the habit of being

There’s banging upstairs and my hair is dripping from the shower and the little white dog is curled at my feet. Three out of four overhead lights have burned out. The boxes are piling up. I’ve been taking all my pictures off the walls. Everyone else seems to be buying a condo in Dupont, but I’m moving away to The City and an hour-long commute to a job I don’t have yet.

All I want to do anymore is have my writing published, yet my own potential scares me so much more than the rejection of faceless editors. I read things from age 15, 16, 17, and I know that today does not live up to that promise, in so many ways. I imagine that my creativity, a once-boundless resource which could be tapped at will upon taking up a pen and ridden for hours at a time, wrung out of me drip by drip with every step I took in 2002. I see a great splash of it escape my body with every act of violence I took part in, and every sexual act was an act of violence, and there were so many, many, sexual acts. The meager remaining reservoir is left to evaporate slowly while my mind atrophies under such concerns as work, taxes, paying rent, my credit rating.

But what can be done? How can an adult expect to be able to think freely and abstractly, the way so many smart high school girls can, locked up safe in their rooms with all their books and scattered notes and art supplies, protected from boys and business? I wrote so much more eloquently about love and pain before I had any idea. I didn’t know how sloppy it all is, how messy and unsure and vague, how nauseating and impossible to describe. I didn’t know it was pointless to try. And once you’ve stepped away from that glorious innocence where it is all so intensely pretty and metaphorical, they never let you return to your beautiful notions. I would give anything for just one more beautiful notion, to feel again the way I felt about stillness and science and beauty then.

I can only feel strongly for people now. Instead of art, I make relationships. And falling in love may be nice, but it doesn’t last; it’s not tangible, not like words on a page.

I care more about people than I do about words and it will be the end of me. I can listen to my mother’s stories and hear her in the moment instead of wondering when my next chance to write it all down will be. And maybe this makes me a nicer person, but it will keep me from being the artist I aspired to be. I am not critical, judgmental, political. Maybe it is possible to be too nice to make a difference.

I go around and around with my mother about my future “career.” She is the only person I can have this conversation with, but it’s still so upsetting. We talk about what I should do with my life, but it’s always really about what I should study. The question is whether or not a person is obligated to pursue the thing she does best above all others, even if it fills her with dread.

I see people studying calculus in a movie and get excited about school again, about pouring myself over a problem for hours, about having a clearly defined purpose. The thought of writing essays just makes me feel trapped and afraid. I will never be as “good” at science as I am at literature and the humanities, and maybe that is precisely why it is so appealing.

The creative writing topic just makes me cry. Do you write fiction ever? No. Do you write poetry? No. But…

Somehow we come through that, the academic dilemma, which we’ve been over again and again, and, for once, I realize that the real question isn’t about picking a subject.

If I could have any job, I would be the one who tells scared teenaged girls coming to abortion clinics that it’s okay and they’re going to be alright. That’s it. I could do that all day long and feel like I was really making a difference. Because I would really mean it and really care.

Instead of saying something about money, or returning to the topic of law school, she says she’d actually wanted to do the same thing, that she’d even looked into it after her own abortion, after seeing a fifteen-year-old girl with the most pissed-off looking woman in the world sitting beside her in the waiting room.

My mother says that I would be so good at doing that, because I am so soft.

This isn’t just about getting pregnant when you don’t mean to; that’s just one example of a time when people really need support. It’s about life. It’s about suffering, and surviving. My mother isn’t the first person who’s described me using the word “soft.” It’s especially strange that that particular word tends to come up, because a lot of the sort of “issues” I’ve come against at a young age are the sorts of things which are traditionally thought to “harden” a person.

I think this is what my having the “hard” experiences I’ve had and coming out of them is for.. so that I can empathize with just about any person in any situation without being judgmental. Sometimes, when it comes to seeing the world from someone else’s perspective, there is no substitute for really understanding how very easy it is for a person, any person, to find herself in a whole lot of trouble. (Lucky for me, my mom understands that too. )

When I was a child, as part of her job as a ward secretary and nurse’s aide, my mom often was the first one to talk to patients coming in to Willingway, a hospital for alcohol and drug rehabilitation. Primarily, she just helped put them at ease.
“You think I’m drunk, don’t you?” she’d be asked.
“Of course you’re drunk! If you weren’t drunk, you wouldn’t be here. It’s fine.”

The central premise of yoga philosophy, which appeals to me as well, is that we are all fundamentally okay… we just can’t always see it because of all the drama that gets in the way.

Helping other people get through to their okayness is the thing I want to do. I want to help people give themselves permission to be okay, despite their troubles, memories, and pain. I want to do it through listening to other people’s stories. I want to do it both one-on-one and through writing. I want to do it through movement and touch and talking. And I think a career in therapy might the best possible thing I could do for myself, too, because if there is one thing I know, it is that the only way for me to be “happy” is to get out of my head and do something for somebody else.

Manhattan is outside my window again. I feel like I walked off the pseudo Chinatown bus into a past life. Off the subway at Columbia and into the arms of a girl I went to highschool with. A girl I haven’t seen in years. A city I haven’t seen in years. The rush is the same, only tinted with the slightest nausea. I could have lived here all this time, I keep reminding myself, protected by the skyscrapers and the hurry. I had my favorite pizza at Rockefeller Center (Two Boots “Earth Mother with Cheese”), and spent hours looking at notebooks and stationary at my favorite Japanese bookstore (Kinokuniya).

I got off the subway at 8th and Broadway and walked around in a daze - all these places I used to walk by everyday, places I hadn’t thought of in so long. I half-expected to run into someone I knew at every corner I turned. I didn’t, of course; I never knew very many people. I wondered into the NYU bookstore, and into the Psychology building, where I used to work. I took the elevator right up to the old lab, got hugged, left again. I took my first class at the Jivamukti Yoga Center, and came back for the lab meeting sweaty, astounded, and in love.

Marialuisa said I seemed different, older. “I’ve been around,” I said. (Sometimes I think to be an adult is too be a disgrace to all that childhood symbolizes.) She all but offered me a full time job, back at the lab, and Denis bought me dinner, something I hadn’t allowed two years before. There was red wine and tiramisu, and it was a struggle not to tell too much of the story. Working full time for them, I could take classes at NYU part time for free. Of course, there is the slight problem that I still know next to nothing about psychophysics and visual perception, and I’m not exactly cut out to be a research scientist, even if I can hold my own in the company of five PhD’s at an expensive Italian restaurant and in a lab meeting. The Pelli lab is a long, long way from Tranquil Space. So much thinking, so little pink. Maybe next year though. Jivamukti is right around the corner.

I have an interview at the New School tomorrrow. I’ve spent so much money today. It is so easy to pretend this is still my life, that these choices are still open to me somehow. But there’s no way it could be so easy. Life is such a bag of tricks.

Today I bought an origami book for my brother, little notebooks for my mother, a Jivamukti tee for R; I have a closet of a room at Columbia, a group of co-workers in the Village, my old NYUcard in my bag, mascara I’m actually wearing, a 3-day old pedicure, a new Manhattan street map, a very nice pen made for Japanese calligraphy, not to mention the invite to Japan…

A year ago today I was homeless, writing a fifteen page journal entry about a day at Planned Parenthood.