It Don't Matter to Me . . .

It don’t matter to me if you really feel that you need some time to be free, time to go out searching for yourself, hoping to find, time to come to find. It don’t matter to me if you take up with someone who’s better than me, cause your happiness is all I want for you to find. Your piece of mind.

I think Bread was a pussy and completely sublimating his feelings in that song. But I’d kinda like to become schizophrenic for a moment and feel that way about myself instead of my lover. (honey, if you are reading this you may NOT go out and find yourself, please leave that to me, the expert)

I didn’t know this year was going to be transformative when it started. Yet, here it is three quarters gone and things are shifting like a stack of dishes at a tag sale. This summer my old computer died – as in blue-screen-of-death and no –recovery-available-death. My new computer took three weeks to come (and DO NOT tell me to get a Mac – not an option for oh so many reasons). While I waited and fretted and wandered aimlessly through my work days on borrowed computers, I decided to do a “quick” remodel of my studio.

I wish I had pictures. Let’s just say my favorite carpenter, Kevy Duty, ended up here more days than he’d planned. He relies on people like me who have “ideas” and practice the Whim Method of project planning. In order to put in new cabinets and build a spot for a new sewing table I had to clear some things out. An entire Herbie Curbie of things. An emotional landscape that was some kind of treasure map to my true self I have not yet pieced together and daily now struggle with. Thanks a lot Kevy Duty!

I’ve lived many lifetimes already. Just a few of the occupations I’ve had:

• Construction Office Manager
• High School English Teacher
• MFA Student/Research Assistant
• College English Teacher
• Literary Magazine Editor
• Interior Designer
• Technical Writer
• Business Owner
• Poet (published, no less)
• Writer

You get the idea. And it’s not like any of those were short stints. The least amount of time I spent doing anything is a tie at the three years I was an office manager and edited a literary magazine.

In my little narrow studio were the remnants and dregs of all those lives. I threw things away with abandon. What am I ever going to do with Construction Detailing and Dimensions for Designers? I do not need teacher instruction manuals on assertive discipline – anyone who has seen me quell children with just a look knows I no longer need a how-to guide. I had kept every poem ever workshopped in my MFA program – just in case anyone I was in the program with became the next Sylvia Plath. I could just see some big university get all excited over my 9 million drafts of the really terrible early poems of So and So. Out they went. Along with my hand-drawn electrical plans for houses that are now totally out of warranty they were built so many years ago. I threw out catalogs for very hard to find architectural elements. I threw out my film-processing equipment from my minor in Photography. I pitched the beat-up parrot that used to hang in my very first classroom at Redlands High School in California. Out went all the research files for the website I did about the impact of the Civil War on the poetry of Emily Dickinson (far more interesting than it sounds!) I threw away the twenty copies of the lit mag I'd hoarded so I could prove I actually was an editor.

And somehow all that throwing away of the bits and pieces of who I have been set off a chain reaction in my psyche. I’ve been all these really concrete occupations – and experienced success in each of them to some extent.

But then I moved on.

Every job I quit, every career that became too much for me to handle, I left under the idea that I needed more time for writing. Yet, here I am today at the age of 42 with this really strange history of jobs and I’m not much closer to being published than I was ten years ago. I have managed to fail so far at the one thing I’ve really wanted to do all along.

How’s that for a mind-bender.