The Next Bold Move

Hurricane season starts next week. I went shopping for all manner of supplies to ward it off today, the first day of Florida's tax-free hurricane-supply-up holiday. (No taxes on candles, batteries, propane, and $1,000-dollar-generators.) I bought two cases of bottled water, and a cooler. And more baked beans than I am comfortable counting.

Even as I shore up for the real Florida welcome wagon, I'm beginning the think about what comes next. And I mean "next" in a big way. In a what-is-my-life-for, Ani-Difranco-sized way.

I've narrowed the field a bit in the past five months. I've crossed Florida off the list of places I might someday want to settle down. And I've ended up answering, at least partially, a question that I wrestled with so much last year, the subject of many a tortured backpacking-through-France journal entry and numerous malaise-ridden bookstore confessional emails sent to myself.

I had cast Life After College as a choice between two ways of living, the Family model versus the Big Dreams model. The Family model takes as its core a community-centered life among people of ones choosing, while the Big Dreams model takes ones own half-imagined aspirations for oneself as its central force. I saw the two as diametrically opposed, because, try as I might, I could not see how a community-centered life could do anything but get in the way of my own big dreams. I liked Boston and being among people I knew and loved, but I always harbored a deep, gut-rumbling conviction that my comfortable surroundings directly stunted my growth. Lord knows where I got that idea (it seems suspiciously similar to an old ditty called "Naked in a Jail Cell"), but it was a compelling one that I could never quite shake.

So I left. And immediately discovered that South Florida is just as provincial as Cambridge, and, indeed, as every other place on earth. It's filled with people who were born here and who will die here, happy, never having left. Most places are filled with people like that.

It's also filled with people who are following their Big Dreams without moving geographically. I could've had my cake and eaten it, too.

Being the guilt-junkie that I am, being freed from the Family vs. Big Dreams dichotomy just gives me time to find new dichotomies to torture myself with. The current one is Love vs. Friends. That's another duality I thought about a lot last year, but without much wrestling. There was nothing to wrestle with. I was in a period of very self-congratulatory celibacy. "I am devoting all of my sexual energy to friendship," I would tell myself, my thumb on a well-creased page of Katherine Norris's "The Cloister Walk." I spent many hours pondering how I could become a nun--or, preferably, a monk--without believing in, er, God.

It was a convenient martyrdom, until I fell in love. Then I became what I felt to be an unbearable hypocrite. In order to beat anyone else to any criticism of my sudden about-face, I did a graceful swan dive into a crater of guilt and self-flagellation and wallowed there, wreaking havoc with my friendships and new relationship alike.

I'm still trying to pick up the shrapnel generated by this last Bold Move. As usual, my worry is whether I'm being a Good Person, or an Enormous Asshole. As usual, it's only clear to me after the fact that my preoccupation with being a Good Person often makes me act like an Enormous Asshole. So, as usual, acts of Enormous Assholery have been enacted, and as usual, I'm fretting over whether this time, they might really be irrevocable. As usual, the only leg I have to stand on is made of  impeccable Good Intentions.

Ironically, being long-distance-monogamous in Florida makes me more of a monk that "celibacy" did, so I've had ample time for reflection.  I don't know the shape of the next bold move yet, but I know some of its elements. It will definitely include Mom's mantra: "guilt being a useless emotion."  It will aim to let me have my cake and it it, too. And it will involve a lot more non-condemnatory, gentle affection towards both my Big Dreams and my Family.

Comments

[eeelana]

i relate!! i've been thinking life in binaries lately, particularly those you mentioned: love vs. freedom, Big Dream vs. settling in one place, digging in. it need not be this way--for instance, we could all cover late-breaking local stories--but oh how it feels like going away is key. away away, like to egypt or ethiopia or ecuador or such places that my people are going. do we need that kind of adventure? can't we just wait and go with our capital L Lovers? oh keep blogging, yes, a good coping mechanism.

xoxo
eee

[jen]

Nakeddddddddddddd in a Jaaaail Cell!