entire, and permanent, change in my life. It wasn't just a summer event, or study abroad, or even a job I could quit. It was verging on a new life, with of course the safety net that I already had some friends and could always call on people back "home" (wherever that was). In any case, I dove in headfirst, so blinded by my "wisdom" and excitement about jump-starting my life again that I failed to notice I was diving head-first into the shallow end of the pool. I promptly smashed my head against the concrete floor and floated along, rather breathless, for awhile. Thankfully, those Boston friends and those "home" friends sitting around the pool took turns holding my head above water, and I have thus survived. But not without a pretty nasty welt on my head and a few battle scars on my ego.

That's it for the metaphor, I promise. Anyway, on to today. I arrive on my island, my quiet little (boring, yet beautiful) island. I've missed the NC coast. Maine and Massachusetts are pretty, but they can't match the NC coast. It smells like marshland. I look up to the sky and yes, there are the stars. One can forget they exist in the city. I walk into my house, am greeted by a barrage of puppy kisses and kitty meows...the welcoming committee that can always be counted on. I head upstairs to say hello to my own cats, Journey and India, who I'd abandoned for a month and a half for my Japan trip. Journey essentially says, "HI, MOM!!!!" India stares at me disapprovingly, but throws me a bone and reluctantly lets me pet her for a second. She'll forgive me, but she's going to make me pay for my sins first. And then I make the mistake of looking up. This was Mom's room. It contains nearly all of Mom's stuff. I rarely go up here anymore, so the shock of this room hasn't worn off like the shock of her car or the shock of the house as a unit. 26 months later, to the date, and I still can't stand in this room. I'm really pissed and I have to leave, shaking my body as I close the door as if that physical act is somehow going to shake the disturbance off.

"Home." I've confused the term so much in my own head that I have to clarify it for people now. To those in Boston, me going "home" from the bar means, obviously, my apartment in Boston. Me flying "home" means Duke and Durham. I keep having to remind people that I'm not actually from Durham. I'm "from" Oak Island. But not really. I moved there. I "grew up" in Gastonia. (Except I'm now also beginning to question whether I've actually completed the process of "growing up.") To those in Durham, "home" means whoever's apartment I'm staying at, or Boston, or Oak Island, or back to Charlotte and Gastonia. When I leave Oak Island, there is no doubt I'll at some point describe the trip as "going home" to Boston.

I used to count these many versions of "home" as a gift. I mean, home is a good thing - multiples of it must be even better, right? The truth, I am finding, seems not to be so simple. This confusion has become, I am realizing acutely on this trip, a serious problem. Maybe even the central problem. Multiple friends in Durham: "When are you coming home?" as in Durham, or at least NC. They all see this Boston thing as an experiment, I guess, and they're not altogether incorrect. Texts from friends in Boston: "When are you coming home?" as in Boston. My actionable daily life resides in Boston at the moment, and there is no reason for any of them to think my home is anywhere else. My dad on the phone, as I vacillate on when I'm driving to the coast from Durham and Charlotte: "When are you coming home?" as in Oak Island. What remains of my family is in Oak Island, my house is there, my dogs are there. It's where I'm expected for Christmas. Clearly, to my dad, it's my home. The reality is so much more complicated for me that I feel out of place in all of these homes. I have constructed Durham in my head as my past and my current guilty pleasure. It's like a drug that I go back to when I don't want to deal with real life anymore. I relax in Durham more than anywhere else; I am more myself there than anywhere else. But I can't hang on to the past there and I can't live in a place where I have to pass the ER where my mom died on a regular basis. Not to mention, the friends are slowly dispersing. Boston. I'm not a Northerner, never will be. I'm dreading winter and I miss Bojangles'. My accent is funny and noticeable there. I'd hoped to find a niche this past spring with school, but that was not to be. I still feel like I'm grasping at straws, trying to find the one that leads to oxygen. As a result, I try too hard in Boston and am less than myself in the process. My behavior is erratic and often inexplicable to those I care about the most. I run the risk of running off those same people who saved me from drowning in the kiddie pool. I'm reduced at this point to floating in Boston as I had been in Durham, unless I can pull up some major bootstraps. Oak Island. Lonely, too many physical reminders of Mom, zero friends. Also, I realized today at a gas station that I suddenly feel more out of place in Podunk, Dirty South than in Portland, ME. Tattoos and country twang proved more of a culture shock than anything in Japan. I immediately caught myself thinking, "I don't want to raise my kids in this environment." Of course, to stave off this pessimistic roll I'm on, I also feel in some part "at home" in all of these places (and in my childhood home around Charlotte as well).

It's as if I'm a teenager again, trying to figure out where the hell I belong in this mess. Multiple homes is not so cute an idea anymore. I'm not against finding a piece of home in multiple places, but I need desperately to find one that will take a clear lead. None of this wishy-washy bullshit. The Japanese seemed to love superlatives, bestowing them upon everything from Buddha to the longest wooden hall. In this, as in much of their philosophy, I'm beginning to think they're correct in believing there is something sacred and important and stabilizing about calling something the "best." It's a decisive identifier, and "decisive" is something I could use right now about as much as "home." And so the search begins, or now consciously continues, for my best home.