Friday, May 29, 2009

Today is the first day of my summer. Well, officially it was last Saturday and really it was the previous Wednesday evening. But today will be my first day, because today is the day I fell apart. I was on my way, but today I broke. Today I thought I just might go crazy, for real this time. I am out of money to the point where my credit card payment will go unpaid for the month of June and maybe even July depending on when financial aid disburses the summer term money, I don’t have a job, I don’t have a vehicle, I live in a dorm room, and I miss home. Not in an I-want-to-move-back sort of way, but in an I-miss-what-I-love-and-know way. This is what my life is.

This is what the plan was: Once dropping Amalija off at the airport last August, I was going to go to the Nicholasville Domino’s, who I had talked to on the phone while still in Oregon, and see if they were hiring for the same job I’d been doing back home (delivering pizza). It seemed like a silly job, but grad students do silly jobs and I thought it would be a good escape from seminary life. I was then going to have an income. I was going to live in the dorm for the first year as a way of getting connected and then was going to move out after that and into a house.

It hasn’t worked that way, not at any level. Instead, I totaled my car on the way to dropping off Amalija, eliminated my job prospect(s) in doing so, and thus, because I was unsuccessful with the workstudy jobs on campus I applied to this year, am still without a job and an income and so I’m stuck in the dorm because I can’t make monthly rent. That car crash had a snowball effect. It ruined my year, or at least that’s what it feels like at this place in my life.

But the full effect hasn’t hit until now. Now that the school year is over, the stress of all that work is over, many of the people in the dorm have left, and the weather is really nice. And the realization that my summer would not be the one of traveling around and discovering the South like I’d wanted hit me at full force, like I ran into a brick wall and fell back, stunned. It was actually last Friday, when I got to spend some time with my chaplain and another friend at my chaplain’s house. This house is not just a house. This place is a home. It’s the last house on the street and beside it is an old stone wall with trees lining the other side of it and on the other side of those trees is a beautiful little creek. When I walked through the little walk way and into the tree covered area where the creek runs through I thought it was just like home. For a good while my friend and I sat with her on her porch, sitting in rocking chairs, drinking tea and eating homemade banana bread (my bread—it’s good). Before we were about to head out to lunch, she showed us her screened in room (I’m sure there’s a name for those) at the back of the house. It is an amazingly peaceful space with lovely light weight cozy, outdoorsy, countryish furniture. I relaxed on one piece and didn’t want to get back up when she told us it was time to head out for lunch.

And that’s when my mood turned. It didn’t help that I sat in the back seat, where it’s really easy to lose myself when the windows are down and I can’t hear the conversation up front. I wasn’t sure why my mood changed and went sour and all I knew is that I shouldn’t have been in such a bad mood and there wasn’t any good reason to have suddenly switched. It wasn’t until that evening when I figured out why—when it dawned on me that being at my chaplain’s house made me miss living in a house more than anything that year had. It made me miss having a space separate from school where I could be a peace, and for the first time while living here, I was incredibly depressed to go back to my dorm room. If I were three years old, I would have screamed and cried and thrown a fit because I didn’t want to go, but I’m twenty-seven years old and all I was thinking was that nothing was supposed to be wrong, so I needed to act like nothing was wrong, except something was wrong and I hated that I was suddenly is such a bad mood.

It took hours for me to realize what my problem was, but recognizing the issue only made me more depressed. I was back in my dorm and that only escalated the problem, because a dorm room can never be a home like a house can. Rules bar you from nailing holes in the wall, denying you the ability to hang framed pictures and thus forcing you to revert to college style decorating with sticky-tack, you can’t install curtains, and you can’t paint your walls so the room feels more like you. And as a dorm, there is no porch, no deck, no space to just be with a rocking chair and a breeze. Deep down inside, I believe if I were to live in a house with a front porch, I would be so much better here—happy, even. A little part of me wants to say, oh, you’d be just as miserable—it’s all a state of mind—but a bigger part of me believes I’m right.

And so it is a week from that Friday and it is Friday again, and here I am. This afternoon, I cried in my chaplain’s office. I cried because I’m living a life I hadn’t expected to live and I don’t know how to handle myself. I don’t know what it means to live a life where entertainment must be in walking distance (if not in my room) and free. I can’t go see movies. I can’t go out to eat. I can’t go to the coffee shop. I am distressed to realize that I don’t know how to be happy without money. Being in this space causes me to realize that money really is the maker of all things in the American culture, not community. It doesn’t help, of course, that most of my closest community is gone, and now that today’s workday is over, I can add one more to that list. Community, it seems, when it is gone, is replaced with money—a lackluster substitute—and when you find you don’t have either, all that you discover is left is that void where it all used to be.

And so Marilyn, my chaplain, told me I need to be productive. “You are not being productive,” she said to me, which was not news to me. Do something, she told me. It doesn’t have to be anything big. Just do something. Make a schedule. It may seem unimportant to have your meals at the same time every day, to take a walk at the same time every day, but it makes a big difference. Clean your room. Go clean your room. She had told me that the other day, that I should go clean my room, but it was more like the way my mother used to tell me to clean my room which often made me so angry I would throw things across it instead of cleaning it. But today the way she said it was different. And so today I am taking her advice, not so much because I think she’s right, but because I feel I have more to lose if I don’t do it than if she’s wrong. She also said to me, “You’re writing a book this summer. A book of your life. You have to make your life happen. You don’t have to actually write, or maybe you should. Maybe you should journal.”

So I have decided to journal every day for the summer starting today. I imagine most entries won’t be this long, or maybe they will. And I may miss a day here and there. But this is the start of a summer that is not at all how I’d planned it to be. You are welcome to take the journey with me.

Today, I’m journaling, and then I’m cleaning my room and rearranging it. This is the before shot.