Paige Dunn-Rankin – A blog from a writer and ex-technologist in San Francisco

Sanctuary

In a place where Lake Superior meets the sky, far north where the days are long even as the trees start catching fall, there’s a cabin built by my family’s hands. Not my blood family, but my betrothed family. My fiancé’s grandparents and uncle turned a miner’s one-room log cabin, bought for a pittance in the 80s, into what their neighbor jokingly calls “the estate” — a joke more telling of the rustic conditions down that stretch of sandy road in Gay, Michigan, and this artistic neighbor’s proclivities, than anything else. Though it must have struck me, because there is something undeniably stately about the tree trunks holding up the screened porch, crossing to make triangular windows that emblazon the morning onto the dining table.

If this were a cathedral in the woods, we take our service three times a day, with coffee, then beer, then wine, with salt and pepper and paper plates, and there is always more than anyone, even grandsons, can finish. Our altar is the fireplace, a big hearth of smooth river stones placed exactly where they fit — along with a piece of the Berlin Wall — and tended by my fiancé, who builds fires five logs high, flames so big the tips disappear into the chimney, because he can. If the conversation dies down as we sit close, in rocking chairs made of the same stuff as the porch and the fire and everything else, there is always the fire to talk about, or stare into. I suppose in this way it’s sort of like a television. For communion, I’d take a fire any night.

There’s a small television in the living room. Grandma turns it on every day at 7, while Grandpa hovers at the door to the porch, to keep his distance from the news. We hear about a defector in the White House, about hurricanes, and about a mother and son trampled by a giraffe. A presidential candidate was stabbed! We watch through the commercials to find out it was a candidate in Brazil.

Outside these woods new facts and feelings are ever-accumulating, and don’t we owe it to everyone, and ourselves, to be aware? But after only a few minutes, I feel the world is too much with us. It seems more vital to watch the perfect reflection of trees and clouds in the lake, or a snowshoe hare emerging from under the porch to nibble on the grass in the yard, hardly afraid of any of us. There are things to be done today — food to be cooked, books to be read, fish to be fished, games to be played.

Life at the cabin feels realer than real. We eat when we’re hungry, sleep when we’re tired, and our only conversations are with family and neighbors, who come by unannounced in their robes, like the cabins are distant rooms connected by wooded hallways. Here beauty and light consecrate our chores, our choices are few and good and productive: a finished puzzle, clean dishes, fresh pasta on the table. We bathe in the sauna, where we make a fire to heat coals to heat a vat of water, which we mix in tubs with cold from a hose. I lift a big bucket and turn it, heavy, over my head, covering me in a shock of silk. There’s no feeling as clean as stepping out from the sauna into the brisk evening air.

When I want to stay there forever, when I feel so happy stacking firewood or digging sand out of the pond, I know I’m being a romantic. I haven’t lived in the cabin for any extended period of time, or done the onerous work: dumping the trash, cleaning the septic, filling the water tank. I wouldn’t want to live there in winter — no one even could, the way the cabin is set up to run on solar. I don’t know what it would feel like without grandparents, to drive alone through woods steeped in night. The businesses in Calumet, a nearby town, are shuttering. I know it’s complicated. But deep down I can’t shake the feeling that it’s actually simple. What is that — faith or delusion? Love, like light, can be two things at once.

“Back to the real world!” our taxi driver announces too cheerily, and we laugh in bitter agreement, but we can hardly look at each other for fear of crying. I have hundreds of notifications and none of them matter. We fall asleep to familiar freeway sounds and the glow of the streetlight outside, and a few days later we climb the hill by our house and stare out at the city. The city feels a little pointless.

Then it starts to feel a little wonderful. We joke about the one and only supermarket by the cabin, which sold cases of Sunny D and something called bologna sausage. We romanticize, for a while, the Bay, the bridges, and the heedless hillside Victorians. And then, with the full and heavy hearts of realists, we take up anew this labor of love.

Promise

We decided to get married, and then the questions began.

“Have you set a date?”

“Where will the wedding be?”

“What kind of wedding do you think you’ll want to have?”

These are polite questions, and I know that by announcing our engagement, we invited people to ask them. Honestly, it felt like they were mostly asking me — like I’d been keeping the blueprints for our wedding in my dresser drawer, while my fiancé hid the ring in his. But I had no blueprints. I checked.

For a long time, I just knew I wanted to be married and have kids someday — no more, no less. Then, I met someone, and I became pretty sure he would be that person. We moved in together, and we talked about it. I talked about it like it was a trip we would take one day; he measured the diameter of my ring finger: “I’ll just do it in advance so it’s a surprise later.” I thought marriage was something you checked off right before getting pregnant; he told me he wanted to be engaged for a little while, then married without kids for a little while, so we could enjoy those…statuses. What would they do for us? I didn’t know. But if it would make him happy, I would take on any title in the world. I didn’t give it much more thought than that.

One night, we were fighting — I have no idea what about. I started arguments I refused to lose; it was how I asserted my standards for the relationship. And I had high standards, which he generally exceeded — it was just in a few instances, that I really needed him to be better at handling my moods, and his own. “Or else.” It was never there, but then in those moments it appeared suddenly, and we both felt its weight in the room, no matter how much I said nothing could threaten us.

Lately, when I had feelings he couldn’t fix, and “or else” was lurking, he became consumed with so much worry that he struggled to put anything into words. It was alarming, and I didn’t like it. When he repeated that he was just really stressed out right now, I wouldn’t accept that. “Work is the same as ever, what’s going on?” That evening, finally, he cracked. He said was working on something that he couldn’t tell me about — and he was probably ruining it by saying anything.

I had to go take a hot shower, I was so shaken. I sat in the tub and stared at the porcelain as the water ran off my hair and over my face. It was one of those heavy stares that transports you through and outside yourself, so you’re looking at yourself staring, so that the only thought in your head becomes: this is happening. Beyond that, I didn’t know, except that it did seem a little bit ruined, and it was my fault. I was the type of person who ruined the best things.

Before the question, and before the answer, there was this: when I came out of the shower and wrapped myself in the sheets, he sat on the bed’s edge, by my side, and held me like he does. In so many words he proposed to me — told me everything he was offering, drew his vision of what we could be. He was more stunningly eloquent than I’d ever heard him or anyone else, on the topic of love, and marriage, and him, and me. I held him like I do, and in so many words I said yes.

I couldn’t sleep that night. I was more excited than afraid, but I was both. It wasn’t him — he’s an astonishingly good person and partner for me. It just felt like my life was about to solidify in a way it never had before, and I wasn’t sure I was ready. I’d just left my job and didn’t know what I would become. I was all stem cells, and now this. I didn’t want to return to my single 20s, or to the person I had been in a previous relationship, but I did have to actually say goodbye to amorphous youth, and step into an identity I’d wear for the rest of my life. Like endings do, this one had arrived somehow sooner than I’d expected, and it was right on time.

“I kind of think we choose something, and then we make the best of it,” my mom told me. She and I had talked about it, but now for the first time we were really talking about it — turned out being engaged wasn’t an abstraction. A day before, I might have been surprised at the way she put it, so practical, but I was realizing that marriage is practical. People say that; I had to get there myself. Yes: deciding to get married is taking responsibility, for that person, and for making the best of your lives together. You pick a teammate, and you promise to be on their team, to love and support them forever, no matter what. It’s a concrete commitment, not a status, and I realized why we needed it, and why I needed to actually think about it.

I thought back to whenever I was emotional and insinuating that maybe we didn’t make a good team, or maybe he wasn’t good enough in some way. I thought about the leap he’d made, on his own. I saw him standing on the other side, arms outstretched to catch me, the way he saved me from falling off a mountain when we were hiking in Yosemite, the way my dad saved my mom from being swept off a cliff by a wave when they were hiking in Hawaii. Cautious and (dare I say) challenging women, and the brave men who love them anyway.

Nothing was ruined, and certainly not the perfect clarity and happiness of that moment, a week later, on a bluff by the beach.

“Were you surprised?” everyone asked me.

This, I did have an answer to: “Not really,” I said, and I smiled.

Pretending on the Internet

At first, my computer was just for computer games, different only in variety and input method (keyboard / mouse) from the video games on my TV or the Gameboy games on my Gameboy. My dad was always keen to acquire the latest games, and we would go to the computer megastore to buy them. I spent most of my time in the kids’ aisle, where I remember the games jumbled in a bin like candy at Blockbuster. My favorites were Petz, The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis, and The Sims. My brother loved quiz games like Where in the World is Carmen San Diego? and a series by National Geographic. Sometimes we played games as a family; in one, we raised little troll-like creatures who hatched from eggs, and we named all of ours starting with Z: Zeke, Zachary, Zenia. My dad played his more intense games after dinner, while I watched, small enough to perch on his knee or the arm of the black leather computer chair.

The games felt incredibly lifelike to me, full of real danger and real reward. To say I was emotionally invested wouldn’t be enough. One time, Zeke got on an underwater elevator whose construction we hadn’t finished and, due to either a glitch or a bit of cruel realism, he floated away and we never saw him again. The Grues in Zork would eat you, and you’d have to start all the way over from the beginning, in the utter darkness. Once, my dad was playing a detective game, and he found the killer’s new victim, a clown, dissolved in a barrel of acid. I still remember him opening the barrel (marked with a skull and crossbones, toxic waste) and the clown’s nose and wig were floating there, a complete cartoon of course, the acid was bright green, but my brain made up for the pixelated graphics and it seemed so vivid. My dad felt really bad about it — I think he still does — but an inevitable part of growing up is being shocked by things that you never could have anticipated having to worry about. It wasn’t so long ago, or so far away, that kids were encountering actual dead bodies.

One day, my dad brought home this game that you played with other people. In the game, people were represented by customized anthropomorphic cartoons (cat heads were popular), and you walked around and talked to people and made friends. That seemed to be the goal of the game — making new friends that you didn’t know in real life (“IRL” was the term). My mom was always saying, that cartoon bombshell was probably a nerdy dude IRL. People exchanged little embellishments for their avatars, somehow gathered in the game world. At that age I was really turned on by collecting things. I would secretly play the game and pretend to be my dad, partly to collect items, partly to see if I could convince people I was him. I have a vague memory of watching him explain to his new friends that his 3rd-grade daughter had a habit of taking over his account.

Then I found a game where you could play pretends as a Redwall character, also with other people, “online.” I don’t remember how I discovered it; maybe through my cousins, who had introduced me to the Redwall series, books about anthropomorphic animals waging medieval warfare, with oddly Christian undertones.

I recall a plain black window where you typed, the likes of which I wouldn’t see again until I started my computer science classes in college. Looking back, it was simply a chatroom, but I didn’t think of it that way. It was a world, and you created your own character, who would travel around and play out their story, interacting with other people’s characters along the way. I already liked writing stories, and I was very excited to find an intersection with pretends, which I spent most of my time playing IRL: at recess, when we went ran boring errands on the weekend, all summer.

I was especially excited about the anonymity of the game. It was one of my deepest wishes at the time to be treated like a boy. Boys got to star in all the adventures in my favorite books, movies, and games. I liked to play boy characters in pretends, but then some new playmate, maybe one of my brother’s friends, would point out that I, though short-haired and cargo-shorts-wearing, was not in fact a boy. Online, this wouldn’t be a problem.

I took the Redwall game very seriously. It would go something like this:

jeremythefox enters The Inn.

The Inn would have been the name of one of the chatrooms, and I would have been Jeremy, or something like that. I loved the name Jeremy, but I insisted on pronouncing it “Jermy,” even after my parents told me it was not pronounced that way (I felt so wronged by this).

jeremythefox: Jeremy was exhausted. He’d spent the day traveling on foot across the West Meadow, and he was looking forward to a warm supper and a good night’s sleep. maxihotbunny: Hi there Jeremy jeremythefox: “Hi,” Jeremy said, raising a weary paw at the stranger in the corner. He couldn’t see their face, which was covered in shadows. “What brings you to the inn?” maxihotbunny: Just passin through maxihotbunny tickles jeremythefox captainbearpaw (moderator): Captain Bearpaw strides into the room, making the other animals quiver in fear. “What’s the trouble here?” He calmly takes in the situation through his steely gray eyes. maxihotbunny: jeremythefox, a/s/l?

At this point, I would probably have closed the game, quivering in fear myself. That was how it mostly went. I was always clicking the little x that made the Internet go away, afraid and confused about what was going on and what I was supposed to do, and then I was drawn back in again, trying something or somewhere new. I lived in constant apprehension that one of my parents would come and look over my shoulder, my whole private and disturbing world exposed on the screen in black and white.

When I played pretends with my friends, I was the actor/director. I spoke in a fast monotone, like I was trying to get through a script reading, while having to constantly interrupt my lines to give stage directions and character notes to the other kids (often, just my little brother). I was open to good ideas from the cast, but I always had the final say, and I always got to steal a scene when I wanted to.

Playing pretends with strangers was almost unbearably exciting, and almost unbearably anxiety-inducing at the same time. The worst thing was when someone got mad at me — I remember I would answer with “8/m/CA” and people would be like, “you’re 8?” And when I insisted, they’d say bad words at me, which I took to be them getting very, very angry. Like, ready to burst out of the screen and come after me. I quickly learned to tell people I was 13, at least — 13+ seemed to be the magic number for the Internet.

For all the people who scared me, there were also people willing to listen to me — willing to play back, at a much more sophisticated level than any of my friends. I found similar games in the form of online message boards, where you could write whole paragraphs as some magical creature or animal. It was like a passalong story, and you’d wait, days or weeks (I could barely sleep at times), for someone to reply. You played for the long term, your character development recorded in your post history, although there was some sense in which all of this was everyone just talking to themselves, so it didn’t really matter much what you said.

These games were frustrating and disturbing in their own ways. My grand designs for my characters — I spent hours workshopping their backstories — often fell by the wayside when no one replied to me, or those who did weren’t on the same page with what I’d storyboarded. When people would talk “out of character,” their unguarded ranting about their nerdy-adult problems made me uncomfortable. I’d always been good at talking to grown-ups, but I found I didn’t actually enjoy pretending to be one.

There were weird posts marked “17+.” In one message board, everyone was pretending they were wolves, and they had these “mating” threads. The allure of the taboo was intense. I would skim the words very quickly and get a strange scared, embarrassed, and excited feeling, though I really had no idea what they were talking about at all. It was like reading about the mystical rituals of a foreign culture.

I played these games off and on as a pre-teen, until I just grew out of them. I don’t remember a single event, but I do remember a growing shame — which had been there at the beginning, but now had something to do with the fact that I was too old to be doing this stuff, not too young. I’d stopped reading Redwall and the only fantasy books I still devoured were Harry Potter. If I’d wanted to be a boy, I didn’t want to be a teenaged guy or a man, on the Internet or otherwise. Instead of joining the girls who were reading their fan fiction and diary entries in the creative writing club, I started trying to write “literary” short stories, and contributed to the high school newspaper. I made friends with the people at the top of all the subjects, the mainstream nerds.

I never spoke about my pretends life on the Internet to anyone. As I got older, the Internet, this place that had been my fake world, became part of my real world. My online playthings weren’t put away in the attic like my toys, but overwritten and erased by reality, or something like it. I quickly forgot all those hours spent deciding how to represent my characters, as I focused on choosing the best photos and lines to represent my teenaged self. It wasn’t as fun, but the Internet and I had changed, and we couldn’t go Home again.

That specially delicious feeling of pretends is lost now, like the overwhelming excitement of Christmas morning — but I can still feel the ghost of it. When I left my job without knowing what to do next, I looked for signs of something I’d always been interested in. Writing had been an obsession since I could hold a crayon, and it was suddenly impossible for me to ignore the thousands and thousands of words I’d typed, voluntarily, on those internet chat rooms and message boards. I still didn’t like it, but it seemed a not-insignificant part of my past.

When I told my fiancé about my online roleplaying, I felt like I was dropping all my pretense of having been just a little bit awkward as a kid. As per usual with confessions like this, I expected my pent-up emotions would be matched by his shock and disgust, but he just listened as he would to any other story from my childhood, not particularly interested or disinterested. To him, this stuff was just one of many weird things that kids get into. What a relief.

I looked up one of the old message boards I frequented and it’s gone now. The top hit is a seemingly alt-right / 4chan wiki that I feel lucky never to have seen before. For some reason it has a ridiculously angry description of that old roleplaying site: “The general populace of this filthy rat’s nest consists of furries, basement-dwellers, and your occasional lesbian!” (And that was one of the tamer lines.) All online roleplayers are female, the wiki says, even the ones who claim to be men. It’s the kind of stuff that hurts because it gets at something true. But I’m sure there were other smart little kids who just wanted to play pretends games, who discovered the concept of furries way too young and were embarrassed and disturbed that somebody would put boobs on animals.

These places on the Internet end up becoming havens for people with too much time on their hands, which includes the usual adult suspects and, I can’t help but think, a lot of precocious kids like me. I know I turned out fine, that I didn’t encounter close to the worst of the Internet, and that it’s inevitable kids explore and find stuff that bothers them. Still, I wonder if there could be a place for dreamy kids, where they don’t have to be adults, and don’t have to carry around the feeling that something’s not right. That would be nice. But it is it too much to ask of a free Internet and smart 8 year-olds?

I wonder, too, if growing up with YouTube and social media means that kids no longer think of the Internet as a place to pretend. It certainly isn’t normal anymore for thirty-something parents to walk around anonymous chatrooms, dressed as a leopard in a suit. Yet some days I’d take that Internet, back when it was mostly a game.

I can still make it disappear by clicking x, and return to my real life. I think, I hope, we’ll always have that.

Rail to Your Friends

I got my first literary rejection the other day.

Tl;dr: On the 3rd of July I came up with a poem I called “Donald Trump Sings America,” I submitted it almost on a whim to an online humor magazine, it was I think rightly rejected, the entire thing took place in the span of one afternoon, and I have some emotions to sort out about it (that’s the tl;dr part).

Here is the poem:

Donald Trump Sings America

Oh beautiful, forsake it, I’m
Bored. Anger’s how we gain!
For fakers, Haters, refugees:
Go home, you’re super Lame!
America! AMERICA!
God’s dead, your Face is me
So crown me Good
White Brotherhood
From ME to shining ME

I have mixed emotions about the poem. Unlike the stuff I’ve been putting on this blog, which I’m pretty satisfied with, I was (and am) slightly bothered by it. “Anger’s how we gain!” sounds like nothing anyone would ever say, also I’m not sure that Trump modifies with “super,” that’s more my generation’s word, and I doubt “forsake” is in his vocabulary (what is being forsaken, exactly?). “God’s dead” is maybe too dark and overloaded. The third line doesn’t come close to evoking the sounds of “purple mountains,” which was kind of the whole point.

But maybe that wasn’t the whole point. And “forsake it” and “God’s dead” could work, in their own ways, if you squinted. Maybe the piece was successful despite these problems. I wasn’t sure, until it was rejected. Overall, the concept had a certain charm to it, and the execution had its moments, I thought. Maybe it would resonate with people. I really had no idea. I guess I still don’t, which is probably a feeling I’ll have to get used to.

The poem’s inception was delightfully serendipitous, and I lived in that mood until I hit “send” and my piece was whisked away on the same creative breeze that had brought it to me. I’d been sitting in my living room, thinking about the 4th of July. I had the misinformed notion that it was the 100-year anniversary of “America the Beautiful,” because I’d seen a headline in an alert on my phone that I must have misread. As I sang the song in my mind I thought about how “for spacious” could sound like “forsaken,” and then the idea came to me. At first the poem contained more direct rhymes with each word in the original song, completely unpublishable stuff like “Unglove my putrid pain.” Then I looked at a rhyming dictionary (sue me), and I spent some time, maybe a few hours, maybe less, editing and trying to get the concept across better, though I couldn’t come up with anything relevant that rhymed with “purple mountains.”

With “White Brotherhood,” I had just left the original line until I suddenly looked at it a different way. When I came up with that, I was like, ooh, this is good.

So then I thought, maybe this is funny and I should put it…somewhere, as my comment about 4th of July. But it didn’t convey what I actually felt about the holiday, and anyway I didn’t really want to upset people. Such a Facebook post would be uncharacteristic and need explanation; it might have been good for Twitter, but I don’t tweet. And it didn’t feel right for my blog, either.

Then I remembered this humor site I occasionally read (present tense!), McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, which has an irreverent and politically liberal sense of humor and publishes a lot of shorter pieces. Sort of like New Yorker cartoons, some make me laugh out loud; some I find clever but not very provocative; some make me feel unhip and uneducated and annoyed about this, the way many Americans must feel about everything in The New Yorker; and some I don’t think are that funny.

Still, I would love to be published there, and at times think to myself, maybe I should try to write a humor piece. Then I wait for a funny thought to occur, and then I start writing about something else. Now, I decided I was going about it the right way — I’d had a funny thought, and then I’d remembered how to publish it. But I had to do so quickly, since this was about the 4th of July and the song anniversary. I remembered that the McSweeney submissions page had said something about Timely submissions.

The McSweeney submissions page is intimidating, in a literary and clever way that insists it isn’t trying to be intimidating, but rather to be funny, friendly, and precise. The tone is that the editors are frustrated with the massive volume of incorrect submissions they receive, but they are simultaneously above being frustrated, and poking ironic fun at the position they find themselves in of frustrated editorial staff. One rule reads, “If you submit a piece of writing intended for the magazine to the web-submissions address, you will confuse us, and if you confuse us, we will accidentally delete your work without reading it, and then we will laugh and never give it another moment’s thought, and we will sleep the carefree sleep of young children.” The subtext is that if you don’t find this funny and charming, you probably shouldn’t be submitting, because you’re the type of person who makes the submission process more difficult for everyone and, on top of it, takes everything personally.

I tried to make sure I read all the rules. First, I saw the part about Timely submissions concerning the current news, which I’d already basically read in the past and decided my poem fit into, so I didn’t quite digest the the words “news of the past 24- to 48-hours,” which might have given me some pause, since my poem was about the future.

I continued on:

SOME REASONS WE MIGHT SEND BACK OR DISLIKE YOUR SUBMISSION 
The following features do not necessarily disqualify any submission guilty of one or more of them, but they do not help one’s cause:

Your submission was of the poetry type.

Your submission was too long.

Your submission included the words “these days” or “nowadays.”

Your submission did not take place in a jungle.

...

(The jungle line is an example of something I don’t get.) Ok, my “song” was sort of a poem, this was maybe a problem, but I felt like I’d read poetry on their site before. (Later, as I was reading more of the site’s archives and realizing soberly how witty and well-developed the content was, I indeed found a series of limericks about philosophers, and an iambic pentameter scene called “Guildenstern and Rosencrantz and Hall and Oates.”) Further on in the rules, I read again “POETRY: We’re not considering poetry at this time.” But was my piece really poetry? It was more of a concept. It could have just as easily been written as a paragraph. Also, why did the rules contradict themselves — in one, poetry did “not necessarily disqualify,” but in the other, poetry was not wanted? There was clearly a gray area. I started drafting my email.

I appended my poem(?) with a note: “Sorry, I realize this is kind of poetry, but it’s short so hopefully not too much a waste of your time to read.” Then, I had at first written “Timely because of the 100th anniversary,” but I paused mid-sentence to verify that claim, and realized that the song was written in 1910 and there wasn’t really any Google News about it whatsoever. Shaken, I wrote, “Timely because of the 4th,” somewhat pathetically. I still thought it was Timely; I couldn’t really imagine it playing as well if it wasn’t published tomorrow. “Thanks so much for considering,” I added, which of course I meant. It’s really amazing that you can submit something and a real person reads it.

Another reason they might send back or dislike (is there a difference?) your submission: “Your submission was about being rejected by a literary magazine or website, such as the one’s [sic] whose guidelines you are currently reading.” Another section reads that if you don’t hear back from them, you should “Rail to your friends about the callous insensitivity of free, Web-based content outlets to the needs and feelings of writers. Vow the most thorough and satisfying of revenges.”

The submissions guidelines even have a way of making me feel super Lame about writing this blog post. [sic] burn though, right?

I didn’t really believe my poem would be published. I had mixed feelings about it, and it had been the work of a few hours. Yet, the reason you submit something is because you believe it could, maybe, possibly, deserve to be published. So there was, in fact, a small part of me that believed that my poem might, suddenly and very soon, go from my brain to the pages of the internet. From there, I saw it going viral, of course. I saw hate mail, since I’d included my email per the rules, and my real name per no good reason. People in red hats would be looking me up online and finding my blog and maybe where I live, since (contrary to what my fiancé insists is “just basic probability”) there is definitely only one Paige Dunn-Rankin in the world, and it’s me.

I noticed that my throat was thumping with my heartbeat. In fact my whole shoulder area, awkwardly nestled between the two back couch cushions, was throbbing. I must have had too much caffeine today, I thought, and not enough water.

A few hours later, the editor wrote back “Hi Paige — It’s a pass, but thanks for the look! Best, X.” It was amazing to hear back so quickly (I’m still waiting to hear the fate of a story at 3 different places, which I submitted about 7 weeks ago, and that’s very typical). I thought it was a great reply: simple, friendly, somehow positive. I wasn’t crushed when I read it, I wasn’t surprised, in fact my overall feeling was relief. I was also proud of myself. I think Eleanor Roosevelt said to do something that scares you every day? I’ve been doing that more and more, maybe not daily but with much greater frequency than I can ever recall in my life. Realizing that the things that scare you aren’t actually terrible, and in fact they’re worth doing, hasn’t stopped feeling revelatory. (Although I think that quote should have really clarified: “something you’ve been wanting to do, that scares you.”)

Still, “thanks for the look!” kept running through my head as I made myself some lunch and thought about what I would be writing for the rest of the day. I didn’t really feel like writing. I felt tense, and my face was hot.

Could “thanks for the look!” mean that they’d enjoyed it even slightly (but then wouldn’t they have said that)? If they’d really rejected it because it was a poem, would they have told me? Did that mean that they’d rejected it because it was bad first, poem second? Or did “thanks for the look!” mean they agreed it probably had been worth submitting, just didn’t quite meet the bar? I knew how silly it was to read into this line (An automated email following my submission had said “You can expect a short, quick, and unintentionally curt yay or nay soon”), but I was still doing it.

I read my poem again and felt the cloud of “nay.” “Anger’s how we gain!” didn’t just sound imperfect anymore, it sounded stupid. And yet — “thanks for the look!” — there were still parts of the poem I liked. Was I going to let one rejection convince me the poem was no good? But it was too on-the-nose, for sure. Too one-note. I’d suspected as much, and my suspicions were confirmed.

I was so confused and embarrassed for thinking the poem had been worth submitting that I didn’t tell a soul. I was simultaneously frustrated at myself for being so sensitive about what was, essentially, the most lite form of rejection I could ever expect as a writer. I wanted to get my thoughts right. These posts are the best help I know; there’s something about writing publicly under my name that keeps me honest and fair.

I guess now what I have toward the poem it is a kind of fondness, for something misshapen and interesting and not my best attempt. I still don’t regret submitting it. Because I did, I have a new respect, and perspective, for the emotions that come with.

I think the takeaway is — keep submitting. It’s the only way. Maybe I don’t have the makeup to be a Timely humor writer; I think I need to let things simmer a bit, make sure I have some distance to assess and decide to proudly stand behind my work, because then I won’t feel so affected by another’s opinion. Although I think that’s very hard either way. But it’ll get easier, for sure.

And there’s nothing wrong with testing the waters. I guess that’s what I was doing, without really knowing it. Dipping a toe so I could draw a quick breath at the cold. And dive in anyway.

Glass

Ok, here’s something I’m trying to process. So I’m just going to tell the story of it.

We were outside demonstrating my fiancé’s electric skateboard to one of his best friends — I should say he was demonstrating it, I was standing on the curb with my hood up, watching. It was kind of a big moment. BFF, as I will call him, described his mixed feelings at the fact that his friend now had something they’d both dreamed about for years. He’s a much better skater than me, my fiancé said, handing over the controls to watch BFF, who caught on immediately, carve down the street — I’m not sure exactly what carving encompasses, but anyway. A grinning driver waited for them to get out of her way; people are either amused or annoyed (or, reportedly, amazed) at my fiancé and his electric skateboard, depending, I theorize, on whether they think he’s as cute as I do — though maybe this time she just picked up on the guys’ overall stoked-ness.

I see, then, in my periphery, a girl walking down the street towards us. How do I know she’s homeless? There’s something wrong about the way she’s walking. She’s shuffling. I can hear her saying something, too. I try not to hear what it is. I’m trying to keep looking ahead, as if by doing this, she will disappear.

“Can you help me?” I hear, while rejecting the words, so they don’t make it to the part of my brain that processes meaning. I look at her, though, I can’t help it. She’s wearing a bright yellow safety vest. I think about the homeless people, 20-somethings, at least one of them a girl herself, who killed a woman my age in Golden Gate Park when I was living in the Haight.

“Can you help me?” she asks again. She is looking right at me, her blonde hair is dirty, curled in loose dreads, and there’s a pained look on her face, like she’s about to burst into tears. That pained look is directed at me, and it’s a primal playground feeling I get then, that she’s a classmate I’ve unintentionally betrayed. She stops walking, maybe 10 or 15 feet away now, and asks again.

I’m used to being on my way somewhere. It’s essential that I have somewhere to be, so I can walk faster and pass by, averting my eyes. I can’t do this with her. I’m in my own front yard.

The boys, who were in the street, are now standing by me in the sidewalk, the electric skateboard come to heel like a faithful dog.

“Can you help me?” She’s saying it to all of us now. My usual response is still unavailable, and I still find it impossible to speak. I just need a minute. I look desperately back at the two of them. Maybe I’m paralyzed because they’re there, and I want them to tell me what to do. I’m grateful, but also somewhat ashamed, when my fiancé steps in.

“What do you want us to help with?” He’s using the higher and more enunciated voice that comes out in tense situations, a voice I tend to find patronizing. “Are you in danger? Do you want us to call 911 for you?”

“Yes,” she says, looking relieved. That’s not what I was expecting.

“Yes?”

“I’m suicidal,” she says, her face reddening as she starts to cry.

It’s unnervingly timely, given the recent death of Anthony Bourdain, closely preceded by Kate Spade. We had just been listening to his audiobook on a drive, his voice brave and sensitive and wounded but ultimately optimistic, and I was messed up for a few days, I wanted someone like that to believe in the world still — to be live in the world still. I followed a link and watched him on a therapist’s couch, which had been played for TV as a quirky cultural encounter in a country with “more shrinks per capita than anywhere else,” but now echoed like a plea for help, and it made me upset, the therapist seemed pathetic to me, even harmfully dismissive. That day I wrote a story, just for myself, about a celebrity suicide counseling group that serves as a kind of purgatory, where a Bourdain character, desperate to get out of there for a smoke, finds himself talking to a Robin Williams character. But I realized halfway through, of course, I don’t know anything about suicide.

I don’t know what force was working in this girl in front of us. I should say young woman, but in the same way I think of myself as a girl, I think of her as a girl. We all, as discussed later, assess her pockets for weapons, doubt their existence.

The boys briefly confer, and then BFF calls 911. No one wants to, but what are we supposed to do?

While he’s on the phone call, which seems to last forever, the girl comes closer, and I keep trying to look everywhere but her, except I don’t want to not look at her now either, and so sometimes we make eye contact, which is a deep and staring eye contact. She has almond eyes the bright, light green of seaglass, and the darker ring around the irises just makes them prettier. They shine in the rest of her face — a crooked nose, acne, some extra weight, and a tan that I somehow know is dirt.

“They’re on their way,” BFF announces.

“They’re on their way,” fiancé and I repeat to her.

We do some more staring. Some more of those weird, forced smiles at each other and her, a smile that stretches my face and then falls when I can’t hold it up, because she’s still crying and still looking at me in that intensely pained way, although now there’s also something like interest behind it. She’s looking mostly at me, or at least it feels that way. I know it’s a fantasy, but it feels like she’s thinking she and I aren’t that different — wondering how she got to be here, instead of on the other side of the sidewalk, by the boy with the electric skateboard. It feels like she’s looking into me, pulling my privilege out and turning it over in her hands.

“It’s going to be ok,” I say, thinking that at least this can’t be the wrong thing to say to someone suicidal.

“What?” she asks me, with that underlying interest, as if I might have revealed some secret.

“It’s going to be ok. Help will be here soon.”

She doesn’t look calmed by this; if anything, she’s disappointed that was all I had to say.

BFF starts to ask her some questions, with a soothing but assertive bedside manner that makes me happy he’s headed to nursing school. We learn her name, we learn she’s the same age as us, we learn she’s also from SoCal, like me, though a less affluent city. In one of the silences, I want to tell her she has pretty eyes, but I worry that might make her stare and cry again, and the moment passes.

She’s not saying a lot, but when BFF asks some open-ended questions — something wise like, do you remember a good memory from when you were a child? — she suddenly is telling us everything, and it doesn’t make any sense. There’s violence in it, sexual things, things being done to her and put inside her, closets she was kept in, a man’s name that she says without introduction, as if he were a celebrity we should know, pills that make her all spaced out. Her mother, and other women, feature negatively, she doesn’t understand why they have to stalk her, why they have to do lesbian things. It’s sort of like someone telling you about their dream — it’s not possible to follow, and the emotions that pass on her face, her insistent repetitions, draw a kind of strained sympathy that might leave her lonelier than before; there is something essential that can’t be communicated.

She relaxes, though, from the talking. She asks if she can sit on the brick edge of our flower bed. It’s a misty San Francisco June dusk, and she looks cold, and I ask if she wants a blanket, and get a nod from BFF and run into the house to get her one. She drapes it over her knees, where it keeps slipping off her and almost falling onto the sidewalk until she grabs at it, half-successfully, like a child might.

Cheered by this, I ask if she also wants a glass of water? I go into the kitchen and spot some bread I’ve made, and start to saw off a slice — who knows when the last time was that she ate — but then I remember something about how you shouldn’t give people food if they’re on drugs, I don’t know if that’s real or not, but I decide against the bread and, feeling like I’m taking forever, fill a glass of water and bring it outside. She sips and then also swings this around as she talks, the water almost, just barely not spilling.

We slowly get the impression that she thinks she’s already dead. She keeps saying things like “that’s why I suicided,” past tense. BFF tells us later that this is something he’s seen before with the mentally ill. I wondered what she was seeing when she stared at me. If she thought she was in a kind of purgatory.

The police car pulls up, and as the cops get out I almost immediately have the thought — wait, the glass, that was so stupid. As if to make my point the officer, a young man not much older than us, serious-faced and precise, moves the glass (which she’s set down by now) out of her reach in a way that is calculatedly casual, and then starts to talk to her.

The discussion hinges on whether she has a plan to kill herself, or a plan to hurt other people, a terrible thing to be talking about, and especially in such logistical terms.

“I need to know if you have a plan to kill yourself, otherwise I can’t take put handcuffs on you and take you in the police car.”

“I’m suicidal.”

“Do you have a plan to kill yourself? Do you have a plan to hurt anyone else?”

“No.”

“You can walk to the treatment facilities, there is a women’s shelter at such-and-such address, you can get someone to take you there. I’m not a taxi.” The police officer says all of this, over and over, firmly but without frustration.

Crying: “I don’t get it. I’ve already told you, I’m suicidal.”

When two more cops arrive, standing bored in the background — when they run up against her idea that she has already suicided before — we decide it’s time to go inside. I’m not sure I want to, I feel invested, but I trust the boys on this one. I already have my blanket; the cops thought it was hers, and she explained while dropping it on the ground and apologizing tearfully to me, and I took it and it left me cold, too. She kept telling the cops that we, “these people,” had been so nice to her; this was important to her but it didn’t fit into the discussion about hurting. At one point she said emphatically that we were like her family, and I felt sad for her, used by her, and afraid of her, and paralyzed again by those feelings colliding.

We’re all quiet inside. The electric skateboard rests against the wall.

I mostly feel awful about giving her the glass, and say as much to the guys. “I thought about stopping you for a second,” BFF agrees, and they discuss the best possible water delivery method.

“Would have been pretty hard for her to have hurt herself on one of our Giants cups,” my fiancé muses.

“I really didn’t think she was going to do anything though,” I say, more to reassure than to defend myself. Her body language had never been violent, right? Well, at most, cautious and wounded, the kind of potential violence of a hurt animal. I have to admit, in this dialogue with myself, that I’d never really known what she was capable of; she thought she was dead. And I’d been so focused on calming her, I’d stopped thinking, let my own guard down.

There’s something I’m trying to put into words. Something about the line between self-preservation and charity being a difficult line to walk. On the one hand, you want to live in a society where people help each other. On the other, when it comes down to it, you want to protect yourself.

“I think what you’re saying is that you don’t want to be put in this kind of situation,” BFF says, and starts talking about solutions for homelessness, and we gradually move on to other things, but that wasn’t what I was saying at all. I was trying to look at this dilemma in the face, in the seaglass eyes, and not turn away.

Now I think he’s right — there is no escaping the dilemma, except perhaps saintly transcendence that could be a kind of suiciding, and we did the best thing, minus the glass.

Out the window, we saw her get taken away in the cop car. Maybe she finally said the magic words. I want to say I hope she’s ok, but I don’t know if that’s in any way realistic, so I hope she’s better.

And I do want a different situation, one where help is less fraught.

Thanks for listening; I get it now. I’m going to start volunteering.

So You Asked About My Life Coach

I switched on the TV shortly after talking with my life coach, Kristin Brabant. A network sitcom I don’t watch was playing.

“My life coach said those are my ‘strongs,’” a woman was saying, the camera all up in her face as she smiled defiantly. She twitched like she was getting ready to enter the ring.

“Your strongs?” Her husband raised his eyebrows and ate a spoonful of cereal.

“Yeah, we don’t like to say ‘strengths.’” Why was unclear. “And instead of weaknesses, we say ‘stretches’.” (This was at least a little funny.)

“So what did she say your new career should be?”

“A…life coach!” There was a crazed look behind her glasses now.

“Your life coach said…you should become…a life coach?” Over the laugh track, her husband indulged her slowly, like he was speaking to a child. I will note that both life coach and life coach-ee were women in this scenario.

“Well, life coaches need a lot of empathy, and empathy is one of my strongs.” To her husband’s dismissive look, she said with finality, “And empathy seems to be one of your stretches.” End scene.

I couldn’t believe I’d just happened to flip on the TV to hear dumb jokes about a service I’m paying for and finding extremely useful. Except, I could believe it. I’ve been tempted to roll my eyes at the idea of a life coach, too. And now that I have one, I’ve met occasionally with judgment, and more often with my own anticipation of judgment. I try not to mention my life coach, and if it comes up, my explanations feel defensive or shy. That’s why I’m writing this post, to say once and for all what I truly feel about the matter, since I’m not great at thinking under pressure.

I found Kristin, the coach, by accident. It started with a silly video — sent via Facebook message by Kristin, the friend, about six months ago. I burst into laughter when I saw the two of us dancing like fools to “Single Ladies” in front of her Macbook’s webcam. She’d randomly come across it and been transported, as I now was, to our time as undergrads at Berkeley almost a decade ago.

Kristin and I shared an apartment for a semester, our beds almost touching because we both insisted on fulls in a room meant for twins. We sort of lost touch after she traveled to Costa Rica to study abroad and was replaced by a new roommate who was there less often. The last time we were good friends was when I went to her 21st birthday party, at a gay bar in the Castro — the most fun dancing. She was always a great dancer; in the video, it’s hilarious to watch me aping her moves. We both had long-term and long-distance boyfriends whom we cried over and eventually broke up with. We appreciated each other’s jokes. We both, I think, harbored a crush on our next-door neighbor. For some reason, I remember thinking that we were just too similar to live together — I know we butted heads over things, but now it’s hard for me to remember what they were. I’m sure Kristin cared more about the state of our bathroom than I did. My boyfriend probably visited too often. Mostly, I think we just didn’t get to spend enough time being friends instead of girls trying to figure out how to share a tiny room.

In any case, I was glad to hear from Kristin, as I always was — we’d found ourselves living in the same city after college, and occasionally caught up over a drink. I went to her beach bonfire birthday one year and had a great time with her crew, singing and laughing and drinking, blanket-wrapped in the warm glow. I once invited her to a party because I thought the crowd was weird and wanted company (come to think of it, this type of behavior might have had something to do with why we weren’t closer) — she actually came, and made such an impression that a few people fell in love with her. Kristin is beautiful and charming, with a sassy, smart energy. Every time we met, she’d make me laugh buckets; she’s a natural storyteller. And she’d always leave me high on the energy that comes from being well listened to.

That old video Kristin sent me — both of us wearing sunglasses indoors, mugging for the camera — spurred another one of our infrequent meetings. As usual, we had loads of updates for each other. I had gotten engaged only the weekend before, to the guy I’d just started dating the last time I saw Kristin. Now I was visiting her beautiful new apartment, she was a vegan (I thought this was new, but she and so many other people around me had always eaten so healthily that I couldn’t be sure), and she’d made a big move to start her own life coaching business. I was impressed. I didn’t know much about life coaches; about as much as the average sitcom viewer, I guess. And while I might have judged someone for having a coach at that time, I (perhaps irrationally) wouldn’t have judged someone for being a life coach — and definitely not Kristin. I remembered her work in college, supporting underprivileged high schoolers. She’d done a project (ahead of its time, I think!) where she gave away free hugs on our campus’s main thoroughfare. And her previous jobs were in teaching and mentorship.

I came back from that dinner and told my fiancé about Kristin’s new endeavor. In his typical wise and plain-spoken way, he remarked, “Well, it’s nice that you already know someone who’s a good life coach.” He never suggested I look into it — he’s much too polite to have even been thinking that, and anyway I’d adamantly refused the slightest suggestion of “seeing someone” when I was having anxiety issues at my former job. But his comment stuck with me.

Thinking back to our dinner, I realized it had given me a taste of what it would be like to have Kristin as my life coach. I’d told her about my recent departure from my job as a product manager in tech, and the options I was looking into: law school, finding another product management job, and trying to…“become a writer.”

“Your body language completely changed,” she told me after I was done talking about how maybe I could make another PM job work. She pointed out that my shoulders were hunched, my body turned inward. With writing, though, she instantly perceived and returned my own excitement. How amazing that I’d wanted to be a writer since I was a little kid! She encouraged me to reach out to acquaintances who are writers (something that we ended up having to work on for six months, since I was terrified). She recommended a few books — You Are a Badass and The War of Art.

I bought Jen Sincero’s book the next day — I’d noticed it on my fiancé’s audiobook queue, so I figured it had two stamps of approval — and I devoured it before the week was over. It was exhilarating, and a balm for the feeling of ennui that had surrounded me in the past few months of playing video games and wondering what could possibly come next. As I read Jen’s writing, I kept hearing Kristin’s voice — they’re both funny, sharp, and spiritual young women. Jen explains at the end of the book that the best thing you can do to continue to invest in your growth is to get a coach. I remembered Kristin told me she had one herself, who was helping her as she struck out on her own and built her new business.

I thought about my fiancé’s comment. What did I have to lose? I had some savings in the bank, and in the worst case of it not working, Kristin and I would go back to rarely seeing each other. As I guessed, and as it turned out, I had so much more to gain.

I could tell you very specifically about the things Kristin has worked on with me. She’s helped me realize what I want, and set goals to get it, goals which have become, through her gentle help, more realistic over time (“writing a novel” became “submitting a short story to a few contests for unpublished writers”). She’s taught me about the different energy levels (basically, states of mind) that we can access when dealing with stressful situations. “Energy leadership” set off my skepticism at first, but it quickly made a lot of sense to me, in theory and in practice. We haven’t really talked about strengths and weaknesses — and even to my untrained eye that doesn’t seem like the best thing to focus on. Instead we’ve talked about my core values, and how I am or am not living in integrity.

I could also tell you what she’s helped me achieve: the time that I wrote 10,000 words in a week because the consequence was having to donate $200 to a political cause I don’t believe in. (It feels like ages ago that we had to resort to such medieval methods.) The short story that I did submit to several contests (Kristin’s idea — the deadline being extremely helpful). The blog I started, which I hesitated on for weeks because I couldn’t think of a good name — Kristin convinced me that paigedunnrankin.com was good enough, and it was. When I shared my writing with my family, for me a necessary first step to sharing it more broadly, it was because Kristin helped me let go of any fears, however irrational those fears turned out to be. I’m now starting to look at what it could be like to have a career where I write (just about every way you can interpret that), and it’s incredibly reassuring to know that Kristin will be there.

Maybe I could have learned and done these things myself. Just like how someone who hires a personal trainer at the gym could have read up on exercises, motivated themselves (!), occasionally asked a friend to spot them, and gotten into shape. If you’ve tried to do this without help, you know how hard it is. And if you’ve ever worked out with a great personal trainer, you know the difference — even expecting to check in regularly with that person, or being able to call them when you have a question or a success to report, goes a long way. Not to mention all the things they see in your tendencies and your technique that you’ve missed. Someone professional has my back as I face the struggles and fears that come along with figuring out my life, and just because that’s more nebulous than physical fitness doesn’t mean it’s silly or indulgent. If anything, it’s that much more important.

And I think it’s important to change the message I picked up, that I saw echoed in that sitcom, which is: by all means, get a personal trainer, get a coach for your golf game or grades, but a life coach? Getting help living in alignment with your values, choosing work that you care about, and achieving balance and happiness? You’d better keep that one to yourself, for now.

Now, a life coach isn’t cheap. Over six months, I’ve paid Kristin what it would cost my fiancé and I to go on a nice vacation. And there may be a time when I decide — Kristin and I were open about this at the beginning — that I could get more value out of putting that money elsewhere. But I couldn’t be happier with my decision. And I want to keep speaking up over the laugh track that maybe exists mostly in my head, but exists all the same.

Kristin and I are closer now, a happy consequence of sharing our gifts with each other (mostly, hers with me). My respect and love for her keeps growing. If anything I’ve written has made you wonder if you could use a life coach, do check her out at www.kristinbrabant.com.

Truth and Fiction

The very first short story I finished after leaving my job to “become a writer” was about a young father whose daughter becomes obsessed with a present he’s gotten her, a virtual reality best friend. The dad becomes obsessed with the knowledge the virtual friend is learning and logging from his daughter and her environment.

Despite what I felt was an interesting premise, the story failed to come together in any way that satisfied me. I’d set out to write about the ways that technology is diving generations — wondering, what kinds of things will our future kids play with that we won’t understand?, landing on VR, which is something that had already made me feel old and alienated, when it became the cool thing to work on among my friends and colleagues while completely failing to interest me. I ended up writing about this dad’s lack of compassion and his pathetic confusion about technology. Because I have never been friends with or even I think known a young divorced dad (to up the stakes and eliminate the number of characters I had to deal with, I made him divorced), I guessed that he would be feeling mean-spirited towards his ex-wife and jealous of her new boyfriend. Because I haven’t spent much time around children, the daughter was always either saying something cute or throwing a tantrum. I had no idea how to describe her interactions with the virtual friend — the very generational gap that I was trying to write about — because virtual reality interested me so little that I didn’t even have the willpower to research how this might work.

Finishing the story felt like finishing a sports game that you know you are going to lose. I pushed the dad towards some kind of epiphany…he cuddled his daughter and removed the virtual reality glasses from her room. “Main character is not likable,” I wrote in my notes. “Look into how VR actually works.” It took me a few more months, a few more failed story attempts, to realize that I’d rigged the game against myself from the start.

Next, I wrote a story about another put-upon man, a software engineer whose team is responsible for a bug that caused a fatal self-driving vehicle crash. This idea was taken from the headlines. I’d come up with a great title: “Post-mortem,” the name of the document we had to write whenever something went terribly wrong on a product at work, only in my story, it obviously also referred to the real death that had happened. The death — that was the problem. I thought I needed to write about something dramatic and important, to discuss tech companies’ great power and responsibility, but I had no idea how to actually deal with the death in a way that felt realistic. My main character’s tears felt insincere; his manager’s whip-cracking did, too.

I tried to picture my former tech leads in the main character’s situation, struggling to find and fix the bug. But I could only recall the ways they acted around me in (less) stressful situations — what happened between them and their monitors had been, mostly, a mystery. And so it remained in my story. My character banged his head on the keys and the code went blurry in front of his eyes, and so on. As the story meandered, sometimes into truthful situations full of details I remembered from office life, I finally had a mysterious stranger come and fix the bug for everyone, and my main character took a new job. I could feel it; another defeat.

I talked about my dissatisfaction with my life coach, who was helping me achieve the life goal I murkily and emotionally announced during our initial conversation: “to create something I was proud of.” She encouraged me to celebrate finishing stories, to show my writing to others, and above all to call myself a writer, something she dubbed “acting as if.” But I wasn’t a writer. Not yet. Would someone call themselves a painter, if they set out to paint a scene realistically, and then the trees came out blobby and the perspective was all wrong? “How will you know when you’re ready?” she asked me; or, of the work, “How will you know when it’s ready?” I was frustrated with the implication that I was being difficult to please, that if I couldn’t be satisfied with my progress so far, I might never be satisfied. I knew that if I wrote a good enough story, I would recognize it, the same way that as a beginning baker, I still recognized a decent loaf of bread from a flat and dense mess that had to be thrown away. “I’ll know when I know,” I said. “I’ll know when I feel like it’s right.”

I was journaling the whole time, getting to know the small voice inside my head, the voice of a young woman. A few of the books I was reading had encouraged me to write about memories, and though I was convinced I’d had a very uninteresting life, I found myself crying as I wrote about walking down to the beach with my family, or my grandmother hanging a fresh-flower lei around my neck at her house in Hawaii. Then, I wrote a speech for my grandfather’s memorial service in April — my first real writing assignment. Just talk about some memories, my mom said, and though at first I worried I wouldn’t have enough, as I sat down and focused, memories of him came flooding back, and of how I had felt as a girl.

The next time I sat down to write a story, I wrote about a young woman, sitting for a tech interview — and quickly her interior thoughts went from skin problems to getting sucked into Wikipedia browsing to riding the bus to outdoor education camp in sixth grade. There was so much emotion as she thought about that time — the excitement of being away from home amid the smell of the pines, how sad she’d been that it didn’t snow, the odd girl she’d been trying to distance herself from that year, but who ended up sharing a cabin with her anyway. What happened between them? I wasn’t sure, but I felt it was something uncomfortable, embarrassing, and confusing. Because of course something like this had happened to me. We were far from the interview now. I was writing a new story, my first true story.

In this story about camp, all the details were deeply felt, and I raced towards the ending with a sense that the truth could win. When I finished, I wasn’t sure if I had a victory or not; I thought some of the character’s choices weren’t fully explained, as if in reaching so far back, I had dropped a few essential pieces and needed to go looking for them again. The story simultaneously contained too many true things and not enough, ending up a kind of muddled reflection in which one could barely see the outline of the plot and the meaning. But for the first time, I made it to the finish line with an exhausted feeling of pride. Looking back, my speech for my grandfather was the first thing I was proud of — the real completion of my goal. But this was the first piece of fiction I was proud of, which had been my real goal.

Or was it fiction? I was afraid, as I wrote, that I was cheating by using so many things that weren’t made up. But this was also exciting, as if I was doing something illegal, seeing what I could get away with. I started another story, pulled directly from my recollection of being almost kidnapped while on a work trip in Shanghai, which I’d written in my journal months back in lieu of posting a #MeToo publicly. My last story had been based on memories of being 12; in this story, I was remembering being 22. It was much easier to remember how I’d felt and acted, but the emotions were duller, perhaps the result of too much drinking or my immature capacity for empathy. I was also creating characters from fragments of former coworkers, some of whom, unlike my elementary school classmates, I still occasionally saw and talked to. My first draft was too realistic, just because that was the only way I knew how to get it down — then I took out the details that didn’t serve the story, and merged and distorted the characters until they became new people, unattached to the real world.

This story, after several drafts, finally felt right to me — it was accurately saying something I wanted to say, something I cared about. I hadn’t known what I wanted to say when I set out to write the story — unlike in my first attempts — only that there were some emotions back in Shanghai, some unfinished business like in my story about camp, that asked me to dig deeper. And in the end the truth seemed to emerge out of getting those details and those feelings as right as I could make them. I was happy and invigorated, but confused. Sure, I had made up some things; if you figured that all memories and perspectives are “made up,” I had made up everything. But this didn’t feel like fiction to me — the way I had written stories in college from the point of view of a poor woman in Costa Rica or an artist’s muse, neither of whom I knew anything about, neither of whom I could even picture in my mind’s eye.

When I learn a new way of doing things, my first feeling is always skepticism. There’s always something foolish and ridiculous about myself, trying something so out of character. There’s often something just too obvious about this new way. In this case, I was learning to “write what you know,” which meant exactly that, and which must be the oldest piece of writing advice. I’d been resisting it for so long, justified by the fact that so many books or interviews had told me it was wrong and limiting — everyone is allowed to write about anything, and this rule can be followed too strictly, used as a way to play it safe.

But for me, writing what I knew was my artistic risk. For one thing, it involved getting a close look at myself, which I hadn’t done perhaps ever. For another, I was sure that what I’d written would reflect badly on me, and possibly hurt other people — as I started writing blog posts that were sort of about my parents, or as I handed my fiancé, my first reader, that Shanghai story, in which the main character dances dirty in a club and has a crush on an obnoxious guy.

“Just please don’t think that it’s about me,” I told him, unable to be in the same room as he read, and unable to sit still, either, scribbling in my journal. When he came over, he reassured me that was easy to think of the protagonist as someone else. Affection in his eyes told me that this pretends mattered much more to me than it mattered to him. He wasn’t mad. He liked the story.

I submitted this story to a few writing contests. As I wrote more and more truthfully, with that same fear I continue to force myself to reframe as a thrill, I gushed to my coach about my epiphany. “Acting as if,” had, in fact, been a necessary step — I had to just type every day, I had to finish a few bad stories, to figure out how to do things better. But acting as if, I was excited to report, was really no substitute for being.

In Situ

“What does in situ mean?” my fiancé asked me.

“In place, at the site, I think?”

At In Situ, the restaurant at the SFMOMA, the menu offered two explanations. One, what I had guessed; the other, “Relating and collaborating synergistically.” My dad passed the menu to me, saying, “I have no idea what this definition means.”

“It’s an adverb.” I tried to remember what those are. “So I guess it would be something like, you and I are in situ right now as we’re working on this project. Man, we’re so in situ on this issue!”

My dad looked skeptical. I was used to that. He had skeptically gazed at the menu a few minutes earlier, saying, “I started thinking that salmon thing could be good. But then I read the rest of the description and I was like, mm.”

The salmon was served with flying fish eggs and, I think, pickled ginger. It looked delicious.

My dad lamented the lack of steak on the menu. My mom complained she was having stomach issues the past few days. They deliberated as if nothing looked good, whereas to me, literally everything did. I was nervous. When I’d sent my parents the menu a week ahead of their visit to San Francisco, aware that they would be treating us, I couched my suggestion in concerns about the pricey-ness and adventurous-ness of the food. “Sounds great! Let’s do it!” my mom wrote back enthusiastically over Facebook messenger. I don’t think she consulted my dad.

Adding to my nerves, the situ was somewhat lacking. We were at a communal table although I’d requested on OpenTable not to be put at one, if at all possible, citing my out of town parents’ noise concerns. I knew it was a lame request, not likely to be honored, but still, it would have been nice. (Our table only had room for two other communers, who luckily never appeared.) My dad waffled over which side of the table had comfier seating — low couch or low chair? — and finally picked the chair. Across the restaurant, we could see the non-communal tables, warmly lit and secluded by walls dotted with modern art. On our relatively deserted side, the ambience was more museum-cafe, with big unshuttered windows bringing in the 7pm summer daylight and street traffic. The waitstaff was slow to check on us and casual, until halfway through our meal, a charismatic man in a suit appeared to take our wine and dessert orders, as if someone had alerted him to the parents.

After a few drinks at our home in the south of the city and incredibly bad rush hour traffic, we arrived early for our restaurant reservation, but without enough time to justify spending $100 on MOMA tickets — which is open until 9 on Thursdays, the day we dined, though it usually closes at 5. Instead, we made our way through the gift shop (my dad bought a packet of colorful chip clips, I bought a paintbrush — two of the best-value items, it seemed to us). The limited-time souvenirs from the Magritte exhibit reminded us of our failure to view said exhibit. My mom loves art, and I felt bad. We headed into the restaurant and ordered the limited-time Magritte cocktails, which were speckled on top to look like giraffes in a glass; pretty, but a bit bland for my taste. My dad got something with rum that turned out, upon closer inspection, to only have three ingredients: rum, lime, and pineapple. It was surprisingly delicious.

Picking starters was easiest: my parents went for the tapioca fritters and the asparagus. My mom and I ordered the carrot soup (a single serving was $7). I silently mourned that we would not be trying the cuttlefish or the salmon. We ordered bread for $4, and the brown butter it came with was definitely worth it.

As soon as the starters arrived, exquisitely presented, my nerves began to settle. My dad and I dove into the asparagus, while my mom and my fiancé at the other side of the table split the fritters, each end informing the others that what they were tasting was really really good. Our soups came in double-walled glass espresso cups, with a bit of foam on top, and the flavors of the carrot and curry spice were comforting, familiar, yet unusual. The asparagus dish had a number of thrilling accoutrements — fried maitake mushrooms, homemade tofu, and a sesame dipping sauce. The tofu’s rich flavors had me feeling like I was experiencing soy for the first time. My dad couldn’t get enough of the mushrooms (although unfortunately he had to, there were just a few bites each). When we got to try the tapioca fritters, my mom and my fiancé weren’t wrong — crunchy on the outside, delightfully sticky and chewy on the inside, dipped into a kind of complex sweet and sour sauce, they were perfect.

I was beginning to feel confident. My parents sang the appetizers’ praises, reminiscing about a very expensive dinner on vacation in Peru, similarly inventive, “a cut above.” We explained about Michelin stars, feeling it prudent to note that this restaurant had just received one.

My parents had opted to split the egg-yolk stuffed halibut entree — when it came my dad noted that it was cooked “the way chefs like,” as in, a bit soft, not necessarily the way he likes. I tried a bite and thought it was cooked perfectly — flaky, not slimy. Egg yolk seeped and mixed with the fresh peas, forming a delicious sauce that my fiancé scooped into his mouth after the parents were done with the dish. He and I were splitting the mysterious “Lamb Carrot”: the lamb buns, a kind of Chinese-style sweet bun stuffed with lamb, were delicious, as was the large carrot on the plate, also stuffed somehow with lamb. We split the farro risotto too, a zesty dish with cheese, pesto, and maybe something pickled — instantly satisfying, indeed a bit too satisfying for me to finish my portion.

We expected modern touches throughout, and MOMA didn’t disappoint. The napkin that my parents marveled over, a cross between paper and cloth. Glasses of wine inventively paired with the dishes in a hard-to-read alphabetical code going up the spine of the menu. The utensil, not a spork but a kind of spife, that was perhaps used for slicing as well as spooning, as our non-suited waiter explained half-heartedly, although that didn’t explain the notch in its side.

Everyone was very full — though my parents, ultimately, seemed to have eaten little — when dessert arrived, a cheesecake that we’d ordered because we had to order it ahead, which made it seem very special. I’d missed this, and the description of the dish, because I’d been in the bathroom (Are all bathrooms in SF going to become unisex now?, my mom wondered at the stalls. They were individual rooms, I explained). My fiancé was expecting something savory, but my parents were somewhat shocked at the cheesecake’s appearance: a round of Brie on the plate, surrounded by butter cookie “crackers.” They were more shocked by the flavor: indeed, soft and pungent Brie itself, with an outer layer of sugary caramel. My fiancé and I loved it, but the cheesecake proved too adventurous for my parents to finish their portions. Still, they insisted they were glad they’d tried it instead of something ordinary like the brownie, which they might have liked better, but…

I’d been worried that my fiancé and I were getting free dinner at a place that only we enjoyed, but in the end, my parents seemed truly impressed with their meal. We left feeling proud that we had given them a unique, San Francisco experience. I was proud of them for keeping an open mind, too. The food was worthy of its Michelin star, and everyone had seen that. We had overcome. We were in situ.

A few days later, we had my parents over for homemade brunch, which my dad applauded as the best meal he’d had in a while. Better than In Situ. My mom gave him a look.

“I loved that meal,” she insisted, and told a story about how their Airbnb host (presumably, a Californian herself) had sniffed over the expensive and fanciful “California” cuisine.

“It was definitely interesting,” my dad said, and left it at that.

Verbs and Nouns

When I was a kid, I was always saying I wanted to be a writer, and my dad was always telling me, “A writer is someone who writes.” I did the thing that kids everywhere do with the well-meaning advice of parents: I misinterpreted it completely. You see, the advice often came when I was down on writing — I didn’t feel like working on my essay, I didn’t want to finish my short story for summer writing camp (yes, I went to writing camp). My journal was gathering dust in my closet but I told visiting relatives I planned to write a novel — well, a writer is someone who writes. My dad was encouraging me, showing me how to follow through. But what I heard was, “A writer is someone who wants to write.” (And that ain’t you.)

Wants to — such a small but important phrase, and it slipped into my understanding, unquestioned.

Maybe I was thinking of another one of my dad’s sayings: “Find a job you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.” What did it mean to have a job you love? I had no idea; maybe you woke up each morning to birdsong and leaped out of bed with a grin, wanting to do stuff. What stuff? Well, the things I loved were writing, reading, drawing, swimming, playing outside, watching T.V., and playing video games. I wouldn’t have wanted to do a single one of them all day long. A combination, maybe, but that didn’t sound like a job.

I thought being a writer was a potential job. But writing was a lot of work — work when I struggled to get the words right, work when I handed a piece to my dad and we went through his red-penned suggestions. My dad, a laywer, studied English lit, and possesses a keen eye for extraneous words, passive tense, and non-sequiturs. I worked to check my sensitive ego enough to appreciate his critiques, because the writing was actually more important. I didn’t care about anything the way I cared about writing, because I knew that with a great deal of effort I could eventually express myself truly and permanently (at least, as long as the house didn’t burn down), and that was the best. While I wrote, I could delight myself with an idea or a turn of phrase, and the way one of those gave way to the other, and that was also the best.

But writing was still work, and as it seemed my dad was always pointing out, I didn’t want to write all the time. In fact, I wrote less and less as I got older and spent more hours on homework, friends, part-time jobs, and sports. Nevertheless, I collected books on writing like I was studying for an MFA, and those books insisted that people who wanted to write would make time for it in their lives — the pen was a calling, a love that a true writer couldn’t resist (unless they had writer’s block, of course, which only happened to writers once they were already writing). The books confirmed my doubts: I probably didn’t have a passion for writing; I was only compelled in that way by AOL instant messenger and sitcoms.

When I went to college and declared a major in English, still clearly my favorite subject, I wasn’t sure what I planned to do with the degree. Actually, I had a wish, but it seemed pretty uncertain at this point. When my dad said, simply, “A writer is someone who writes,” I knew he supported my choice of study, but it felt like he was getting a little tired of repeating himself.

I’d taken a computer science class in high school because a few guy friends recommended it; one of them became my boyfriend, and gave me encouragement and help debugging as I took more classes in college. I liked the logical thinking and the creativity — stepping through a fascinating proof that underlies cryptography, or finally getting my machine learning code to compile and play PacMan. Everyone seemed very impressed that I was one of the only girls in my classes, that I was doing something so ostensibly challenging and cutting-edge. I tried not to admit, even to myself, how much the material drained me.

Meanwhile, I loved English, which I continued to major in almost as a guilty pleasure. I left my lectures feeling like I’d been moved by a sermon; I left my exams exhilarated from responding to a prompt with some unique and interesting perspective I hadn’t even known I’d possessed. I couldn’t wait to give feedback to my peers in creative writing classes; my hand always shot up in discussion sections. Writing papers took a lot of time and energy, but I often reread mine with gleeful pride.

“I might want to be a writer,” I told my parents still. Had I written any stories lately? No, unless you counted the two I had to write for my short story class; I’d been a little busy. “Remember what I always say,” my dad told me.

I kind of dropped the writer thing, somewhere in the middle of college. I was done insisting I wanted to do something that I clearly didn’t want to do (maybe, hopefully, I’d catch the fever when I got older). I declared a second major. And while I don’t remember any career fair for English students, there were festivals for computer science, trumpeting jobs upon jobs that people seemed to love.

“Paige needs to find her passion for computer science,” my manager wrote in my review after a summer internship at Microsoft. I’d been working with a young woman whose eyes lit up as she defended her database design, and I knew my manager was right. But I dug in my heels, thinking, the fact that computer science is so much less fun and more frustrating than English is normal. Everyone says so, that’s what makes it a challenge worth overcoming. I figured I just hadn’t found the right job.

I tried a few more jobs in tech, but my passion still eluded me. I left my job to figure out what I wanted to do instead, and I thought I’d give creative writing a real shot. The day I decided to start, I sat down in front of my word processor and almost immediately stood up to get some water. I sat down again; I opened Facebook and the New York Times. Returning to the word processor hours later, I felt foolish. I was an adult who had made a decision, so I would keep going for a while to see it through, but this couldn’t possibly be the passion I’d set out to find. A writer is someone who writes!

My dad would have pointed out my flawed logic with a stroke of his red pen. And soon, I saw for myself that he was right, and I’d heard him wrong all those years. Wanting to write didn’t have anything to do with it. I started writing, forcing myself to do it every weekday, at first holding myself to a word count, then to a span of hours. I dragged myself through fall and questioned everything in winter, but by spring, I only needed to shake off some morning hesitation to write all day long. It still felt like work, but it also felt like love, as it always had. And just like that, I became a writer.

I’ve been thinking about where I got confused. As a kid, I was trying to say that I wanted to be a writer as my job, in the future, a job I needed to love so I wouldn’t have to work a day in my life. Thankfully, my dad never told me that I’d better pick something more practical; he certainly improved upon the typical parental advice of previous generations. But since he’s always said that I should improve upon him, I hope he won’t mind that I have a few ideas. I’d like to try to clear up all the mess around work and love, jobs and being, verbs and nouns. To a mini-me, I might say something like this:

You mean you want to be a writer as a job when you grow up, right? Great. Right now, your job is to be a student, which is a weird job you don’t get paid for, and it’s probably hard for you to picture ever having any other job. But it’s awesome that you know writing is something you like to do. (Here, my kid will roll their eyes because I still say “awesome.”)

Writing is a verb, and every job is a noun, a whole situation composed of many, many verbs. You already know that being a student isn’t only about studying; you’re also expected to take tests and speak in public and get along with your classmates. Like with most jobs, you get decent credit for just showing up every day and sticking to your schedule. Like with most jobs, the people who actually care about studying are only sometimes successful and happy with the varied, mysterious, and shifting requirements of “student.” (But they’ve got a good shot, I think.)

No one is going to just tell you what all the jobs are where you can do writing, which may have “writer” in the title and may not. No one is going to just tell you what else is involved in those jobs (maybe verbs you like, maybe verbs you don’t). So ask; start with your teachers at writing camp. Follow the words you see all around you, inspect the jobs at their source.

Because you care so much, I think you’ve got a good shot, but let’s say you get a job where writing is a big part — maybe you’re even called a writer — and you don’t succeed, or you’re not happy. Or let’s say you can’t find someone to pay you for the kind of writing you care about, so you have to get a job doing something else, and write on the side. It’s ok; keep going, and know that your job will never define you. What matters is your work, and the decision on that is all yours.

Work is the effort of your self behind a verb, and as you’ve seen with writing, when you care about something, you want to work your hardest at it. There’s a kind of paradox, because you never want to do hard work, nobody does, and you might wonder, do I really care after all? Trust that you do, because when you don’t care with all your heart, the work won’t feel good, not even close. When you find work that fills you up even as it empties you out, hold onto it, because it’s rare. Actually, it’s the best — but you already knew that, didn’t you?

For now, focus on doing the work of growing up. You want to grow up and become something? Plan instead to grow up and do something, because the work you choose to do is how you become. Sorry, but there’s no way around it. Sorry not sorry, because you’re incredibly lucky to get to choose in the first place.

My dad had a great way of putting it: A writer is someone who writes.

He also used to say, with an affectionate laugh: “Listen to me now; believe me later.” Yeah, I think I’m going to have to steal that one too.

Replanting

About a year ago, my boyfriend impaled himself on a metal post. We had just moved in together into a miraculously affordable bungalow with a backyard, and we were cheerfully ripping out piles and piles of invasive weeds, uncovering planter boxes and the remains of an old fence. We left the posts sticking up, small tubes about an inch or two wide with blunt ends, while we hacked and pulled our way through a mass of ivy. I’d been afraid to find snakes and rats, but there weren’t any, and after a few weekend days of hard work, we were almost done.

Then an ivy root snapped in my boyfriend’s hands, he stumbled downhill, and his armpit went down onto one of those metal posts. He came up off of it and I ran after him inside, he was saying it was probably bad, pretty bad. We somehow got his shirt off him, and he lifted his arm to show me. I thought I was prepared for something bad, but I wasn’t prepared for what I saw: a huge black hole in his armpit. I almost fainted.

He became incredibly, eerily calm. Should we call an ambulance? Probably, I sobbed. I had never really driven in San Francisco, had let my license expire, and I just imagined him passing out on me on our way to the ER, as I struggled with traffic and the narrow, hilly streets outside our house — he didn’t think he was going to pass out, but he didn’t know. He apologized for not being able to drive, because he is a wonderful person.

I dialed 911 on my phone, a tester phone for my job, and it didn’t work; the operator couldn’t hear me. So I found his phone, dialed again. The ambulance would be there in five minutes. He asked me to get him a change of clothes for the hospital, and I frantically cast aside T-shirts and pants until I found what I thought might be his favorite, comfiest ones. We sat on the bench by the door. I kept telling him I loved him. He kept telling me it was going to be ok, he was going to be fine. He was mostly dreading the needles (his phobia). Oddly, the gushing blood we expected never came, not even as the first responders arrived and drew back the shirt my boyfriend was now using to press against the wound.

I thought this seemed like a great sign, but the doctors looked very concerned. They took my boyfriend into the back of the ambulance and put an oxygen mask to his mouth. One of them asked me, “Is he usually this pale?” I wasn’t sure. His chest did look pale, but was it more pale than normal? Had I even been paying attention to anything in my life? I overheard the head doctor say that they needed to go to SF General, even though my boyfriend was a Kaiser patient. SF General was the only place equipped to deal with a puncture wound to the trunk area.

I climbed into the passenger seat, and started calling family members, who answered the phone brightly; it was a pleasant surprise to hear from me. I had never had to call 911 before, much less tell people about a bad accident, but it was all very straightforward, as it turned out, which was both relieving and chilling.

When we got to the hospital, a phalanx of doctors swarmed around my boyfriend and whisked him away. I was left standing with a social worker, who had a serene face and a soothing voice, and I loved her immediately, but I was very afraid of what she was saying, and moreover what she represented. He was in the OR, and they might have to operate on him. Apparently, your armpit is right next to your lung.

The social worker led me to a small room with brown chairs, brown walls, and brown floors, and left, closing the door behind her. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so obsessed with my thoughts, so unable to think of anything but the worst outcomes, so alone. I now realize most people, past a certain age, have probably experienced their own brown room, but at a very lucky 27 years old, this was my first. I tried to text my mom, but I didn’t have service (you would hope to have service at a hospital — I blamed my tester phone again). I felt heavy with helplessness; I put my head on my knees. I was still wearing my sports bra, and my perfectly intact armpits were rank. I peeled a few sticky weeds off my yoga pants. I told myself it would be ok and I tried to believe it.

And it was ok. They didn’t have to operate. Miraculously, the post had missed all his major arteries, and hadn’t nicked his lung after all. He’d need stitches, if only because the hole was so big, and it had done a little damage to his nerves, but that would heal. The air bubbles in his chest cavity — a normal result of having a hole in your armpit — would go away on their own, although they still wanted to monitor him for six hours to make sure the bubbles didn’t make his lung collapse.

He squeezed my hand while they cleaned his wound, excruciating pain on his face, despite a hefty serving of fentanyl and his natural fortitude. He had told me, at dinner one night after we moved in together, that he really needed me; he’d told me he would probably propose within the year. “I can’t wait to marry you,” I said as he lay on the hospital bed. I really needed him too.

In the weeks that followed, I washed his armpit and replaced his gauze and made sure he took his antibiotics. When we went to Hawaii about a month later, he had healed well enough to swim in the ocean. It feels a little weird to him now when you touch his arm or hand on that side; in a more positive development, his impaled pit doesn’t really smell anymore (we think the glands got messed with, and we might be onto an innovative new procedure for bad B.O.).

The changes for me were more psychological than physical. I felt more sure about my boyfriend than ever, and I suddenly felt it was important to be sure about everything, as sure as possible — because any of the things I took for granted about my life, including my life itself, could change or disappear in an instant. Maybe this was something that my boyfriend, active and accident prone since youth, didn’t need to learn. He’s an entrepreneur, engaged with life and aware of what he wants in a way that seems to come naturally. I was the one who needed a wakeup call.

I appeared to be doing splendidly. My work provided me with a great salary, unbelievable benefits, and exotic travel opportunities. When I talked about what I did at parties, it sounded objectively interesting and important. I got to meet Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson when they filmed a movie about how crazy amazing it was to have my job.

Inside, I was sick, and barely surviving. I was wasting hours reading about other people’s relationship drama on Reddit and looking at pictures of adoptable cats and puppies I had no intention of adopting (for some reason, that was how my sickness expressed itself via the internet). My face was broken out in painful acne cysts that I poked at feverishly. I avoided talking to anyone at work more than was absolutely necessary, eating my lunch alone. I smiled and nodded and did just enough to keep afloat, all the while feeling that I could barely contain my true listless, selfish nature. Any misstep, however small, became confirmation, which cycled into guilt and avoidance, which led to more missteps.

After my boyfriend’s accident, I began to have a small, insistent feeling that what I was doing with the majority of my time was truly wrong, wasteful, and needed to stop. The feeling followed me around for a few weeks, as I explained to coworkers that I was a bit shaken up. Then I suddenly hit rock bottom.

Our team was hosting partners from another company, and I came into the engineering meeting late from unexpected traffic (a common enough occurrence that it should have been expected, but I also refused to get on the shuttle at 6 in order to get to work by 8). The complex design tradeoffs and negotiations, already underway, went over my head completely. I spent the meeting among all these well-meaning and well-informed men, confused, distracted, and feeling like a kid in class who hopes they won’t be called on — and I was never that kid. What’s more, I was supposed to be a leader on the team, the manager of the product.

As we walked back from lunch, my lead engineer asked me, very kindly, “Is everything ok? You have sad eyes.” (Picture this in a faint German accent.) I told him everything was fine, and excused myself from the meeting. I went out to a field a short walk from the office and lay under a tree in the fetal position and cried uncontrollably.

A year before this, I had gone through a similar crisis, including the fetal position crying (and looking back, there had been many lite versions). And I’d come out of that rock bottom deciding to recommit to my job and move to a new and exciting project — building phones — with a great manager. Now I felt like an even bigger failure.

The work on my new team was, again, so objectively interesting and important, and the people were, again, for the most part so supportive and smart and just trying to do their best. But looking towards the future — days, years — I saw nothing but endless things I didn’t want to do. Success would mean more of these things, with higher pressure and higher stakes. Failure would mean less attractive and interesting versions of these things (did I even care?). Interminably.

I thought a good, sane person would have focused on the opportunities to have a positive impact on millions of people, and the lifestyle the job afforded me — which was what everyone told me to do whenever I had one of these crises of faith. Unless I really wasn’t happy, of course; no one wanted me to be unhappy. It seemed I had to decide for myself: was I unhappy, or was there something wrong with me? I knew “imposter syndrome” is common among women (at my company there was even a group devoted to this syndrome, with hundreds of members). I knew I had a tendency to be dramatic and sensitive. I knew I’d lived a sheltered, privileged life, and now, in my 20s, had a job that people twice my age dreamed of having.

It had been my dream too, ever since I was in college and met a few older guys, freshly back from their product manager training trip around the world, which sounded like the best thing ever. And my dream came true, despite the fact that I didn’t even make it past the phone screen the two times I’d interviewed for the summer internship version of my job. Surely this was the golden opportunity of my life; well-meaning people were always telling me that I couldn’t do better.

In the field, under the tree, I wasn’t crying because I was unhappy. I already knew that. I was reminded every time I dreaded going to work (every morning), every time I imagined the future with a nauseous shiver. I was crying because if I couldn’t be happy here, I didn’t think I could be happy anywhere. I was unhappy, and there was something wrong with me.

My boyfriend spent hours with me on the phone, telling me that I was not a bad person. But I wasn’t easily convinced. When I did leave, about a month later, it wasn’t with my head held high, moving on to bigger and better things. I teared up talking to my boss and my engineering lead, in conversations where I admitted that I didn’t really know why I was unhappy, or what I wanted to do, but I supposed I had to go figure it out, since my boyfriend just had this accident and I realized that life was short. They were incredibly supportive, but except for the fact that nobody was mad and everyone understood, it was like initiating a hard breakup; I felt confused and ashamed.

I said goodbye to an organization I had loved and been sheltered by, that had treated me kindly and generously, given me fun and fond memories, and taught me things I couldn’t have learned anywhere else. Mostly, I said goodbye to my old identity, which was completely wrapped up in that job — it was where I ate, played sports, and made many of my adult friends; it provided my phone, my computer, and my transportation; it was mostly all I talked about.

I cringe to say this, but for my entire life after college, my entire real adult life, everyone was always asking me what I did, and I usually replied, “I work at Google.” Only then would I explain my position (not many people know what a product manager is). That was how I saw myself — I wasn’t in an industry or on a career track, I was a Googler, like I was an American.

The version of me with that job had been certified smart, wealthy, and successful, and people were proud of her, even admired her. She wasn’t the very best at her job, and she wasn’t the very worst. The problem was only that she wasn’t happy. In fact, she was so negative and dysfunctional that I couldn’t stand to be around her anymore. Maybe I was really breaking up with her.

I felt empty after I left. I didn’t think I wanted to do anything, and so for a while, I didn’t. It wasn’t that terrible, or that different from what I’d been doing at my job — only now I didn’t hate myself, I just felt bored. I slept a lot. I played video games. I took a few trips. I took the LSAT, which was intense and weird and kind of fun. I’d told everyone that I was going to maybe apply to law school, because that felt productive and like something I could possibly succeed at, but I let the application date come and go without really researching a single school. That was somehow fine, though; if I could be ok leaving my job, I could be ok not doing another thing I didn’t want to do.

The more I spent time with just myself, suddenly with no expectations to meet and no identity to uphold, the more I felt drawn to strange and surprising things. I learned to knit, to bake bread, and to garden, three skills I’d never had even a hint of inclination to study in the past. I stroked those hats, loaves, and leaves with an obsessed, amazed feeling. It was a feeling of love, for what I had created, and even more for myself, the creator. It was a feeling I hadn’t experienced in a long time.

Except I had occasionally gotten a whiff of this feeling at work, when I would reread a particularly thoughtful email or doc I’d written (which I did somewhat compulsively). I cared too much about these things — people were always asking me, “What’s the tl;dr?” This stood for “Too long; didn’t read” (a term appropriated from Reddit, I think), and the unspoken rule was that it should go at the top of anything longer than a few paragraphs. I wouldn’t have minded as much if it was called “summary” or something, but “too long; didn’t read”? Wasn’t that a bit insulting to everyone involved? Anyway, it felt secret and weird, my pride in the things I’d created that were always tl;dr. But it was something.

At home one night with my brain’s newfound silence, I remember looking at myself in the bathroom mirror and hearing with absolute certainty, so clearly that it felt like I was saying the words aloud, “You are going to become a writer. That’s what you really want to do. That’s what you have always wanted to do.”

I didn’t know what to do with this information. It felt kind of absurd and impossible. I hadn’t written a single story or essay since college. But I couldn’t deny that the voice was vigorous, by which I mean full of life.

I left my job last August, and I started trying to write in October, hardly managing to finish even one very bad and frustrating piece. It’s now May, and I’ve submitted a short story to several writing contests. It’s maybe still very bad, but I’m proud of it, and the important thing is, it was joyful, not frustrating. More to come on my journey as a writer, and the support I’ve received and am still receiving from wonderful people.

It’s spring. My boyfriend proposed last November, when I was newly unemployed and anxious, and it was perfect. I can’t wait to marry him. In our backyard, a vegetable garden is flourishing — I planted tomatoes in the place where we yanked out that post.

I think everything will be ok.