This is a Post about the Highwomen

It’s Saturday, which I mention only to contextualize my reason for writing this post: so far, I am having a scientifically perfect weekend, so much so that I felt compelled to write about it.

The last few weeks have been tough, which you’d know if you found my sneaky little post from Sept. 9. I didn’t even share a link to that one because it felt like such a puny little whiny bug of a post.

Anyway, back to my weekend.

Yesterday I drove out to central Wisconsin because my former professor and mentor asked me to speak on a panel about editing and publishing as part of the Young Writers Conference and Central Wisconsin Book Festival. I listened to One Direction the whole drive there and thought I’d lose my voice from howling along at top volume. Once in town, I got to reconnect with my mentor and other friends from the area and talk about books, which I was reminded I love just about more than anything else.

My mentor brought me a loaf of bread from my favorite bakery in my college town, and told me it was sliced by a young lady I hardly know from college and nonetheless adore. While we caught up and talked shop, I recognized a new confidence in myself, although my mentor joked I was funnier on Twitter when I was working retail and fully miserable. It’s one thing to talk about what you love, but it’s quite another to talk about what you love in the context of your job. Every day I pause to think about how lucky I am.

By the time I got home it was dark and I was buzzing with nerd energy and despite my pleading nobody would meet me for a drink to talk about books. So I got into a bottle of four-dollar wine from Trader Joe’s, washed dishes with my headphones blasting my favorite playlist, and danced around my apartment feeling silly and light. Evidently, just a glass of four-dollar wine will get you—maybe just me—positively drunk, and so I feel asleep by 10:00.

I woke up late this morning with the sun on my face. I feel guilty about sleeping in late usually, but it was Saturday and being curled up in my blankets with the window cracked to the early fall breeze was perfection. Eventually I got up and made myself coffee and pumpkin spice pancakes, which were divine. At this time of year everything is turning candy-colored, and I want to eat everything pumpkin spice and butternut squash and corn and leafy and warm.

Over breakfast I watched the last episode of season two of Fleabag—a perfect show, and a perfect episode, by the way—and had a little cry about it. Then I hunkered down on the living room floor and got some work done and wrote a letter to my pen pal, who, this week, signed off with “take care of you and yours.” He’s 4/4 on telling me precisely what I need to hear, and in my last letter I told him so. I think that tickled him a bit. I love writing letters. Write me a letter!

This afternoon when I finally brushed my teeth and got dressed—a fall-colored sweater and my grandpa’s tattered Levis, an outfit full of physical and emotional comfort—I headed out of town and called my mom.

We had a nice talk, and were talking longer than I planned as I spilled about the problems weighing on me and felt relieved as I confided in her. I haven’t done that in a long time. I think she liked to be confided in again. When we got off the phone I tried on two sweaters and even took a photo of myself in a green one because I’m trying very hard lately to look at myself and be grateful for being able-bodied and being alive and honoring my big nose and my funny smile and my tall legs because life is short and I’m not doing myself or anyone else any favors by hating myself.

En route to get groceries I missed my exit and took an alternate route on county roads with my windows down and The Highwomen playing loudly and the epiphany of the perfect day I had on my hands.

I listened to the song “Old Soul” by The Highwomen four times before I finally let the next song have its time and missed another turn as I listened. I kept going back to the chorus:

“Oh to be a wild child for a day
All the promises I’ve ever kept
I’d line ‘em up to break
Oh to be a dancer on the edge
I’d rip the filter from my mouth
And all my cigarettes
But I know I won’t
I guess I was born an old soul.”

How’d they get in my head like that? Lately my skin has felt a little itchy, like the dust on my old soul has built up and needs to be shaken off. I feel like getting in my car and driving to a cabin in the woods and reading and writing in solitude for a month, and I feel like going to a dive bar alone where I don’t know anyone and listening to a crappy band play for a couple hours. I feel like going home and hugging my family. I feel like going to my hometown and returning to my favorite spot to be alone and screaming into the cornfield there until I go hoarse. I feel like taking up smoking and changing my name.

The Highwomen also have a song called “If She Ever Leaves Me” that’s a lesbian cowboy anthem about love and heartbreak and about how if you listen enough times you’ll fall in love with Brandi Carlile. This Highwomen project is so special. It makes me feel like a woman, like Shania Twain, naughty and pretty and strong and authentic. They make me feel like addressing openly the part of myself that feels queer, that may never manifest in a relationship with a woman or non-binary person but which has been thumping in my chest for a long time and has stayed hidden by shame and by feeling as though it doesn’t matter, not really, for a cis woman in a straight relationship to “come out” or identify as queer or even acknowledge it. And it’s not brave or interesting for me to do so, but it feels like something I’ve all but said aloud and when I catch myself wondering why it seems very silly. So maybe it’s a little bit scary to speak it out into the world, but everyone I care about already knows, at least a little bit, probably, and so what does it matter? It’s another exercise in rejecting shame.

Even as I was thinking all this driving along back roads in Minnesota I was thinking about what a beautiful day it was and how happy I am to know that, though things are difficult now, I am doing right by myself by choosing to ask for what I want and need and being kind to myself.

It’s sixty degrees and the sun is shining enough to warm my bones. Tomorrow, it’ll be cool and rainy. The flowers I bought myself at the grocery store smell like life and I have apples and pears in the fridge crisper to make something warm and gooey and sweet. I have a stack of books up to my ears to read, all poised to break my heart and kiss my bruises.

I’m doing alright.

Lexie

This is a Post about Identity

If you haven’t already heard, today is the first day of my new Big Girl Job. I wasn’t sure how to write about this because, aside from it being exciting news, I don’t have much to say yet. But then I had a tiny little epiphany and a blog post came to me.

In the midst of signing my formal acceptance and consenting to a background check and all the standard stuff, the hiring manager asked which first initial I wanted to use for my company email address, A for Alexis or L for Lexie. Professionally and academically, across the board, I’ve always gone by Alexis, although I grew up with everyone calling me Lexie. (Although I bristled in high school whenever anyone less than a best friend shortened “Lexie” to “Lex”.)

As an adult it seemed like it was time to shed my childhood nickname in favor of my legal name, which I guess I think sounds more professional. It always felt impersonal and foreign to hear people call me by my given name, but eventually most people got around to calling me Lexie anyway when we got to know each other well enough. Y’know…how nicknames work.

At my job in retail, I used Alexis as a defense mechanism, purposefully impersonal because I didn’t plan to stick around long. Go figure, the longer I was there, the more people started calling me Lexie. It kind of felt like that meant I’d been there too long, but really it just meant I was making friends. Not that serious, dummy. But that’s how I felt, and this job offer came at just the right time to get me out of a place I never planned to become familiar.

Even if I don’t stay at this job for my entire career, I feel so lucky to have found what feels like the perfect place to start. It’s a nonprofit, so the people working there are doing it for the love of the job, not to make big money. It’s reading and literacy focused work, which is the exact kind of thing I want to be doing. There are a dozen people on staff, including me, and they eat lunch together outside when the weather is nice. As far as I can tell, none of them are republicans. And they are as excited about me as I am about them. It’s an amazing feeling.

I don’t know if there’s a lesson here, except that I’m grateful this job found me when it did, because I was feeling ready to give up (again). The job hunt was hard on my ego, and especially so thanks to a brutal winter that ramped up my depression ten-fold. Like I did when I graduated high school and was anxiously preparing to go off to college, I feel like I should be blasting “Shake it Off” by Florence & the Machine and dancing around my bedroom.

This is a short post and I’m glad for it. It’s refreshing to share good news and leave it at that.

Tomorrow is my 23^rd birthday. I feel good.

Lexie

Recommended reading for “This is a Post about Identity”:

“The Glass Essay” by Anne Carson

This is a Post about RIVRGRL

By my estimation, ninety percent of vanity plates are corny and lame, but recently in my city I saw the license plate RIVRGRL and it made me smile. I guess that’s because I’m a river girl myself, although I never really thought about it much before.

I grew up in Northeast Wisconsin along the Oconto River—called “The Pond” in the town where I was raised—which gives way to the Machickanee Flowage before it slims out again and makes its way to Lake Michigan. Near my grandparents’ home I explored the Pensaukee, a scrawny little river that splits off in every direction and winds all around the county.

In my hometown my friends and I rode bikes to spend summers at the east side beach. The west side beach was more secluded, but was a much longer bike ride, had less beach, and was better suited as a boat landing. We heard stories about how high schoolers around my big sister’s age used to jump from tree swings into the shallow water over there on the west side and shuddered at the rumored resulting injuries. Allegedly the rope had been taken down to avoid further injury, but if you took a boat out onto the river you could spot at least one along the shore, hanging from a tall tree.

When I was in high school, we’d clamber into the river with inner tubes and float along, baking in the sun, a time-honored tradition among both teenagers and adults.

People from surrounding towns came to the east side beach frequently, which elicited a territorial response from us locals, although we never did anything to make our discomfort known. I think it was mostly a performance among ourselves, the notion that our beach was something of a local attraction, which was about as exciting as things got in a town of two thousand.

On Labor Day weekend the docks at the beach were pulled up onto shore to signal the end of summer. Then when the river froze, it was dotted with ice fishing shanties way before the ice was thick enough and, into the spring, long after fisherman were advised to remove their gear.

I grew up in a paper mill town, which meant the mill’s history was inextricably linked with the river. I heard a story once about a (presumably southern) semi-truck driver picking up or dropping off at the mill who saw all the ice shanties on the frozen river and said, “It’s so sad about all those homeless people!” Of course, we thought it was hilarious. Looking back, I can’t list on one hand all the things that assumption and our response reveals about cultural divide. But that’s a story for another time.

In middle school, on Earth Day, my class visited the hydroelectric dam to learn about renewable energy. We wore hard hats as one of the workers shouted over the machinery to tell us how there was once a waterfall in the middle of our river but now it was a dam and provided energy for the city. I guess I have always been mystified by dams, and seeing one up close only made me more dumbfounded.

At the top of the dam was a boat landing and a few fishing docks set apart from a flat-rock and gravel walkway that led to the framework at the top of the dam. My friends and I liked to sit on those big rocks when the beach was too crowded or in the spring and fall when we couldn’t swim. We’d skip rocks and ignore the smell of dead fish and bristle whenever someone came near to fish. I sometimes stopped there with my dog to take a rest on our walks. It was maybe the best spot in town to catch the sunset.

As you’d expect, sometimes the dam was open fully and the water rushed through with a roar that seemed completely mismatched to the river we swam in just a mile to the west. Other days, it merely trickled.

In the winter, great gushes of river water froze at the top of the dam, impossibly, and stood suspended in motion. Knowing what little I know about dams and hydroelectric power, this phenomenon seems…wrong? But I saw it every winter and was and still am flabbergasted by its beauty and surrealism.

I live in the St. Croix River Valley now, which creates the border between western Wisconsin and Minnesota. From my side of the river I can see clear across to Minnesota, Sarah Palin style. The St. Croix is gorgeous, so much so that it’s protected by the National Park Service.

On the day my partner and I moved into our apartment here, I had taken a detour to our college town to meet with a professor about a project, adding an hour and a half to what is ordinarily a three and a half hour trip. By the time I got into town, I was exhausted. It was a hot day, and when I went to my meeting with my professor it was raining and took me twenty minutes to find a parking spot because the roads on campus were being patched.

But the first thing I saw when I got into town, just off Wisconsin exit 1, was the St. Croix sparkling beyond the off ramp in the early evening sun. I felt myself relax, and I smiled with the relief of having finally arrived.

Our city is a sort-of suburb of the Twin Cities, and as such, is home to a fair few wealthy businesspeople who commute to work in the Cities while enjoying residences in a quieter area. There are marinas along the river full of these business peoples’ sailboats and yachts. It reminds me of the touristy, wealthy communities along Lake Michigan where the endless watery horizon can trick the brain into thinking you’re on the ocean.

Currently, the St. Croix has flooded so significantly so as to submerge about 60% of our riverside park and much of First Street. About ten miles south of our city the St. Croix feeds into the mighty Mississippi, which has also risen menacingly this spring.

Before my first interview properly in the Twin Cities, I got to sit by the Mississippi and feel small. It was fall, and I got to St. Paul an hour early in an overabundance of caution, and I found Harriet Island Park nearly empty. I was underdressed for the breeze in my interview outfit, but sitting on a bench and watching the Mississippi flow with downtown St. Paul set just behind it was surreal. River boats along the banks made it look strange, like I was on a movie set before any of the cast or crew appeared. It was the first moment in my new surroundings that I felt small-town-me easing into what may eventually become big-city-me. And it reminded me of the passage about rivers that, in many ways, brought me to the Twin Cities in the first place.

As a senior at UW – Stevens Point (Stevens Point is on the Wisconsin River) I took one of the classes that set me on course to be a big book nerd forever. In that class I was elected copy editor, which meant I got to spend hours poring over the manuscript of the very first book I would ever edit. The abstract idea of it was as intoxicating as the physical act of it. The book, The Appointed Hour by Susanne Davis, was and is my baby. If I haven’t bullied you into buying a copy yet, consider it done now.

The passage goes like this:

“In the southeast corner of Connecticut, three rivers flow and meet. First, the Shetucket makes a semicircular sweep and receives the Quinebaug and then together they join the Thames, flushing water into this once wild tract of land nine miles square. Of the three, I love the Quinebaug River most, coming as it does with a rapid current through a hilly country, channeling its way around ledges, spraying foam and diving headlong over the parapet of rock, free for a moment, then caught, a reminder to me that even nature faces encumbrances.”

Perfect.

It may be hard to believe, but Netflix was new at one point, and I remember my first experiences with it like I do my first experiences with the internet. (Hang in there—I promise I’ll get back to the river stuff.) Like most people, we just had the DVD-in-the-mail service at first, but eventually added the streaming service as well. In those early days, Netflix’s streaming options were 30% obscure indie films nobody has ever heard of, 50% Korean dramas, and 20% anime. It was slim pickings as far as my interests were concerned, but giving all those strange indie movies a try is cemented in my memory. The first movie I remember watching was called Dandelion, and years later, when Orange is the New Black came out, I’d see one of the main actresses from Dandelion in a much bigger production. Wild!

Anyway, another of the first movies I streamed was called Sixteen to Life, about a teenage girl living on the Mississippi River, reading about Mao and working at an ice cream stand inundated by tourists. The plot deals as much with her teenager-hood—it takes place on her sixteenth birthday, and everyone is giving her shit about being “sweet sixteen and never been kissed”—as it does with the transient nature of tourist towns. The wealthy kids who spend summers at their river houses are rude to her when she serves them at the ice cream stand, and the eventual love-interest is a tourist she may never see again. And so on.

What I’m saying is that, for me, Sixteen to Life was the original RIVRGRL! Here was a girl around my age, kind of weird but well-meaning and trying to figure it all out, who was growing up influenced by the existence of a river. She was fictional, but surely me and all the other RIVRGRLS in the world were having much the same experience and looking longingly to our rivers expectantly. But typically only the ocean gets the grand ennui representation in movies and songs and poems. So here was this movie about something less grand and, I guess, more universal.

I loved that movie. I found it again recently to watch it again—it’s on Amazon, and you should watch it, too—and I still love it. It still means everything to me it did when I was twelve or whatever and combing through mostly crappy options for wasting my time. Maybe it’s cringe-inducingly-millennial that a freaking Netflix movie helped my identity take shape, but that’s where we’re at in the grand scheme of things, so get over it. What Sixteen to Life gave me was assurance that my very ordinary life in a little river town could be special even if it wasn’t terribly interesting to anyone else.

When I think of the rivers that have raised me and nudged me along into the defining moments of my life so far I wonder what it is that makes them special to me. If I wanted to write something beautiful I’d say it has something to do with how they carry on despite those encumbrances. But I want to write something true, and if it’s beautiful that’s just incidental.

I think I love rivers because they are old and sometimes smelly and they are landmarks in my memory. They don’t care if you’re a local or slightly less local from a neighboring town and they don’t care if you pee in them. Rivers are like the oceans without all the mystical majesty. They are humble and accessible and were there long before you or me and will be there long after we die. They dictate how cities are built because they can’t be moved, and when you drive on the windy streets of a river city you can’t help but notice the way humans have catered in a small way to their existence. I suppose they’re poetic in a kind of dirty, diamond-in-the-rough way. They are the working class of bodies of water, maybe.

Then again, the Great Lakes have informed much of my character and Midwestern-ness, but that’s a post for another time.

Lexie

Recommended reading for “This is a Post about RIVRGRL”:

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

The Appointed Hour by Susanne Davis

The Flatness and Other Landscapes by Michael Martone

This is a Post about My Career

In college I spent nearly three years as a technical writing and editing intern at a software company. I was very well paid and had a lot of responsibility and was deeply miserable, at least for the last year or so. Had I stayed there, I’d have had an all but guaranteed full time job after graduation. That would have been the smart thing to do, but, like I mentioned, I was miserable. So I left.

My last semester of college, I was a social media intern for a printer. I was paid four dollars less an hour than I was at my previous internship, but I was over-the-moon happy. I got to brush elbows with publishers and talk about books every day. I got to watch famous books getting printed on massive machines and get woozy from the smell of ink and chemicals in the plant. I talked ice fishing with the managers in the plant and fell in love with the mesmerizing efficiency of the Timson T-32 web press. My boss let me work from home when the weather was shitty or between classes and brought me soup at my desk when I was sick.

I started applying for jobs in March of 2018 in anticipation of my graduation in May. I had a few phone interviews—one with a publisher in Chicago I’d connected with through my internship—and my future was spread out before me with seemingly endless options (I’d insert the fig tree passage from The Bell Jar here but if you know me you know I’ve already beaten that one to death.) Maybe too many, honestly.

My degree is in English, and my heart is in publishing. The heart of publishing is in New York, but there are small presses in the Midwest doing neat stuff and I’d rather die than move to New York. So when it became clear that the job in Chicago was not going to work out, and my partner and I solidified our plans to live together, we had to narrow down locations for the job hunt. We settled on the Twin Cities.

There are a handful of indie presses in Minneapolis, including Graywolf and Coffee House Press and Milkweed Editions, which publish beautiful books and nurture a vibrant literary scene committed to diversity and inclusivity. They are indie presses, so their staffs are small. What I’m getting at, reader, is that none of them have hired me yet, despite my brilliance. More on that later.

After I graduated I decided to move home to save money—although I’d end up paying rent at my place in my college town through the summer—and had a hodgepodge of jobs that mostly kept me afloat. First, my boss from the printer offered me the opportunity to continue my social media job as a freelancer, just through the summer, while I looked for a full time job and they looked for their next intern. Second, a professor and mentor signed me on in an unofficial capacity to continue my work with the press at my university; I helped with a few projects here and there and got to keep my foot in the door of the small press industry. It’s not a paying gig, but it feeds my soul and I’m happy they’ve decided to keep me around. Finally, I picked up where I’d left off at the funeral home—I’ll write more on that another time—as office assistant for my aunt Pam and her team.

Admittedly, I spent very little time working and a lot of time poolside with the dog, applying for jobs in and around the Twin Cities while my partner applied and interviewed for teaching jobs in the area. By the end of July he’d accepted a job offer and we began to earnestly look for somewhere to live. We found a great apartment, signed the lease, and were set to move in at the end of August.

The first week at our new place, I had an interview for a job that would turn out to be a horrible fit. I continued applying and interviewing and freelancing for the printer until they cut me loose in September. While we waited for my partner’s first paycheck to direct deposit we lived mostly on salsa made from tomatoes and peppers from my mom’s garden. With no income, I got more desperate with my applications and things were getting bleak. How had we moved to one of the biggest metropolitan areas in the country and still I couldn’t find a job? I wasn’t even looking in my field anymore, because those jobs were limited at best.

As of right now, I’ve been on the job hunt for over a year. I’ve turned down one offer. Reader, it fucking sucks.

I work in retail now, which I’d never done before, and it fucking sucks. I like the people I work with. They’re kind and funny and make an interesting cast of characters in the stories I tell my partner and friends. But it’s retail, and I have a degree, and it makes me feel like shit. (And knowing that deep down I think me and my degree are “above” working retail also makes me feel like shit, believe me.)

Once, my partner’s boss, the principal at his school, came into the store and I spent an hour dodging behind racks of clothes while she browsed so she wouldn’t see me. Once in a while I’ll see his students shopping and have the same reaction. I know there’s no shame in working to pay your bills. I know that, degree or not, labor has value, but that value doesn’t have a direct relation to the person doing the labor. I know all these things, but seeing people who maybe have a different idea about me when I’m wearing my nametag and folding underwear makes me want to disappear. I guess I’m not afraid that they’ll think less of me for working retail, but that they’ll feel bad for me, because they know I have a degree and ambitions that more directly align with a cubicle than a checkout lane. I kind of want them to feel bad for me, because I feel bad for me.

Even on days when I don’t mind my job, I am reminded of the tiny ways in which capitalism still manages to make it miserable. For example, during my interview, I was told in hushed tones that the starting wage would likely go up to fifteen dollars an hour within the next year or two. That’s on trend with a lot of states, so I wasn’t really surprised. There wasn’t much more talk about it until recently, as we began implementing new practices determined by the corporate office.

These new practices were introduced with the tease of that raise to fifteen dollars an hour and the suggestion that a higher wage will mean more responsibility.

Sure, if you get a non-performance-based raise in an office job, it typically means your position is changing, along with your responsibilities. But our jobs aren’t changing, even if the way we do our jobs is a little different. The wage is being raised to fifteen dollars an hour because that’s a living wage these days. We’re not being rewarded for hard work; this is a response to the economy we’re living in. But this raise is being dangled like a carrot in front of our noses so that we are led to believe that’s not the case. And that makes me want to puke. Nobody is sacrificing so that we may eventually make a living wage. It’s not something we should be made to think we must work harder to earn, because making a living wage for your labor is a right, not a privilege.

I guess at least I’m familiar enough with corporate condescension and can recognize it in the wild? Gag me. My coworkers are mostly adults, and they deserve better than being made to feel like they’re not earning their keep, even if it doesn’t bother them as much as it does me.

I haven’t worked in an office in a year but am still feeling those same middle-management irritations. In moments where my motivation to apply to other jobs stagnates, I’m reminded of this attitude and kick it back into high gear.

Interning at a software company, in a corporate environment, turned me off such employment forever. The more experience I got, the more responsibility was piled on. This makes sense, right? Except that I was doing more work than most of the full time employees in my department within the confines of 20 hour weeks, and with no benefits. For a long time I thrived off that responsibility and knowing that I was good at my job. But middle management—or, rather, mismanagement—made it impossible for the pros to outweigh the cons. And now I’m getting the same bullshit at a place where my greatest responsibility is marking down men’s underwear? C’mon.

When I get really depressed about not having a “real” job, I consider what it would be like if I’d have stuck it out with that software company and gotten my guaranteed job offer. I would have health insurance, and regular hours with weekends off. I would spend my days at a desk instead of on my feet. I would still get to hang out with the friends I made there, and I would enjoy yearly bonuses. My partner would get to teach and keep living near his home and his family. I would be closer to my family.

On the flip-side, I would also, undoubtedly, be even more miserable than before. I would be getting underpaid—although interns were paid handsomely, full time employees in that role are pitifully compensated, well below the industry standard—to do more work than most of my peers and have little room for growth. I would be working in my field, but on mind-numbing technical documentation rather than interesting or inspiring or weird stories. I would still be mostly without a creative outlet.

It doesn’t really help me at all to wonder “what-if?” I didn’t stick around because I wasn’t happy, and applying for a job there now would feel like defeat after leaving on not-great terms. I don’t think a meager benefits package would make me feel better.

In a way I’m hoping this blog will help fill in the gaps. I have a semi-creative outlet, I’m keeping up on my writing skills—debatable, you may be thinking—and if I’m as lucky as a thousand mommy bloggers in Utah, someday I can monetize this.

In five to ten years it’s possible that the press I worked with at my university will have the funds to make me a full-time paid fixture. That hope keeps me going most of the time. It would mean moving back to central Wisconsin where we’re closer to our families and the community we love so much. But five to ten years is a long time, and clinging to that very narrow hope is dangerous.

I want to work in publishing, but really I want to do anything that means creating. I want to work with people whose lives are totally different than mine, who have a unique story to tell, and who want to make the world a better place to be a person. Most of the jobs I apply to now are in corporate offices, which make me want to throw up, but it’s something, right? It’s an increased income with benefits so that I can springboard—a nasty, corporate word—into something more rewarding and less soul-sucking. But I can’t even do that. Just writing about it is bumming me out.

I know I am smart and talented and hardworking, and I am just waiting impatiently for anyone to say, “Alright, let’s give her a shot.” My main consolation when I get passed up for jobs is that at least it means I am surrounded by people who are extremely talented and someday I might get to work with them.

All this grumbling comes with the crushing reminder that I am very, very privileged and things could be much worse. I am healthy! I have a strong support system! I am college educated! I eat three meals a day! I have a job! My herbs are starting to sprout! Quit your whining, dummy!!!

My life is good, but it is hard sometimes. Feeling professionally unfulfilled has intensified my depression, which was worsened by a nasty winter. Something will come up eventually—I know that. But the wait sure is a bitch.

Lexie

This is a Post about Love

On Friday my partner and I celebrated three years together. I didn’t plan on this post lining up with that occasion, but serendipitously it has. Here is my love story.

I’ve always been pretty cynical about love. My parents are divorced. My mom remarried and sometimes I wonder if she and my dad—not my “bio-dad,” as a counselor once called my biological father—are even in love anymore. As a preteen I used to agonize over the question of love. I remember once asking my mom frantically, “But what if my soulmate lives across the world or doesn’t speak English or we never meet and know that we’re soulmates even though we are and I never find love?” I think she said something like, “Chill out,” which I now have to admit was perfectly fair.

I have a history of ending relationships at the drop of a hat. My romantic attention span is mortifyingly short. Boo-hoo. But, like most people, I cling to the shred of hope that someone will come along and all the fairy tales and romantic comedies will make sense.

I know I am not the first person to say this.

I feel embarrassed to call myself a writer (but why should I?). Even so, as a young writer I always found myself crafting the same story over and over again. There was a charmingly mismatched couple who would fight a lot, but love would always bring them back together again until, one day, it didn’t.

Annoyed as I was to be trapped by this trope, I couldn’t shake it from my system. All my stories reflected some weird, failed relationship of my past or present, and it felt like analyzing it and trying to make it poetry made it okay to have failed. But had I failed? Is tragedy beautiful? Blah, blah, blah.

I think a big misconception about relationships is that they need to lead somewhere. But what I’ve observed is that I’ve learned more about myself through relationships than I have about love. My past boyfriends have taught me the kinds of qualities I hate, the qualities I love, and the ones I never thought about before. I thought my past boyfriends taught me I have a hard time saying “I love you” but now in hindsight I can see that I don’t. I’d just been hanging out with guys I wasn’t in love with. (And that’s fine!)

But then I did it. I met him: the “I love you” guy. It happened by accident, the way it always does. He’s funny and he thinks I’m funny. In fact, while I was drooling over him the spring of my sophomore year and tweeting brazenly about my infatuation, he was researching me online and, seeing those tweets, suspected they might be about him. Of course, when I found this out I was mortified. He was kind enough to tell me on my 21^st birthday.

But maybe there’s something charming about diving headlong into it. Maybe it’s funny or brave to be publicly vulnerably. Maybe not. But he saw it and was into it, and that’s been the basis of this whole thing since we decided to give it a shot. But back to the “I love you” thing.

It took me about four months to realize I felt it and wanted to say it. Then it took another three to muster up the courage to actually do it. I wanted the perfect place, the best possible timing, a calmness in my gut that would make the words tumble out easily.

Here’s a secret, free of charge: it doesn’t happen like that.

It went like this:

We had class together and peer-reviewed each other’s essays. I complained about my next class (Intro to Linguistics, taught by a guy who hated all my opinions, answers, and explanations) and he said, after telling me his next class had been cancelled, “Skip it.” So I did.

I had been agonizing over saying “I love you” for months, as you know, and kept giving myself these arbitrary deadlines to finally bite the bullet and do it. Another part of me insisted I’d say it when I was good and ready, god damn it. That day I skipped class out of pressure to meet my personal deadline before I’d go home for the weekend.

So we walked back to my apartment from class and he told me about issues at the student newspaper (at which he was the managing editor) while I packed my things. I drove the three blocks to his house and parked outside. He unbuckled his seatbelt and I panicked, grabbing his chin and blurting, “Listen.” Don’t ask me why that was my move—to this day, I’m still not sure.

He said, “What?”

I said, “I love you, and you don’t have to say it back. I just wanted you to know.”

I watched him smile and heard him say, “I love you, too.”

I positively melted. Then we kissed goodbye and I told everyone I knew, hives spreading across my chest with a vengeance.

So it happened like that. It was imperfect, and weird, and terrifying. But I wouldn’t have had it any other way. Gag!

What’s your point, idiot? Fair enough. My point is this, and don’t hate me if you’ve heard it before: it pays to let go and take a chance. Look at each relationship as a learning experience. If it goes south, it’s fine. If it changes your life, it’s fine. If it’s the most boring thing ever to happen to you, it’s fine. Take it and learn from it. Indulge in it. Enjoy it. Laugh. Allow yourself to appreciate that, at least for a time, you were happy with the person. Figure out why the bad stuff made you unhappy so you can avoid it in the future.

Most importantly, say what you think, and say it like you mean it. Be vulnerable. Like asking your boss for a raise, you can’t approach love without putting yourself out there and risking failure. The beauty of it is that you get re-do’s forever and ever, until you croak happily alone or happily hitched to some other weirdo.

Find the “I love you” person. Find ten of them. Find the happy things.

You’ll need coffee shops and sunsets and road trips, airplanes and passports and new songs and old songs, but people more than anything else. You will need other people and you will need to be that other person to someone else, a living, breathing, screaming invitation to believe in better things. –Jamie Tworkowski

Years later, literally, I realized the moment my “I love you” guy knew he was falling in love with me. He was having a panic attack. (Stay with me.) I wonder if he even realizes this was the moment. On the other hand, maybe he’ll read this and ask me, “How’d you get this from that?”

Anyway.

We’d talked about our struggles with anxiety and depression and, admittedly, we were both having a tough time that first summer we spent together. He’d just come back to school to try a new path and I was just generally depressed. Also, my car had taken a shit and I needed to buy a new one, and soon, but I didn’t have any fucking money.

Anyway, we were in his bedroom at the house he shared with two other guys and a dog named Poncho and he was lying on his back in his bed, raking furiously through his hair and perspiring. I don’t remember what we’d been talking about, but this sort of came out of nowhere. Now, this is a telltale sign of a panic attack, but at the moment, I couldn’t get a read on the situation at all. He wouldn’t say what was wrong. I lay down next to him and put my head on his chest and his heart was racing. It was a hot summer and the panic was overheating him and he was uncomfortable with the closeness so I sat up again and just stared into his rumpled face.

Finally, after some more prodding he said, “I’m just scared.” And I instantly felt better and probably even smiled a little, which I’m sure he didn’t appreciate at the time. “I don’t know how to do this,” he added.

That was all? He was scared? Of me? (Well, to be fair, he wouldn’t be the first one I’d scared off.) I had never been in love before, not really—although I once asked my mom how she knew she was in love and, thinking of a certain boyband member, admitted that I was in love—but something about that moment was calming where before it would have thrown me into a panic attack.

In the past, any time I could feel a boyfriend getting too attached, I bristled and sent him packing. Don’t be dependent on me, don’t be in love with me, and do not ask me to reciprocate, please. But this was very different.

When this guy said he was scared, it meant he was getting attached, but it freaked him out a little, too. And although I was scared of getting attached because I was new to love, it felt like trying and failing with this guy would be worth the trouble. So, in response to “I don’t know how to do this,” I think I laughed and said something along the lines of, “Uh, me either, dummy.”

I don’t think that sentiment was particularly comforting to him at the time, but our shared anxiousness about being together—maybe forever or maybe ruining the whole thing somewhere down the line—comforted me, because it meant we were on the same wavelength. This was new and freaky and we were both stumbling around blind in the dark, but at least we were holding sweaty hands. When before I’d have taken the first signs of trouble and run far, far away, this one seemed like he was worth the work.

How embarrassing!

Being in love with the guy who panicked at the prospect of being in love with me has been an incredible gift. I can see futures where our love crashes and burns and I am devastated beyond repair, and I can see futures where we grow old together with kids who are stone cold weirdos like us. Any way I imagine it, the time we’ve spent together has helped me grow into myself.

I am still depressed a lot of the time. My career is nonexistent. My January rent check bounced. The handle on our fridge is broken and our landlords won’t let us get a dog. Things could be better. But I am so genuinely happy. My partner is a sentimental packrat who knows exactly how to make me laugh and exactly what kind of beer and/or ice cream to bring home when I’ve been tweeting about being depressed all day. He has sacrificed a great deal to make it possible for me to chase a career in a new city. When I was still figuring out I was gluten intolerant he’d whip the car around at the drop of a hat to get me to a gas station so I could have an emergency poop. He makes French toast on Sunday mornings and makes mine extra eggy because gluten-free bread is intolerably dry. His family has pulled me in and doused me in love and encouragement.

And if we crash and burn in five years or two months or whatever, it will have been worth it. It’ll rip me to shreds, to be sure, but it will have been worth it. I could write about him all day, and sometimes do. What a gift.

You may be reading this and thinking, Lexie, you guys sound insufferable. You’re right. That’s fine. Or maybe you’re reading it and thinking, This sounds nothing like my relationship, but I’m happy, or, This sounds just like my relationship, but I’m not happy. Love—platonic and romantic—is, fortunately, not one-size-fits-all. It’s a combination of your best and worst pieces matching up with the best and worst pieces of someone else and that match enriching your days. And if the match doesn’t enrich your days anymore, it’s okay to fall out of love or friendship or whatever. You’ll find it again.

Although sometimes it feels like it’s dragging along, life is genuinely too short to try to force companionship with people you aren’t compatible with anymore. IT’S OKAY!

Love is funny and weird and hard but what else is there? Romantic love and platonic love are at the root of so many of my greatest joys. Girls grow up with all these notions about what love and relationships should look like, but once you figure out it can be whatever it is—within reason, of course—you’re free to love how you like. You can see that falling in love many times with many places and things and people is a good thing. Love isn’t a finite resource. It’s actually, spectacularly, renewable, when little else is. Give and receive it generously. Why not?

Lexie

Recommended reading for “This is a Post about Love”:

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

Mostly Dead Things by Kristen Arnett

Here Goes Somethin’

This blog started out as a book idea, which is hilarious, because I am not qualified to write a book or even, really, a blog. I used to write a blog after I graduated high school about hating my body and being depressed and homesick and declaring my major in college. That blog was cathartic for me, but it led to some dean of students or someone or other knocking on my dorm room door to do a wellness check because someone was blogging about being depressed on campus. Whoops.

I’m only 22 now and my life, in the grand scheme of things, has not changed much since I first blogged my way into the hearts and worries of strangers. I will be 23 in June, which will make me an expert on life and adulthood. Kidding.

But, I have spent the last four years learning more than I ever wanted to know about myself, and I suspect that trend will continue. And because I spend too many hours a day scrolling through Twitter and Instagram, absorbing the successes of others while my five-year-plan disintegrates before my eyes, I think it may be good for me to talk about that, because I know I’m not the only one. In fact, I love stories about failure, and sadness, and grief, and disappointments. Life on Instagram is, more often than not, shiny and exciting. And I get it. Sharing photos of ourselves when we feel good, or our families when we’re having fun, or the meal we made that looks amazing, feels good. I don’t think it’s vapid and I don’t think it’s necessarily ruining all our self-esteem.

Fortunately for me, as much as I love sad stories, I love success stories too. I love seeing my friends’ selfies when you can see in their eyes that they feel good about who they are. I love seeing their travels, and the gorgeous food they eat, and the goofy things they do with their families. It doesn’t make me feel bad, which is a giant blessing considering how much time I spend on the internet. But I know it’s not the whole story, and so do you…I hope.

I don’t know what this blog will become or whether it will last very long. I don’t know whether anyone will read this post or any beyond it, but what I do know is that my life is at a weird point and if I don’t have some kind of creative outlet, I’m gonna lose it. So because I live for oversharing, I’m going to try to overshare in more than 280 characters, publicly, because maybe some of the epiphanies I’ve had lately are ones that haven’t occurred to you yet. Maybe hearing about poop emergencies and familial estrangement will make you feel like your life isn’t so strange. (Spoiler alert: everyone’s life is weird and full of gross, horrible, difficult stuff. We just don’t love sharing it on Instagram. Except me. I’ll make you feel better about your gross, horrible stuff.)

People have told me over the years—and you can blame them for any inflation of my ego—that I’m a good writer. So I hope that this combination of weird stories and an alright handle on communication will mean something to anyone, even if they don’t know who I am (and ten points to you if you can name that reference).

I am a big sister to two tweens who are reluctant to ask for or listen to advice. But I have always been hugely maternal, obnoxiously overzealous in my desire to comfort and advise and give input. Someone, somewhere has to need that in their lives, right? I’m your mom now.

At this point, I’m getting away from myself, and you’re surely getting bored. Since I mentioned this blog started as a book idea (honestly, who do I think I am?), below you can read my annotated introduction to that book/this blog. It’s not very good, and I know that, but what fun is it if I can’t show you how embarrassing I was just a few years ago? I wrote a few pages for that potential book and will use them to inform this blog, I guess, and it should be a treat to see how 19-year-old me informs what 22-year-old me cares about now.

I knew I was going to write this book [BLOG] my sophomore year of college as I found myself scrambling across a 2000-space parking lot on my way to work. My car was nowhere in sight, and although I had just run about a hundred errands on campus, I was convinced I’d somehow be late to work. Unless I got abducted by aliens in that elusive parking lot, however, that was impossible. Let me give you a little context.

My Wednesdays were busy–four of my five classes met and I went to my internship for a few hours between the last two. My third class got cancelled (that’s the one before work) and I had an hour to spare. I managed to cruise downtown to the post office, pick up my copy of a zine I’d contributed to from the Women’s Resource Center, and do some Christmas shopping at the campus bookstore with time to spare.

I really had no reason to believe I’d be late. In fact, I wound up in my desk forty-five minutes early. But when you have time anxiety and what feels like a billion obligations on your nineteen-year-old plate, the question where the fuck did I park!? [I still ask myself this most days, even in the tiniest of parking lots.] is enough to send a girl reeling. [We love a good cliché.]

Here’s how I make it work anyway. [Bold to say I’m “making it work,” young lady.]

Thanks for being here. Stick around if you like.

Lexie