“I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life…”
Perhaps it’s because I’m unwed. Perhaps it’s because my primary concern is paying my rent, not my mortgage. Perhaps it’s because I picked a career that is, by definition, unstable and project based. But whatever the case may be, I often find myself backing up, evaluating, and doing a gut-check about where I am and how I feel, because I have the freedom to change most things.
The position I’m in is both a luxury and a loss. It’s a luxury because my primary concern is, truly, selfish. Feeding myself. Housing myself. Being myself. It’s a loss because I do not have the assured knowledge of priorities that comes with marriage and family. Were I like many of my dear friends, I’d know that my marriage is paramount in my decision making, and as such, most of my decisions are done in a team setting. I’d know that the first task is making sure my children are fed, housed, and being themselves. It would be both simpler and a helluva lot more complicated. It would be different.
I, like my mother before me, find my early thirties rife with me-time. Unlike my mother, I’m not panicking about being alone, because I hope that, like my mother, I eventually meet a man who is equal to me in kindness and self-assurance. Someone who has also spent time backing up, evaluating, and doing a gut-check. Someone who has also gone to great lengths to assure himself that he is fully himself.
The story of my parents gives me great solace. I rarely feel like I’m being left behind, because all I wish to do is form my own version of the type of marriage they had, which arrived later than usual and blossomed beyond belief. Both of my grandmothers had a child at forty. Life is both too long and too short, and losing myself in the urgency of what I lack at the moment adds anxiety that I just don’t have space to accommodate.
This summer, my dad and I spent days in the car together. During one stint when I was at the wheel, I asked him who the first person he fell in love with was. I imagined a high school or college crush, maybe someone he dated in the Navy. For a few beats, he didn’t say anything. Then he said, “I wasn’t expecting that question.” I braced for the shock of new information, and possibly some grand admonition of young love.
I gave him a few looks out of the corner of my eye and realized he was crying. “Your mom.”
Moments like that snap the hot/cold fire/ice feelings into action. The anger of my mom’s absence in the car with us flies by at the same time I snag the gratitude that these are my parents and this was their marriage. I am both furious and humbled, seething in my wonder. My parents loved each other so well. My parents are now separated by death. Their love is the greatest gift I’ve ever received. Their love is now inescapably tied up in hope for life after death. Why am I so lucky? Why am I so unlucky?
This is the forth time I’ve moved to a new city, basically sight unseen, with a half-baked notion of what might happen and a whole lot of sheer, unpackaged will. The first was my move to Palm Desert to teach high school, a job for which I’d never trained. The second was when I moved to Los Angeles to “Do The Things,” ended up working at Universal Studios, taking comedy classes, working at a parish, and going to grad school for fancy face noises. The third time was Vienna. And now I’m in Berlin.
Things I’m Really Good At:
Reading between the lines of Google reviews
Starting conversations with English speakers at a bar
Figuring out what aisle the rice is on
Passing as German by keeping my mouth shut and communicating with my eyebrows
Not caring when I realize that legging are socially unacceptable
Adjusting Google Maps timing to accommodate my slower-than-average walking pace
And the pièce de résistance:
Living through FOMO on a Friday night when everyone in an apartment/restaurant/street is at a party except me, because I know no one, and no one knows me.
Things I’m Really Bad At:
Traditional employment
Twice now I’ve turned down a hot-ticket, high paying job offer to do this *gestures vaguely* instead. Sometimes I fantasize about what it would be like to afford a premium gym membership. But those moments pass. The drive in my gut to make good art and have good conversations, to intentionally build my life around singing and performing while I am spouseless and childless, well, that hasn’t passed. Someday I hope it will be a balance, and my decisions will be done as a two (on behalf of three! or four!), and not as a one. But not today.
Which is why I am always checking in. Am I happy here? Do I like this neighborhood? (Yes.) Is the layout in my apartment working? (Needed a better desk chair.) Am I spending enough time on my career goals and not getting stuck in the weeds of side hustles? (The constant struggle.) Is this goal still worth this situation? Is this situation the best set-up possible?
The boon of my ENFP/Enneagram 7 life is that I am always evaluating the big picture. Now that my mom has died, I have an even more vivid understanding of death, it’s inevitability, it’s finality, and the Communion of Saints. I believe that when I go to mass and partake in the Eucharist, I am touching the liminal space between this world and that of Heaven. That’s part of the deal in Catholicism — at mass, all the angels and saints are present in a more urgent way, because the body the Creator donned to be present on earth is present again, in those pieces of bread, and when we consume them there is this radical, visceral closeness. I am closer to my mom when I’m at mass, putting the Body of Christ into my own body.
Of course it’s weird. But I don’t think it’s any weirder than buying Bitcoin or considering a Koons to be high art. It’s the choice I’ve made based on my lived experience and what I consider valuable.
I like to think being Catholic makes me a better person. It certainly makes me a more grounded one, because the old-school Catholic notion of “memento mori,” remembering one’s own death, gives my current life it’s own sharpness and spice. I held my mother’s dead body and placed my flushed cheek against her waxy one, willing her to hug me back. She didn’t.
Death is inevitable, and it’s not a story I’ve read, it’s a story I’ve lived. Because of that, the big picture of the decisions I make every day about food, friends and career is more vibrant. It’s as if coming face to face with the reality of my own death flushes my life with color and nuance. Scarcity breeds innovation. I know I’ve got a finite amount of time, and I don’t fear the end of it, so I’m not going to spend my time trying to continuously extend it. Instead, I’m going to make it rich in flavor and conversation.
So when I see my friends with spouses and children, and my immediate, societally-induced thought is to mourn the lack of my own, I remember that I’ve only got a few decades on this dirt anyway, and would I really change anything I’ve done so far? Teaching at Xavier? Going to grad school? Spending tens of thousands of dollars on private voice lessons and coachings to be able to sing specific, obscure music very well?
No, I wouldn’t change it. I find, like Koons, devoting time and energy to an uber-specific art form to be deeply satisfying for my heart, my soul and my humanity. It makes me a better human. I’m good at many things. I am very good at singing opera. What a gift, to push forward what a human can be capable of, to hone a craft with the best of them. It’s running a marathon. It’s becoming a surgeon. It is satisfying in the pursuit itself.
So this brings us back to the value check. I’m sitting in Berlin, supporting myself by writing freelance and designing websites, once again building out a network of teachers, coaches, comedians and friends. Do I live in a perpetually shifting fog of grief? Of course. Does the hope of joining my mother in a real, radical way upon my own death keep me moving forward? Yup. Does the finite nature of my body and my life on earth give a satisfying definition to the choices I make? That, friends, is the kicker. Indeed it does.
In an unexpected way, it removes the urgency of hitting “milestones” created by twenty first century American culture. I’m not playing by the rules of my generation, I’m playing by the rules of a human with a life and a body and a lot of love to give. I survived childhood and haven’t died giving birth. That means I’m currently older than most women who’ve ever lived.
The richness of my life, the things that get me up in the morning and commandeer my heart and time, are the conversations I have. The delicate craftworks of jewelry at a market. The unbelievable taste of a new cheese. Really good writing. Calling my dad at midnight to have a long cry. Sitting alone at a café and watching the sky. Making bad puns with friends via messenger all day. Video chats with my dog. A dinner date at a restaurant that goes on three hours. Trying to craft a visual joke for my Instagram story. Spending 45 minutes in the English bookstore reading reviews of every single YA fantasy novel on GoodReads to pick the very best one. Digging through a thrift shop and giving each piece a personality. Singing a phrase over and over again, alone, to myself, to make it beautiful.
This is the work of living — finding the joy in the in-between moments, seeking satisfaction in the day to day. As Mr. Bauer told us junior year, our task is to suck the marrow out of life. (Thoreau said it first, but I like to imagine Mr. Bauer looked at a room of frazzled, pastel polo-wearing, over-scheduled 16 year old girls and came up with it on the fly.)
That’s the question I ask as often as it suits me: Am I sucking the marrow out of life? Is there marrow to be had? Am I feeling loved? Am I giving enough love out? Am I doing my best to make the people I meet feel good about themselves and the world? Do I feel good about myself and the world?
If this is all the time I get, is this what I want to be doing?
While you’re here…
If you, like me, enjoy reading good writing, might I suggest a few newsletters that I read regularly? The first is from a friend in Berlin who is a much more successful freelancer than I. She’s acerbic and delightful and deeply authentic. We met in Vienna when she came up to me after my set at a comedy show and demanded that we be friends. May I suggest The Percolate.
The second is from a long-time friend/mentor/content collab partner who hails from the land of Thoughtful Catholicism (my term) and finally started his own newsletter. He’s a professor, writer and father. One could argue that the fearlessness he employs in his pursuits laid the groundwork for much of my own vocational drive. May I suggest Life | Sweetness | Hope.
In that vein, if you like what you read here, please pass it along to those you know who might enjoy it, and if you want to get this in an email, subscribe. It’s free!