My computer died.

I feel like I’ve lost a friend.

Mal came into my life 7 years ago, when my laptop was stolen out of my apartemt while I was out of town because my roommate left our apartment unlocked.

He has been with me ever since.

He was named after Capt. Malcom Reynolds of Firefly. He had his Serenity moment. Two years ago I spilled a huge cup of ice water all over him. I toddled down to the Apple store in Bethesda, hoping they could retrieve my files for me, and when the blueshirt plugged him into their system he came back to life, completely uncorrupted and ready to go. I laughed at the shocked face of the young man. In stuttering sentences he told me that he had never seen something like that happen before and he couldn’t believe it.

I have no hope this time. Mal was fine when I used him the other day. This morning, preparing myself to answer work emails, and fight of a migraine from answering work emails, there was no life in him. He gave up the ghost sometime in the night.

I want to cry. And More than looking at my meager savings I see that I don’t even have half of what I need to replace him. I feel real sadness in my heart. For a computer. Which makes me want to punch myself. It is just a rectangle of metal and plastic after all.

But Mal has been through all the changes in my life. He was the one thing that every time I moved always came with me. I can’t even say that about the framed photograph of my father, who died almost 19 years ago.

I wrote graduate school papers on Mal. I failed to finish graduate school papers on Mal. I applied for jobs I didn’t want and didn’t get, as well as the job that I love on Mal. I showed television shows that I adored to friends on Mal. He stored the history of my horrid taste in music (which is all safely kept on the backup drive, thank you very much). I made worksheets, lesson plans, awards, games, and conference reports all on Mal. (Also saved externally, I’m not a total idiot, even if I sound like one right now.)

More than anything, Mal was my savior in early sobriety. On Mal I wrote emails filled with fear, pain, hope, prayer, and a whole lot of nonsense to friends and family who patiently and lovingly supported me through I time when I didn’t know if I was going to live or not. I sat with him for hours, pouring out the poison that had destroyed my mind, ruined my body, and damaged my soul. Through him I read words of comfort and encouragement, strength and peace, without which I would not have survived. Alcoholism took my words and Mal helped me get them back.

And so I’m crying, like a giant dumbass, for a computer. For a tool that can give no more back than what I put into it. But what I put into it is that which was devestated, and what I could back was that which thrives.

(2 Years, 10 Months, and 23 Days Sober)

(Sorry about the retroactive posting!  This happened on 6/11/14)

There was a tiny moment of panic as we turned onto the Pennsylvania Turnpike. What are we doing?  I’m sure the panic was even more so for Margaret, you know, leaving the place she grew up and had lived most of her adult life.  I was just going on vacation, and would be returning to my apartment, job, and friends at the end of August, regardless of how it all  worked out.

It’s funny, I’ve moved around a bit.  But always out of desperation or fear.  I moved to Texas because I had to go to college and the University of Dallas was the only place that accepted me.  There wasn’t a lot of choice involved in that.  But, I’ve never considered that a bad thing.  I’m not great at making choices that are good for me, and left up to me, I wouldn’t have gone to UD.  I was supposed to be there, it was a key to the plan for me, and so God simply took away all my other options so that I followed the only path available to me.  I’ve always thought it was pretty nice of God to make that so easy for me.  But the moves since then (from Dallas to DC, from DC to Portland, from Portland to DC) were not so much the natural progression of one phase of my life into another, but rather the wild flailing of a person trying to escape.  So while I could sort of imagine what Margaret was going through crossing the boarder from Maryland to Pennsylvania, my own experience wasn’t the same.

I hope someday it can be.

You see, the moment I saw the sign “You Are Leaving Maryland” I took a deep breath for the first time in I don’t know how long.  I could feel the difference, as if there had been someone sitting on my chest who’d suddenly decided to take a hike.  I knew it wasn’t just relief that a long school year was over, or excitement about trying something new.  It was a confirmation of what I’d suspected for a long time and hadn’t been ready to admit.

I don’t belong in DC.  And I never will.  Because I don’t want to.

While I love my friends, my job, and some of the advantages of living in the DC metro area, I do not love it there.  The culture tends to be frantic, self-involved, and shallow.  And I see those traits creeping across myself, peeking out in places I don’t want them.  I feel vaguely uncomfortable no matter where I am or what I’m doing, in a way that has no better explanation than “I don’t belong here.”  Every so often I am overcome with a sense of being smothered, a burning desire to run in the night with no explanation to anyone.  I start researching the most un-DC places that I could move and the feeling eases a bit (but never passes entirely) and I chock the whole thing up to stress.  But even when I think as clearly as possible about my future and settling permanently in DC I am always aware of the feeling of wrongness inside me.  I mean, FFS, I’ve lived there a total of almost 5 years, and in my mind it’s still an experiment.

Sitting next to Margaret I realized that I want to be able to leave DC in the next 3 years, and to leave it with her sense of purpose, rather than my own sense of fear.

The sun followed us through Pennsylvania.  Aside from a stop for lunch, a picnic in a parking lot, we didn’t really stop in the Keystone State.  I admit, I was a bit concerned by the signs every few miles along the road that said “FALLING ROCK.”  Why, exactly, was the rock falling all over the place in this state?  Should I be worried that we’d be hit by rock falling from nowhere?

We weren’t hit by any falling rock.

Nor in Ohio when when we crossed into it.

After some prompting from Margaret, I kind of figured out how to find a campsite online, and managed to make a reservation.  Seriously, I had no idea what I was supposed to be looking for, or asking about when I called these places.  And then I managed to get the address wrong, so we drove around the same couple miles of Akron Ohio for almost an hour.  “Learning experience” doesn’t even begin to cover it.

But we made it eventually, to Portage Lakes State Park.

The campsite we were assigned was a bit buggy, wet and soulless, so Margaret investigated the other sites, since we were almost the only people there, and picked a slightly more scenic spot.

Sadly, there was nothing we could do about the fact that it had rained that day and the mosquitoes were having a party.  When Margaret pulled the small bag about the size of a croquet set out of the back of the car and announced that from it would spring a tent that would shelter us both, I has the overpowering desire to cry “bullshit!”  But really, what was I going to do at that point?  Of course, the tent fit us both and Margaret was very patient showing me how to set it up.

We were eaten alive by the mosquitoes, due to the damp and lack of proper firewood we never got much of a fire going, and the were fucking huge spiders in the port-a-potty.  I’m pretty sure it was a textbook example of what people call “immersion therapy.”

I’ve been back in Portland a little over a week.

It’s more difficult than I was expecting.

First and foremost, I forgot just how much I HATE looking for a job.  I mean, hate it.  It would be a great sense of relief to my current bosses if they knew just how much I despise job hunting, for they could rest assured that only total disaster would make me up and quit.  I never really know where to look, I feel like an idiot asking people about help wanted signs, I’m either overqualified or underqualified for everything (no, I don’t have a Master’s in international public policy, and no, I don’t have an Oregon Food Handler’s License), I always fuss too much with my hair or my makeup or my clothes, so I look really uncomfortable, and mostly I just don’t know what to say.  Somehow, “I’m not an idiot and I’d like money, so please hire me” doesn’t quite inspire the confidence that you would think it would.

I have to remember to calm myself down.  I’m not destitute, I’m not going to get thrown out on the streets or starve.  I didn’t work last summer, and that was a huge mistake, but I managed to muddle through.  I wonder how I’ll feel about that muddling through business when I’m 55?  I feel that panic sitting in my chest, the “holy shit, I’m always going to be broke as a joke” panic.

In fact, I was feeling a whole lot of panic last night, and not just the financial kind.

This summer is the longest amount of time I’ve spent in Portland, at my mother’s home, in about 4 years.  And it is the absolute longest time I’ve spent here sober.  At least, since I was 12.  And even in a week, hell within a day, I could see all those old habits taking over.  Looking around at the expectation that I would somehow have the answers to problems that pre-date my birth, at the necessity to run interference between people who suck at expressing themselves, at the overwhelming list of physical tasks and improvements that someone needs to take care of, I slipped right back into silence and solitude.  I hid in my bedroom and read crappy books, feeling trapped by past habits and desire for a different future.  It’s not resting, it’s resentment.

Now, I am realizing just how physically spent I was after this school year, and that I need much more sleep than I was getting for months.  Between the stress, the complete lack of physical activity, my exceptionally poor pre-WW diet, and a list of excuses as wide as my waistline, I’m not in the best physical state at the moment, and when I set my alarm for what I think is a perfectly appropriate hour, I often sleep for more.  But, I’ve gotten better over the years at telling the difference between what is physical and what is emotional being expressed through the physical.  Or maybe I just think I have.

Sometimes you just have to deal with the fact that other people don’t want what you want.  I want to go berry picking, I think it would be fun, and we’d get berries out of it!  No one in my family wants to go berry picking.  And my suggestion that this would be a fun, outdoor activity is treated as a burdensome demand from a spoiled child.  Now, everyone in my family, me included for sure, has tonal difficulty.  We’re not careful with our tone and often hurt each other unnecessarily.  But the fundamental problem might be that what I want isn’t what others want.

I want my life to be fun.

I wanted that before.  I always wanted that when I was drinking.  I was trying to make fun out of something that wasn’t fun for me.  I was caught up in what was supposed to be fun, desperate to avoid admitting that it wasn’t.  In the hard work of early sobriety, the concept of life being fun gets pushed a bit to the background.  But in recent months I’ve started to have those doubts again, the feeling that I’m bored, restless, and awfully uninspired by my own choices.  And that I will always be that way, because I was born for a life of work without relief.  I blame it on money, or time, or tiredness.  And then I hear all those same excuses out of my family, and I want to scream.  At them, but mostly at myself.  

Last night I was dejectedly chopping potatoes for dinner.  My mom wasn’t feeling well and was put out with me for asking her if she wanted dinner.  My brother wandered into the kitchen, asked when dinner would be ready, but didn’t offer any assistance.  And I just wanted to cry.  Cry because it was like being 14 again, taking responsibility for what I considered basic tasks of life that no one else could be bothered with, and being treated like that was my place.  As the timer counted down I made a decision.  When dinner was finished I grabbed my purse, told everyone they could eat whenever, and split.  I walked 30 blocks to a meeting and snuck in, late and sweaty, to a room full of strangers.

It was a birthday celebration for the two leaders.  And they were wearing hats and garlands.  I was shocked at first, but then everyone that spoke thanked them for being so lighthearted, for reminding the room that we have to laugh at ourselves, that we have to remember to have fun.  It took me a while, but I eventually relaxed.  I let myself remember that I’m not beholden to my old habits, and that what I want from my life is possible, but it might not be possible within someone else’s context.  I don’t mean that to sound as if I give myself license to be selfish and think only of what will make me happy.  Rather, it gave me the space to realize that maybe my family couldn’t understand my desire to do things that I think will be fun instead of sitting around the house watching TV every single night, because they haven’t been in the place where there is only despair surrounding you.  Seeing happy, smiling, grateful people in all stages of recovery reminded me that sometimes the communication between myself and my family, especially about my reawakened desire to be moving, out, DOING, isn’t that they don’t love me, but rather, they don’t understand that being rid of the years upon years of despair it is important to me not to waste the second-chance I was given.

And boredom is a waste.

So, as always when reality slaps my expectations, it is up to me to decide if it is what I want or how I’m going about getting what I want that is unrealistic.  As usual, it’s my approach.  Time for a little tinkering.

(2 Years, 9 Months, and 10 Days Sober)

So I haven’t updated along the trip because of poor reception and my battery keeps dying, but so far it’s been amazing.

We’ve been through Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and now we’re in South Dakota for the night.

It rained all last night and I was a complete bitch about it. I thought Margaret was going to smack me. I would have deserved it.

I can put up the tent all on my own now, am slightly sunburned, but no more than normal, and in a few days will have earned a free coffee from McDonald’s.

And today we saw this:

All in all, not too bad.

(2 Years, 8 Months, and 25 Days Sober)

We did a practice pack of Margaret’s car tonight.

This is really going to happen.

Yikes.

A few years ago Katie wore one of these headlamps to The Farm and we all made fun of her.

I made fun of her a lot.

I mean really, who owns one of these things?

Oh.

Me.

Now.

(2 Years, 8 Months, and 17 Days Sober)

Let’s be honest, one of the best parts of trying something new is buying new things.

So this is me with my brand new tin mug. I dig it.

I’m buying a sleeping bag today.

Not shocking or important news, right?

Or maybe it is.

My school year is going to end in 2 weeks (9 more work day to be precise!) and after a few day of cleaning up my classroom and counting my books, I’m heading out of the DC area for the summer.  I HATE DC in the summer.  HATE.  It’s muggy and hot and smelly and loud.  It is everything about physical existence that I detest.  So, this year, instead of suffering through summer with no good grace at all but rather a lot of complaining, I’m going to spend about 9 weeks in Portland, Oregon with my family.  Portland is lovely in the summer; warm but not hot hot, very little humidity, green and open.  In addition to the oh so important environmental comforts Oregon affords over Maryland, there are some big happenings with my family this summer (a baby, a birthday) that I’d like to be around for, so it just makes sense.

Around the time that I was telling people here that I wouldn’t be around for 3 months, my friend Margaret decided to move to Seattle for a year.  So she asks me, “Would you like to drive to Oregon?  We could camp!”

At first I was skeptical.  I mean, I’d already bought my plane ticket, and I don’t drive, so I wouldn’t be any help, and many, wouldn’t that eat up all my (very meager) savings?  Furthermore, CAMP?  What?  I don’t CAMP?  I haven’t been camping in my whole adult life!  One of my most treasured joys is that my students are too young for the traditional-end-of-the-year-camping-trips at school, so I don’t have to go camping.  Anyway, I have to get to Portland as soon as possible, because …

You see, I can talk myself out of anything.  No matter what it is, no matter how good it would be for me, no matter how much I want it, I can quickly and easily convince myself that it will be too hard, or I don’t have enough time, or I don’t have enough money, or I don’t really want it that much, or people will laugh at me, or (and this is the big one) I am not that kind of person.  I think I make more decisions than I realize based on who I imagine myself to be.  It doesn’t mean that I don’t have a realistic sense of myself, but more that when I ponder something that I haven’t done (in this case camping) I assume it is something I don’t want to do or am not capable of doing, because it I wanted to/could, then I would have done it already.  Therefore new experience, I am not that type of person.  Take that!

But, I didn’t want to dismiss Margaret out of hand.  And the idea just kind of sat in the back of my brain.  What was stopping me?  Was I the problem?  (If you’ve read the paragraph above, then you know I discovered that yes, I was the problem.)  The more I thought about it, the more good reasons I came up with.  I’ve seen very little of the fly-over states, and mostly as weekend wedding trips.  I usually go right from work to family with only a day in the airport between the two, so maybe it would be good for me to relax a little before inflicting myself on my family.  I don’t have a job lined up for the summer, so it isn’t like I have a deadline for when I have to be in Portland, and really, when was the last time I didn’t have a deadline?  Plus, (and this was what really got me) do I really want to be a person who doesn’t do things simple because I’ve never done them before?  When I ask a student “Why did you do that?” and I get a blank look and a shoulder shrug in return, I tell them “If you don’t have a good reason for it, don’t do it.”  I realized I needed to take my own advice, and stop shoulder-shrugging my decisions.

On Saturday Margaret and I officially decided to take this trip.  I’m super nervous.  I have no experience, no skills, and a tendency to get defeated pretty easily.  I have no idea if I will be remotely pleasant to be with, spending day after day in a car.  I am sort of convinced that Margaret will leave me in a corn-field somewhere in a state I can’t spell, and that she will be right to do so.  But it’s ok for me to be nervous.  In fact, it would be shocking if I weren’t.  But in the end, Margaret is too nice a person to abandon me, no matter how just it would be, so that makes me feel a lot better.

So this afternoon I have to buy a sleeping bag.  And a mat.  And a cup and plate set.  And a hat.  I really hope there is a holiday sale.

(2 Years, 7 Months, and 6 Days Sober)