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.

The Cut-Glass Bath by René Magritte
The Cut-Glass Bath by René Magritte

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.