About Time

Today would have been Nana’s 81st birthday. After her death in April, I knew better than to swallow my grief. Instead, I let myself feel what I needed to. In my experience, grief never gets easier the more you experience death; instead, it compounds, like interest in some fucked up account you can’t collect on, no matter how hard you try or how much you might need the money. Fighting it off never works. I have to swim with the tide these days or risk going down. I wanted to write an obituary for Nana, one that reflected the complicated and tenacious woman I loved. But I couldn’t find the words in the immediate aftermath. I could only find the emotions, whatever exists pre-language, before our cultural or familial frameworks settle in to bring the incomprehensible into a semblance of focus, of meaning.  

I tried so hard to make sense of my mother’s death eight years ago. I fought like my life depended on it. I was exhausted and sad. I can’t even get into it here. But I found myself approaching Nana’s passing with a quiet acquiescence, a bewildering sense of acceptance. This is happening? Now? Again? Fine. Fuck you.

Last year at this time, my siblings and our partners celebrated Nana’s 80th, an impressive milestone that I felt in my bones she would surpass, easily, by at least another decade. For most of my life, up until the last year of hers, Nana had always seemed like the world’s youngest 70-something-year-old. She bustled with energy; walked circles around Grandview Cemetery to “keep her figure”; met up with her grief group, Soul Survivors, on a regular basis to share in their widowhood; attended mass as often as she could; went on bus trips from Johnstown to Rivers Casino and back again; the list goes on. She finally let her hair go gray in 2023, after years of dyeing it a pale blonde. I met her outside the Eat n’ Park in Johnstown’s West End for lunch that summer and the first thing she said when she climbed out of her car, in greeting, was a declaration of sorts: “How do you like my new hair?” With a coquettish hand flourish, she showed off the grays, which I can honestly say suited her well; she looked great and I told her so.

“It was about time,” she said, almost solemnly, like it had become a mantra in her mind, a new motto for her life. She was finally accepting something, or trying to. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t notice her recent decline in exuberance, the way her voice rasped low and uncertain when she talked about her life and recent health updates – she’d been struggling with UTIs for months and had to get a hysterectomy. She worried about her brother, Mark, who had lived with her since his early twenties (Nana was the eldest of four children, the only girl to boot; after her own mother died, she cared for her younger brothers), what he might do if she needed more hospital stints or another form of alternative care. She confessed that she didn’t want to die alone.

“I was there with your mother and your grandfather,” she repeated at least twice as we talked over our club sandwiches and fries. Something squirmed in me, a twist of the familiar shame and guilt I’ve carried since 2016. I had made it to my mother’s death bed, but I had been absent for most of her care. If I could go back in time, I’d change my whole life. I’d be a completely different person, one who understands the gravity of the situation, that death is more than a locked door – it is the vanishing of doors.

But I couldn’t go back in time. I placed my hand over Nana’s where it rested on the table. “You have us, Nana,” I told her, squeezing her fingers together to emphasize the truth in my words. I meant it this time, but I could tell she didn’t believe me.

“Yes, yes,” she agreed distractedly before she jumped into another story, one I couldn’t concentrate on because I was so focused on proving to her that I would be there when she needed me, wrestling with the impatience and horror of knowing I wouldn’t be able to prove anything until it was too late. Where had I been when she was in the depths of her own grief? I didn’t know what it was like to lose a child, she had told me that at my mother’s funeral. At the time, I thought she was being dismissive of my pain and it felt like a slap in the face. I would have preferred it if she’d actually hit me. But she was right. It was a lesson in wisdom. She was trying to tell me what I thought I already knew: it never gets better, it just changes you. You won’t know anything until you’re on the other side of it, when the knowledge is useless. I was determined to use that knowledge, regardless. I was determined to do right by Nana in the way I didn’t by my mother. I knew what it was like to lose a mother; I knew the ways in which you could love and care for someone through that last, ultimate journey. I knew when Nana was gone, I’d be sick with the thought of never talking to her again.

Deep turmoil swirls in my gut. Anger licks through my veins like a brush fire. I could do terrible things with the power of the grief I feel for these women: I could hatchet down a tree; I could break someone’s car windows; I could shovel my way down into each of their graves and let the dirt pack me away forever. The weight of that alone would be its own kind of relief. Grief is not just love. It is anger, and regret, and every missed moment of joy, gone from you forever – or worse, scrolling through your thoughts in an endless, miserable loop, dragging you back to all the questions you didn’t ask, the things you never said, the time you’ll never get back.

When my mother died, I did do some terrible things. I raged at my father. I smashed a collection of snow globes – each collected from a different city I’d traveled to – onto the driveway like I was smashing grenades in a war against God. I ran for miles until I had to stop to finish crying or throw up, until my toenails fell off and my feet bled from popped blisters. It was ugly and I reveled in the ugliness. I needed to sleep, so I wore myself down until my mind went blank. Even then, I couldn’t escape my dreams.   

I still can’t escape my dreams, but I’ve learned to harness the grief a little better. I recognize these intense hills and valleys now, of rage and heartache, relief and guilt. I have something of a map this time to navigate the turns. I know this is all “normal.” I have, after all, been here before.

I held up on my promise to Nana and rubbed her shoulder as she went. Then I cried like my life depended on it; sloppy but silent tears rolled down my face as another woman I loved left me behind for a time, a place, a dimension - somewhere and anywhere and everywhere - that I won’t be able to know until I’m on the other side, until I’m changed.

I’m a Maximalist Now: Some Transparent Notes on Having Money

For a good stretch of time in my early 20s, I thought I might be a “minimalist.” I didn’t like the idea of being burdened by stuff. I wanted a mattress on the floor, the same outfit to wear every day, a clean and organized and empty living space, et cetera. I think moving across the country when I was 23 certainly helped me maintain this mindset, since I could only bring the things that would squeeze into my tiny but reliable two-door Honda Civic — and that’s not factoring in myself and my dad, who also had to fit.

Fast forward two years and a graduate degree later, and I was 25 dropping off my entire collection of Shakespeare and Norton Anthologies at the Corvallis library to lighten the load before heading back east. Poor planning and my general tendency to procrastinate everything meant I also left behind a great air mattress, a bike, a desk lamp I’d had since freshman year of college, and a bunch of other very useable items I’d find myself wishing I’d had the foresight or room to bring with me when I landed in Pittsburgh about six months later after a brief (and very hairy) stint in good ol’ Johnstown aka the Dirty J.

From there, I moved from one tiny apartment to the next about every year (or six months) from 2017 until 2019. And my minimalist tendencies helped me move as much as I did, as frequently as I did, with relative ease because I didn’t have much furniture besides a busted IKEA bed frame/mattress and an old $50 desk I bought from Wal-Mart in, like, junior year of high school. No couch, no chairs, no TV, et cetera.

Look at me, so go-with-the-flow. But what I gained in ease of transport, I lost in comfortability. Eventually, I had to start buying back the things I used to own and had abandoned on one or another move so that I could finally…I don’t know, go on a date with someone and be able to offer them a chair to sit on if they came over for a meal. This was incredibly daunting at first because I was working a series of low-paying jobs, buckling under student debt, and reaching the end of my rope in multiple directions. I didn’t have the money to drop on a couch, or a microwave, or a table with chairs. And I wasn’t resourceful enough to get most big-ticket items for free. I had grown up in comfortability. It was easy for me to pack up my Honda in that cross-country move to Oregon because the reality of the situation was that most of my bigger or less important belongings could stay behind, at my childhood home. I skated through grad school with help from my dad, who picked up my car insurance and phone bills while I deferred payment on my student loans — student loans, I should add, that were significantly less terrible than they could have been because my dad helped me out with college tuition as much as he could. So, I’d never had the need to develop the skillset many people grow up learning just to survive: how to bargain, how to budget, how to make do with what you have, how to hold onto things.

What I didn’t understand then, or failed to see from lack of perspective, was that minimalism only really works if you have some kind of safety net to fall back on when times are tough. Whether that be money, or family support, or something else, it’s much easier to get rid of a bunch of crap if you know you can easily get it back, one way or another, when you really need it. As much as my family has been rocked by my mother’s death in 2016, I knew that I could rely on my siblings or grandparents for anything I wasn’t willing to ask my dad for. But I’m thankful for those years immediately following her death in at least this one way: they forced me to learn how to manage my money and finally become financially independent. I’m much more aware of the value of a dollar, not to mention the many privileges I had growing up because my parents could afford to give me opportunities, like sports and college, that would change my life for the better.

When I moved into my current 2-bedroom place, I was at first overwhelmed with the space. My belongings could fit in one room, but now I had multiple rooms to fill. Eventually, over the ensuing two-three years and with the help of good friends, my belongings started accumulating again. I have desks, and a couch, and an armchair, and a bookcase! I have two beds! I have a record player! I have a goddamn exercise bike! I have art on the walls, and I buy books now with the same relish I had in high school when I used to peruse the shelves at B. Dalton with my dad’s money. I have a table with chairs to eat at when my girlfriend comes over for dinner (though to be fair, we mostly eat on the couch while watching re-runs of Mad Men).

So, okay, having stuff requires having money, too. Just in a different, more obvious way. And I have that money now, after starting a new job last August. I’m working as a copywriter at an ad agency based out of NYC (very Mad Men of me). I find the work challenging enough without being too stressful, which means I have the time, energy, and space to devote to my creative pursuits. With this job, I was finally able to pay off my credit card debt that built up over the years when I was making swim-school/hotel-front-desk-person/adjunct-teacher money (goodbye $3,000 money-hole from Louise’s emergency vet visit last year). Soon, I’ll have the remainder of my student loans at a $0 balance (even despite those Supreme Court motherfuckers denying student loan forgiveness). Maybe someday, I’ll even be able to afford my own home — a dream of mine since I realized how important that kind of security means to me.

I’m a sentimental person, and sentimentality doesn’t really jive with minimalism. Now that I have monetary means I didn’t before (at least not of my own), I want to be as maximalist as possible. I want to buy your art. I want to invest in a good-feeling couch that will last a long time. I want to help you out if you’re in a tough spot. I want to give and share the wealth as much as I can. I want to be a good steward of my life and possessions, and that means my money, too. I don’t want to succumb to the terrors of late-stage capitalism, but nor do I want to deny the reality of living in the U.S. Money fucking helps!!! If it doesn’t buy happiness, it certainly buys the means to pursue happiness.

I don’t want to strip my life of everything that makes it functional, or enjoyable, or uniquely me by subscribing to an aesthetic that never truly fit me to begin with. And I don’t want to be evasive in the means I have to achieve a lifestyle more suited to my needs. I just want to…be honest. I want to share what I’ve learned about myself following the “money scripts” I inherited from my parents, as well as the money scripts I learned along the way to young adulthood and beyond. A lot of my life includes experiences involving very sick family members, years in hospitals, years of anticipatory grief and angst about that grief. But it would have been infinitely worse if my family didn’t have access to money and support. As I’m writing about my family, I want to bring that theme to the forefront. In a lot of ways, we were lucky. We still are. Money doesn’t buy happiness, but it goes a long way in helping you take care of yourself when you’re down bad. That’s important for me to acknowledge.

As always, thanks for coming along for this ride.

X

Sam

The Most Wonderful Terrible Person

Every now and then, I’ll come across a piece of media or art that speaks to me directly in a way that would feel unnerving if it weren’t also a kind of relief. This past week, I tuned into the latest episode of the podcast Criminal, which features stories about true crime that veer further away from the salacious and exploitative, and more toward the complicated and nuanced side of the genre — or as its website states: “stories of people who’ve done wrong, been wronged, or gotten caught somewhere in the middle.”

It’s this “somewhere in the middle” that especially intrigues me. Episode 213: The Most Wonderful Terrible Person focuses on an interview between show host Phoebe Judge and a woman named Debra Miller, who recounts her experience after her mother, Lucille, is convicted of murdering her father in the fall of 1964 when Debra is just 13 years old. Because the episode is a true masterpiece of storytelling, I won’t dive too deeply into specific details since I think it deserves a full listen. But suffice it to say, the most wonderful terrible person from which we get the title of the episode (not to mention this blog post) is none other than Debra’s mother.

In fact, Debra’s mother is the focus of the first essay in Joan Didion’s 1968 nonfiction tour-de-force, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, which is perhaps one of the reasons Judge and the rest of the team at Criminal have given Debra this platform to discuss Lucille and what happened in the years following the conviction, the publication and wide distribution of Didion’s essay*, and Lucille’s eventual death at age 56 of breast cancer.

Though I love Didion, I’m less interested in her take on the Miller trial as I am with that of Debra’s. Debra is now in her early 70s and working on a book about her mother. It’s Debra who attributes the phrase “the most wonderful terrible person” to her mother, describing her just four minutes into the podcast as both very loving and very mean. And boy, dear reader, did that moment make me sit up a little straighter in bed where I was, before this point, passively listening on my way to dreamland.

“My house, everything was unpredictable,” Debra says. “You could do one thing and it would be fine and do it again another day and you would be slapped. It was a nervous house to grow up in.”

I sat up even straighter and started listening hard. Debra goes on to describe her relationship with her mother, which — perhaps surprisingly — grows stronger and more intimate the older Debra gets. Debra, once a self-appointed Daddy’s Girl, feels an affinity toward her mother as she recognizes Lucille’s attempts to nurture her into an independent and confident young woman. Then, her father dies under mysterious circumstances only for her mother to be arrested on murder charges.

Even as Lucille is convicted of her father’s murder, Debra confesses her fear and desperation at losing her mother to prison. Throughout the whole podcast episode, it’s undeniable how much Debra loves Lucille. It’s the kind of love that borders on desperation, at least in the ways Debra tries to express it to her mother while Lucille is in prison, sneaking her contraband items that seem to take on supernatural weight when Debra gets the creeping suspicion that her mother cares more for Debra’s visits as a mule than she does as a daughter.

“I had a feeling that if I wasn’t going to do it, there was no point in me coming to visit her. She never said that, but she also didn’t do anything about my fear. It didn’t matter to her,” Debra explains. Despite everything, Debra shows up for her mother time and again. When Lucille is finally released from prison, Debra moves with her from place to place over the ensuing years, not out of filial obligation so much as a strong desire to be near the woman she loves so much. As Debra puts it, she wanted her mother “by hook or crook.”

By the time Lucille dies in 1986, Debra had stopped living with her many years prior. It’s when recounting Lucille’s funeral that Debra makes the somewhat baffling admission to Judge that it was then that she first got an inkling that maybe her mother was actually guilty of the murder. Up until that point, she had maintained her mother’s innocence, though she definitely had had her moments of doubt throughout her lifetime. Debra describes it as a moment of hilarity, which — if you’ve ever lost someone close to you — might feel eerily recognizable. At least, it did to me. I think that sometimes big truths about our parents can only come after they’ve died, but maybe that’s just my writer’s ego butting in. Whatever the case, Debra allowed herself to reframe her mother’s conviction after the point was moot. I think a little irony goes a long way in helping you laugh when you’re in the thick of grieving.

Now that she is writing a book about her mother, Debra admits that she will never know for sure whether her mother is innocent or not. But, she says, “I need her to be guilty because she suffered so much.”

It’s at this line that I had to physically pause the podcast and take a deep breath. It comes toward the end of the episode, as Judge and Debra are wrapping up their conversation. Debra’s voice is warbly throughout the episode, her tone slick and funny and wonderfully self aware. But where before she handles the narrative with a kind of matter-of-fact bemusement, she seems especially fragile at this moment, almost as if she can’t believe what she’s saying. Yet the statement, and the unspoken emotion behind it, feel like the truest part of her story. She loved her mother and saw her suffer. Of course she would want that suffering to have meant something. We don’t get a lot of information about Debra’s father, but Debra doesn’t come across as not loving him. If anything, she seems to regard her parents as complex, deeply troubled people. Perhaps, if he died in such a terrible way, that must mean something, too. We’ll have to wait for her book to find out what.

At the end of the episode, Debra delivers another line that cut me to my core and made me realize our individual stories are more familiar to one another’s than they are strange and intangible:

“I couldn’t have her to myself. I always wanted her to myself. And in the years that I’ve been off and on with this memoir, I’ve had her to myself. And she will be gone when it’s finished.”

Writing is hard, and I’m not ready to let go just yet. Sometimes I need my mom to be guilty because she suffered so much. I need us all to be guilty.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

X

Sam

Notes

—

*If you’re not a Didion fan, it’s time you became one. You can start by reading her essay in question, based on this case, here.

What To Do if You Have the Christmas Blues

Hi all,

Your friendly neighborhood Sam here to talk a little bit about the reason for the season: facing family drama and tackling latent childhood trauma…

Just kidding! Kind of. For a little context, I was raised in a Protestant household (Lutheran then United Methodist). My family went to church every Sunday, and sometimes during the week for youth group or bible studies. My parents volunteered as ushers at Oakland United Methodist Church in Johnstown, where once a month, they’d don white polos (the usher uniform) and help collect the offering during service. My dad was involved in a men’s bible study and my mom taught Sunday School to the pre-school/kindergarten-aged kids. For a few years, I volunteered in the church’s nursery, looking after the babies and toddlers too young to attend Children’s Church.

I was fairly serious about my faith even into the early years of high school. I was obsessed with evangelizing my friends, and being someone worthy of God’s love. I really tried to be a good person, and I often felt guilty when I “failed.” By late high school, though, I was attending church because my parents made me go. Skipping church was out of the question; unless I came down with Swine flu or had a travel soccer game, my parents expected me to join them every Sunday, which, looking back, is kind of funny — only being allowed to miss church for severe sickness or a sporting event, and absolutely no in-betweens, absolutely no room for nuance or discussion. But when you’re a kid on the verge of graduating high school, you take your lumps where you can get them. At least we always stopped for food after church was over, and that was a bright spot in an otherwise murky and convoluted time for me. To this day, a Wendy’s cheeseburger tastes like a Sunday afternoon in 2008, which means it tastes like small comfort. What a vice grip nostalgia has on us all!

My late teenage years were rife with lots of things, both relatively normal and relatively not: hormones, depression, reckless optimism, an uncertainty about who I was and who I was becoming. God became a big question mark in my life, especially as I continued broadening my horizons through books and other media, especially as I started growing into my own personality and world view. If we’re lucky, this is a process constantly in flux, or at least one that is always open to modifications, always open to growth. These days, I strive to be always open to growth, which I think explains at least in some part my eventual path from devout believer to atheist to now: some kind of agnostic who really doesn’t know what’s out there and why. To be completely honest, I also don’t care to know or have the answers. I like living my life as if it’s the last one I’ll ever have and I like sometimes thinking I could be wrong. That about sums up my spirituality at the present moment.

Despite my evolving level of interest in church and religion between little-evangelist-sixth-grader me to “well-maybe-something-happens-to-us-after-we die-but-I-don’t-really-care-what”-30-year-old me, I’ve always been drawn, even sustained, by the capacity to witness something holy. Or to be in communion, in some way, with the earth and with other people, sometimes both at the same time. We can define holiness in any number of ways, each valid and unique to us as is our world view, but I won’t wax poetic about that here. Sometimes moments of holiness cannot be adequately shared via blog post, and that’s quite all right with me.

But one moment of holiness still acts as a through-line between my younger self and myself at present, and this is the Christmas Eve Candlelight Service. As a kid, this service was made almost unbearable with the anticipation of Santa’s arrival the following morning, but it was a natural high unlike any I’ve had since. Even in my doubt-ridden and ambivalent high school years, this service could kick up shadows of feelings I’d already come to believe were out of my reach for good. A deep sense of peace and belonging descended upon me as the sermon wrapped up and the overhead lights dimmed, signaling the time for candles and a brief yet beautiful collective acapella singing of Silent Night.

Everyone took out their candle we’d all received upon entering the sanctuary at the start of the service, stuck in its little plastic cup to catch dripping wax, and the ushers on duty would come in through the back doors and start lighting the candles of each person on the outside aisles of the pews. Then, we’d slowly tip and catch the flames down each row of pews until everyone’s face was lit from underneath by a soft, warm glow. Once the sanctuary was awash with these tiny pinpricks of light, some brave soul would start the first bar of lyrics until, like a wave, all our voices collapsed together to sing the old, familiar hymn:

“Silent night, Holy night,

All is calm, all is bright,

Round yon Virgin, Mother and Child,

Holy infant so tender and mild,

Sleep in heavenly peace,

Sleep in heavenly peace…”

When we’re kids, we are stuck with looking at life through the perspectives our parents or guardians can afford to give us, and when I was little that perspective for me and my family was heavily influenced by Christianity. My first experiences with holiness were inextricably linked to holiness as defined by the bible, or God himself. I never thought to question them until I could start sussing out my own identity as one apart from, but still informed by, my family’s. For instance, I no longer believe that holiness is mutually exclusive to God, either as a literal being or metaphorical construct. It has more to do with feeling a sense of love and belonging and yearning for life. Sometimes, that feeling may very well come by way of God. But it doesn’t have to.

Maybe the presence of God informed my first memory of Christmas Eve service as something special and holy. But now, God has transformed and evolved for me. What I find in holiness is equal parts love and something else, as yet unarticulated. I guess you could call that God. It’s the best definition of God I can come up with, at least the kind of God I’d want to subscribe to. For the purposes of this post, I’d like to leave it up to interpretation. If you want to call it God, call it God. If you don’t, what other possibilities are out there to explore?

Christmases these days are fraught with a lot of hurt and painful memories, as I’m sure they are for a lot of people — anyone who has experienced loss or abandonment, anyone at odds with their family’s world view, anyone for whom family is not a safe and secure entity…the holidays are often spiked with unwanted thoughts and feelings we’d rather avoid or never confront. If you can hold on to something good and pure, even if just for a split second, I hope you can give yourself permission to consider it holy: a lit candle and a collective voice; a snowy midnight walk with someone you love; a happy memory held up against the present’s lack of warmth and light; a moment of clarity in a sea of confusion. Gather up these faculties, hold them tight. Then let them go and move on. You can do this.

Love and happy holidays to you and your loved ones,

Sam

Paying Attention to Cheryl Strayed’s Wild

It’s been a while dear blog, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been thinking about you. In all honesty, my writing brain has been filled to the brim these past few weeks, reading and researching and thinking and (get this!) sometimes writing parts of my book. But I wanted to check in. Mostly I wanted to talk a bit about Cheryl Strayed’s 2012 memoir, Wild.

Here’s a brief summary for those unfamiliar: Cheryl Strayed lost her mother to cancer when she was 22 years old, her mother just 45. After that, her life shattered. She cheated on her husband, got addicted to heroin, watched the remnants of her family scatter in the wind like so much dandelion fluff. At 26 years old, almost on a whim, she decided to hike the Pacific Crest Trail. Maybe it was an instinctual reflex to get herself out of a dangerous rut. On the trail, she discovered a lot about herself while she walked and mourned her mother. The book is about this journey, both physical and emotional, but it’s the emotional one I connect to the most, though I can certainly empathize with needing a long, exhausting, sometimes dangerous walk to keep the physical body in balance with a roiling torment within. It makes sense, like pinching another part of your skin to distract your brain from a broken nose.

I first read this book pre-2016; i.e., before my mother died. I know this because I remember renting the 2014 movie from the Redbox at Wal-Mart in Johnstown for a dollar because I had the weird, sentimental, maybe macabre idea to watch it with my mother. I rented a few movies, in my defense, but I knew going in that we’d only make it through one, realistically, before she fell asleep. I also knew I’d make us start with Wild.

It was a Saturday, and I must have been home from college for the summer; I vaguely remember my dad and my brother taking a day-trip somewhere, so my dad had asked me to look after my mother while he was away. In 2014, this had become a necessary asterisk every time my dad left the house for longer than a few hours. In 2014, it was still possible for someone like me to fulfill that asterisk; it didn’t require much heavy lifting (both literally and figuratively). Was she sleeping downstairs in the living room by this point? Perhaps just on the cusp of that. Before the permanent hospital bed on the first floor, there were a few years when my dad helped her onto the double stair-lifts we’d had installed so she could reach their bedroom (two because our staircase was broken in the middle by a landing). And before the stair-lifts, I remember my dad carrying her upstairs to bed each night.

Sometimes it feels like the only way I can distinguish parts of her physical decline so well is because it happened alongside my own formative childhood development. Once I reached college, though, things started blending together. I didn’t keep a journal. I didn’t take notes. Mostly, I tried to pretend my family didn’t exist. That was easy enough when I had new friends to make, classes to study for, parties to get smashed at, etc. Less so when I returned home and saw my mother’s diminishing health with the fresh eyes distance and space had given me. Changes became abrupt, not gradual. The crawl of time blinked by for me in blips. Everything seemed to happen so much faster once I left, but that’s probably because I made a concerted effort not to pay attention.

To pay attention…well, that would have cost me what I wasn’t prepared or able to give at the time. 

Pay attention. It’s what I psychically tried to communicate to my mom as we started watching the movie. I thought it would be something like a bonding experience for the two of us, but I didn’t want to have to orchestrate it all the way. I wanted her to want to watch it, too. For the bonding to happen organically. For us to witness this mother-daughter relationship torn apart by illness – but more importantly, for her to see the aftereffects of that relationship when the mother died. I was 22 years old, just as young as Cheryl at the moment her life changed forever. It was pretty fucked up of me to put up a mirror to my mother without acknowledging it was a mirror for me, too. 

In truth, picking that movie was a lesson in vanity. I wanted to create a moment for me, not for her or even us. I shouldn’t have been surprised when, halfway through, I glanced over and saw that she had nodded off in her electric wheelchair, one of her Word Seek puzzle books lying precariously in her lap, on the verge of falling. I remember being first angry, then disappointed. The movie was ruined. I think I even clicked it off and went upstairs before returning an hour later feeling chagrined, even ashamed. I knew, deep down, that I was being childish and I hated myself for it. When she finally woke up, we started watching one of her favorite shows, Dr. Phil, and I pretended like we’d been watching that the whole time.

In current research for my own book, I’ve been revisiting a few memoirs I’ve already read (in addition to reading new ones). One of them is Wild. I realized a few weeks ago that I hadn’t actually read the book since my mom passed away. I wondered not if the experience would be different for me, but how. Though I’m still growing and learning as a human being (as I hope to always be doing), I’ve learned enough at this point to know that the book would be changed for me. 

This time around, I entered it hoping to explore Strayed’s craft of putting this particular story together – like the structure of the memoir itself, the way she connected past and present events via the PCT as a literal and metaphorical throughline in the book. I learned a lot about effective storytelling, especially when that story is true and takes place years before the writing of it. For everything that Strayed left in, I wondered about the parts left out. Like parts of the PCT she’d had to bypass in order to avoid threatening passages in snow-packed mountains, I wondered which parts of her life’s story she’d also been forced to bypass in favor of a clearer, more emotionally true narrative.

But in addition to that, I paid close to attention to the character of young Strayed – the lost, wandering 22-26 year old trying to piece her life back together after a monumental bereavement – through the lens of the narrator: the older Strayed who already knows what’s going to happen even as she channels young Strayed’s thoughts and feelings. The physical and emotional journey of the book is started by young Strayed, but it’s older Strayed who is able to show the fruits of all that labor: in her wisdom, reflection, and grace toward a younger self.

Older Strayed is also able to show this grace toward her mother, whom young Strayed is equal parts angry toward, hurt by, and longing for. 

In Chapter 16 of Wild, young Strayed is wending her way on the PCT to Crater Lake National Park. Throughout this stretch of the trail, her mother has been “looming for days” because Strayed herself is nearing the date of what would have been her mother’s 50th birthday had she continued living: August 18. But, as Strayed continues:

“She didn’t live. She didn’t get to be fifty. She would never be fifty…Be fifty, Mom. Be fucking fifty… I couldn’t believe how furious I was at my mother for not being alive on her fiftieth birthday. I had the palpable urge to punch her in the mouth” (264).

Young Strayed’s anger is, indeed, palpable in this passage, as it is in other parts of the book. It’s an anger I recognize and have sometimes felt deeply ashamed by. Later on in this same chapter, though, Strayed as narrator describes finally seeing Crater Lake, once a huge volcanic mountain called Mazama that “had its heart removed” in an explosion over 7,000 years ago, becoming an empty bowl that “took hundreds of years to fill,” in order to transform once again into the impossibly deep, impossibly blue Crater Lake:

“But hard as I tried, I couldn’t see them in my mind’s eye. Not the mountain or the wasteland or the empty bowl. They simply were not there anymore. There was only the stillness and the silence of that water: what a mountain and a wasteland and an empty bowl turned into after the healing began” (273).

It’s the acknowledgement of healing that brings out older Strayed to me in this particular passage. Maybe young Strayed, too, is capable of such a poetic revelation but this one feels honed by time in a way that explicates almost perfectly a feeling so intrinsic, young Strayed may not have felt compelled to put it into words – or maybe she didn’t yet have the words or the skill or the space to do it justice. Young Strayed observes and recognizes the destruction needed for Crater Lake to exist. Older Strayed is able to extend and apply that same recognition toward herself and her mother.

There are many such examples of this dual selfhood in the book, and I’m especially interested in the way a narrator is able to commune and empathize, even criticize, a younger self. I’m not necessarily writing a memoir about my life, but I am writing a lot about my life in relation to my mother’s and her experience with illness. It means that I’ve had to confront a lot of unpleasant truths about myself, ones I’d rather turn away from but that ultimately serve their place in the tapestry of my family and its history. 

All that said, the character of my younger self is relatively easy to pin down. It’s the narrator of my story I think I’m still striving to become. Maybe the act of writing will be a bridge between the two. Maybe my narrator is somewhere walking its own trail, and I’m slowly but surely catching up. When I get to the rim of the lake, how will I feel? What metaphor will I choose to say the things I couldn’t say when I had the chance to say them? Who will be listening when I do?

Big questions, my friends.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

x,

Sam

Looking at My Own Face

I’m working on a book right now, and for the first time in my life it feels like something I will actually finish and not hate. I haven’t begun to wrestle with the ethics of trying to get it published. The book is about my mother because everything I write is about my mother. People are probably tired of hearing me write about her. I’m getting tired of it.

This won’t stop me, though. And though I don’t quite know where I land on the ethics of writing about someone who can’t respond, through the lens of my relationship to that person, I still want to get it published. I want people to read it. I want my mother to read it.

Sometimes writing feels like a terrible burden, and then I feel extremely pretentious for feeling this way. Sometimes writing doesn’t feel like anything in particular. It’s just a thing I do, sometimes, not consistently enough. Sometimes writing feels like the only way I can show my true self to the world – yet what does that say about my definition of true if what I’m sharing is entirely within my control to shape? 

I guess it can be true that there are things people will discover about me through my writing that I’m too close, or tunnel-visioned, to notice myself. 

Perhaps it’s true that controlling your own narrative isn’t wholly possible. There is always some element outside your ability to capture it. You can’t look at your own face the way another person can look at your face. Sometimes the thing I want most in the world is to look at my own face.

What does this say about me? 

Or another way to phrase the same question: from what am I trying to excuse myself?

Lately, I’ve been caught on the edges of conversations that themselves edge around big, philosophical questions no one has the answers to. They feel like some kind of intellectual game, with consequences made not real by the distance of privilege. I wonder about my own privilege. Am I doing enough? Who am I to say anything about anything I’m not directly affected by? Is that a cop out? Even now, with this paragraph, from what am I trying to excuse myself?

In my last year at Penn State, I wrote a short story about a working class woman who lives on a horse farm. She is also, inexplicably, a truck driver. Aliens feature prominently in the plot. An alien descends on the woman’s farm and presents itself as her doppelgänger. She instinctively feels the need to kill it. The alien who is her but not her does everything right. It mucks the horse stalls perfectly, performs chores, maybe even mends a fence (I can’t remember). But most importantly, it takes elegant, compassionate care of the woman’s mother who just happens to be bed-bound as a result of a tragic accident. The story ends with the woman cornering the alien at the edge of the neighboring farm’s pond, turning it around, and pushing it down into the water. With this action and for the first time in her life, the woman is able to see the whorl of hair on the back of her head. She instinctively feels the need to touch it gently. I think it’s important to note here that she doesn’t end up touching it. She drowns the alien and the story ends.

If I could fight my doppelgänger, I would fight it to the death. At least, that’s what I’ve always believed. But maybe it’d be braver to let the doppelgänger win. Maybe the doppelgänger doesn’t even want to fight.

I know I have more than one birthmark on my back. But how many exactly? Only you can tell me the number, and even then I’d have to trust you were telling the truth.

30 Things I’ve Learned in as Many Years

At the end of this month, I turn 30. I’m not going to be cute about it, mostly because I don’t have the energy. But also because I don’t find it very cute.

Maybe, if you’re reading this and you are already in your 30s (or past them), you will find my deep existential malaise over this particular birthday either familiar or over-the-top or both. I guess before I go on, I’d like to confirm that I also find it to be all of these things, and more. But it’s true that I’m not ashamed of feeling this way. Turning 30 is a big deal in our society; at least, a lot of the cultural and social cues of the past few decades have indicated it as so. And whether the 30th birthday is significant on its own merit, or whether that significance is born from these cultural and social indications (or, of course, some kind of messy amalgamation of the two plus whatever else)... can we at least agree that, yeah, there is something seemingly big about the transition from your 20s into a new decade, maybe even bigger than any other decade-to-decade transition past the 30s?

Perhaps I will return to this question on the eve of my 40th birthday, but for now my 30th is looming and – though hard to admit for reasons I’ll get into – it’s the first birthday I’ve felt, actually felt, that I am, indeed, an adult. Obviously not a kid, but not-so-obviously not a young adult, either. I’m leaving my 20s behind and I no longer have the excuse of my 20s for not having gotten my shit together yet. It’s painful to cop to, but I’ve been leaning on that excuse for a while now (even if just subconsciously) and, well, y’all…I’m low-key running out of time.

At least, that’s what it feels like even if (rationally) I know it’s not true*. 

Look, I’m a millennial. Not only that, but I’m a queer millennial. My 30s were always going to look different from the status quo insofar as money, marriage, and mortgages are concerned. I’d really love to devote a whole blog post to this idea of queer-millennial crossover because it definitely deserves its own deep dive. For instance: how am I and my peers supposed to measure our adulthoods when we’re borrowing a template from our parents, one on which the once-predictable indicators of success — like home buying and kid rearing — are slipping further and further out of reach due, in no small part, from systemic issues inherited from said parents (or at least the generation to which they belong)? If I can’t afford to buy a home at 30 because of inflation, exorbitant student debt, low wages, high-cost health care…how am I supposed to know I’ve grown up? If I don’t have kids of my own, how can I determine a sense of self worth and maturity that matches societal expectations? Am I doomed to being Peter Pan in this new decade of mine, just as much as I’m doomed to looking like him? Is 40 the new 30? Even if, hypothetically, I could financially support a kid**, am I somehow less of an adult if I don’t decide to have one? 

Obviously the answer to all of these questions is some variation of: no, Sam, of course not. Life is nuanced and age is but a number. Nothing is real and nobody matters. Blah blah blah.

And, yeah, of course there isn’t one path forward. But — maybe even if just in our most scared and insecure moments — doesn’t it sort of feel that way? 

So, in lieu of (or maybe in direct resistance to) the standard societal markers of 30-dom, I thought it would be fun – at least for me – to craft a list of some of the life wisdom I’ve managed to accrue in my nearing three decades here on earth. I may not have a marriage, or a house, or a kid, or a novel (working on it), or [insert basic expectation here], but I do have some free time, an urge to share, and a blog of my own. 

Dear reader, here are 30 things I’ve learned about myself in as many years***:

1). It took me a lot of time, but I’m sincerely grateful to be queer and feel lucky to have this experience despite its hardships. I didn’t choose it, but if I could then I would.

2). Falling in love is not the only type of way to experience love, but it sure is fun to do.

3). I have a lot in my life for which to be grateful. The older I get, the more I see this truth. 

4). I’m anti-capitalist. I find it hard to reconcile this with living in a capitalist society and sometimes benefiting from my position in said society, but I truly believe a system based on the exploitation of others is doomed to fail. Plus, I hate seeing human life treated as commodity, especially when it comes to housing and health care.

5). Siblings can be so, so important. I’m lucky to have two really good ones.

6). I like cats better than dogs. And I always have. 

7). Emotional regulation is important and vital, but it’s okay if trauma has stunted its development. What’s not okay is leaning on this excuse into adulthood without taking responsibility and doing the work to be a better person. At a certain point, you have to own your feelings and actions. But that doesn’t mean you can’t also be kind and gentle to yourself throughout this re-learning process.

8). Life is one big re-learning process! 

9). I am more than my mistakes. I’m also more than my job or productivity output. So are you!

10). Confrontation is hard for me to face. I’m often passive in situations when speaking up or doing something would ultimately lead to a better outcome. But having hard conversations is usually worth the discomfort felt during them. Communication really is such an important tool, and most people aren’t good at using it. Including me sometimes.

11). I actually am a slightly picky eater. 

12). I’m grateful for my health. I promise never to take it for granted. I love my body and what it can do for me. 

13). Friendship is a relationship constantly in flux, even if it doesn’t seem that way. Friendships have the capacity to change and evolve, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. 

14). I have some great friends, but I haven’t always been a great friend. 

15). I hold myself to high standards. 

16). I think I’m meant to make films; I just don’t have the knowledge or equipment yet to find out.

17). I really miss my mom and wish she could know the person I am now. I wish I had been more patient with her when she was alive. 

18). I believe people can change, but it’s often hard to do. But maybe I believe this because I desperately want it to be true for myself.

19). Lol, I’d like to think I’m a pretty self-aware person but maybe I’m wrong! You tell me. 

20). My favorite show is Halt and Catch Fire and I recommend everyone watch it. Just get past season one, and I swear you won’t regret it.

21). I believe Kristen Stewart is the best actress of her generation and if you disagree, please let me have a KStew movie marathon sometime with you. At the very least, watch Personal Shopper and Spencer before you settle on your final decision. And honestly, the Twilight Series – movies, not books – is actually delightfully fun and campy. You can’t change my mind.

22). My favorite book remains the same from when I was about 11 years old, and that is Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech. 

23). I care about how I look, but the older I get, the less I care about it. I’ve finally accepted that I’m cute in my own, shaggy-haired way. Also, it doesn’t really matter. Feeling good, both physically and emotionally, is much more important to me. I’m grateful for this shift in perspective and hope my 30s keep providing me more of the same.

24). I would love to own a house but I know that, realistically, it’s probably not going to happen, at least not for a long time. 

25). I am addicted to my phone and I don’t like that I am.

26). If I could choose one thing to be really good at – like professionally good at – it would be running.

27). I can’t cook – well, I’m learning to cook, but I’m not very good at it and it’s a source of deep insecurity.

28). Being kind is one of the easiest ways to give back to the world.

29). I think orange may be my favorite color, despite thinking it blue for the majority of my life.

30). I’m not above a good, old-fashioned cliche…and I know I still have a lot to learn about life, and my place in it, and that won’t stop until I do.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

X,

Sam

Notes:

*Well, barring some kind of accident, etc. Life is fragile and I’m not going to pretend that I’m outside the realm of unforeseen tragedy even if I don’t actively think about it all the time. That said, knock on wood.

**Keeping in mind this would include fertility treatments of some kind and/or expensive adoption costs (regardless if I parent alone or with a partner). American society as of now still favors a heteronormative, nuclear family despite big strides for the queer community in the last couple decades.

***In no particular order.

I’m On A Gender Bender

I don’t know if it’s because I teach at a high school in the city, or if it’s because I teach at a high school in the city that specializes in Arts education, or if it’s because I teach a bunch of Zoomers at a high school in the city that specializes in Arts education*, but damn, these kids are with it when it comes to a lot of topics — but especially when it comes to the topic of gender expression and sexual orientation. It’s not just okay to be gay here; it’s welcomed and supported and, if possible, accepted as just a normal piece of the fabric that is our beautiful, complex, mutable identities as humans in this big, bad, beautiful world of consciousness.

But, like, it’s not just okay to be gay. It’s okay to be anything on or adjacent to that long and never-ending spectrum. In fact, the term gay takes on a whole new meaning when people, especially kids, feel as though they can claim it, and safely. Gay is not a derogatory adjective here, in this building or with this generation**. It is more an adjective that can, if need be, sum up a deeply rooted feeling or describe a passing whim, much like the word queer: a word that is open to interpretation, open to experimentation, open to anyone using it in the way that makes the most sense for them.

When I was in high school, only just a little more than a decade ago, in rural-suburban Pennsylvania, gay or queer weren’t any of the things I needed them most to be. Not exhilarating, not acceptable, not accessible, not beautiful. Identifying as queer definitely wasn’t safe. It meant shame — shame and fear and resentment and hate. It meant hiding.

Lots of factors went into my experience as such: small, conservative town; religious family; lack of representation; cultural cues from the early aughts onward; etc., etc. Also the fact that I just didn’t tell anyone. In truth, I was still figuring a lot of stuff out and couldn’t really tell anyone anything because I myself didn’t really know. When a friend asked me, very genuinely, whether I was a lesbian before one of our 10th grade gym classes, I vehemently denied it***. Even on a subconscious level, here was a question I didn’t want to approach — so much so that it was a question that I didn’t even allow to exist.

I wouldn’t officially**** come out until college, and not until my last year of college at that. I marvel at my students now, how easily they wear their labels yet refuse to be defined or reduced by them. It can be quickly argued that the world is going to shit, but I do see progress happening even if it’s not scalable to other high schools, other cities. I see progress when so many students not only want to explore their identities, but are encouraged by their peers and the establishment to do so.

On the first day of class with the Juniors, I played an ice-breaker with them because I was essentially meeting them for the first time. Before they shared their responses*****, I also asked them to state their names. But before I could even finish the sentence, one student shot up her hand and asked if they could share preferred pronouns as well. I stumbled a bit in response, not because I was offended or unsure — quite the opposite. I stumbled because I was taken aback, but in the best possible way. “Of course!” I said, maybe a little too enthusiastically. And we went around the room, sharing our responses, our names, and our pronouns.

Even me, because my students will never miss an opportunity to find out something about my personal life. “What about you, Ms. M?” they asked.

Without thinking, I replied: “She/her and I guess they/them. Either works for me.” Then we moved on, no big deal.

But, this was essentially the first time I’d publicly announced my pronouns as such. To be honest — much like my high-school-aged self had been with the whole lesbian question — I’m still trying to figure it all out. Even taking into account my uncanny likeness to nonbinary comedian, Mae Martin******, I still don’t know what they/them means to me. Me as in, specifically just me. And if I ever do end up figuring that out, I don’t know if the meaning will change, transform, grow, evolve as I keep doing the same. And maybe it’s not even a question of if, but how and when.

I feel, sometimes, as though I’m caught on the edge of a threshold, one foot on each side. Or a state of being that can best be described as liminal and exhausting, but also liberating and exciting. Other times, I don’t really care one way or the other. I rip up any and all labels as they apply to me and watch them scatter on the wind. I want to be, and not be. I want to fit in, I can’t possibly fit in. I want to swim topless and for that to be normal and okay without the requirement of removing my breasts. I want smaller breasts or no breasts at all! I like my breasts as they are! Why can’t I just have it all, all at the same time?

For me, right now, maybe my gender can best be described thus: I’m swimming, and I’m naked, and I’m beautiful, and nobody gives me a second thought. I’ll let you know if (or how or when) that changes.

Notes:

*It’s most likely some beautiful combination of all of these things.

**Okay, I can’t speak for all of Gen Z, but on anecdotal evidence alone I feel pretty confident in this statement.

***Well, technically speaking, can you deny something that you yourself believe to be untrue?

****Can you believe I made it my Facebook status on Coming Out Day? Me neither.

*****We played Two Truths, One Lie or as I like to call it: Two Nonfictions, One Fiction.

******I’m the Wish version.

Wake Me Up When September Ends

So, I know it’s not exactly September just yet…but this Green Day song kind of succinctly sums up my feelings about this time of year. I wish I could pull a Bo Burnham and shut myself off for, like, 40 days*, just long enough to get through the last gasps of August and the whole month of September. Then, I’d turn on again the first of October and continue on from there.

Let me explain (bear with me). I’m a person who gets a period, but it doesn’t have a regular cycle and hasn’t since the first time I got it.** I could go up to four months without having one, and I can never plan for when it’s going to happen. But — if I start feeling weird, more depressed or irritated than usual, and I wake up one morning to find that my uterus has shed a lining, my first reaction isn’t exactly Fuck! I’ve ruined another pair of underwear!*** It’s actually a flood of relief. So that’s why I’ve been an absolute cretin this week! Then, I go about my day, dealing with the cramps and the mood swings, but without all the guilt and helplessness I might have felt even just the evening before. Whether this is scientifically backed or not, it feels so much better to have a reason for a state of uneasiness that I can point to, even retrospectively, and say, Well, duh! It helps to know that sometimes my body knows what’s up before my brain does. And when my brain catches up to my body, whatever bad feelings I’ve been wrestling with become easier to process and move through.

I believe trauma lives in the body, and that it can present in many different ways. The body remembers even when the brain works hard to replace memory, or keep it tucked away somewhere we can’t easily access it. When you really think about it, we humans are miraculous creatures with all the involuntary systems in place that keep us going and keep us safe. We don’t think about pumping blood through our heart to the rest of our organs, we just do it. We don’t just decide to dream, parts of our brains are specifically designed to manage that for us, in order to process events and organize memories. We are our consciousness, but we’re also so much else…

Around this time of year, my body tries to tell me something. I find myself slipping into an irritability that is hard to shake off or ration away. I succumb to darker thoughts. I self-isolate. I feel like I don’t like anyone or anything. I lash out at loved ones, I stop caring about things I care about, I get annoyed at the tiniest, most insignificant missteps, I lose patience and the ability to grant grace to people for their “mistakes.”

“I just feel like my heart is full of this darkness. I have such a negative outlook right now,” I told my girlfriend last night****. And then it hit me. We’re in the last days of August. Next month is September. Well, I think to myself, duh!

My body, as I started learning at 15, follows cycles. The odd uneven time of August through September is another cycle for mine established five years ago when my mother was actively dying — death being another cycle my body will go through someday, too. Every year since 2016, around this time, the grief that is always with me spikes to a fever pitch and I’m brought to that first time it happened, its nexus, once more. There’s a lump in my throat, a heaviness in my stomach, a darkness in my heart that makes me not just sad, but angry. I carry my grief like the physical, visceral thing it can sometimes be.

And then…my brain catches up. I look at the calendar and I take a deep breath and I nod to myself and I think, Okay, I know what this is, I’ve been here before, I just have to be strong enough to get through, and I will be because I have been. And just like that, whatever bad feelings I’ve been wrestling with become easier to process and move through.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

X

Sam

P.S. Next week, an essay I wrote about my mother will be live on Entropy. I’m excited and nervous to share something so personal and important to me. It seems like kismet that it should find a home in September.

Notes:

*Let’s keep it biblical, baby!

**Ninth grade lit class, baby!

***That’s the second reaction :)

****Everyone should be so lucky to have a Caitlin in their lives.

Chop Wood, Carry Water

Hi, it’s been a while. Last time I logged into the blog, it was because I was sad and felt that writing might make me feel, if not better, at least more grounded. Today, I’m not sad. I made a freelance deadline with plenty of time to spare. I read another chapter in this gargantuan textbook on the history of multiple sclerosis (for essaying). I sat on my porch, and between pages of a delightful reread of My Side of the Mountain, chatted with my neighbor and opened the screen door every few minutes or so to let Louise come in and out until she settled in one corner, dozing with her face on her paws. Then, I went on a run, and even though my music conked out on me within the first minute, I kept going for nearly two miles, listening to the heavy sound of my breath, dodging couples strolling on the sidewalks (or dodging the sidewalks entirely if they were uneven or downright broken), letting my mind wander where it needed to wander, stop where it needed to stop. The weather was balmy, the sun kind. I finished in front of my apartment, sweaty and motivated and that really good kind of tired usually reserved for these sort of late evening runs in late July light.

So, why am I telling you this? Simply because I want to. I stumbled upon a Zen quote through, of all things, the hashtags in an elite runner’s latest Instagram post. The hashtag? #chopwoodcarrywater. I didn’t recognize it, but had an idea it might be the new tagline for his elite team. However, when I clicked on the tag and it was flooded with posts, from so many accounts, I knew it couldn’t be limited to this (relatively small) group of middle-distance runners. Since I’m a detective, I Googled it and, of course, realized it’s a shortened version of this Zen proverb: “Before enlightenment; chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment; chop wood, carry water.”

I’m sure there are thousands of blogs throughout the course of Internet history* about this simple, yet profound idea. In fact, here’s one that even gets at the origin of the quote to provide a little more context. My summary: the key to reaching enlightenment is to keep doing the work of enlightenment, even if that work is (or seems) mundane or boring. The key to maintaining enlightenment is…to keep doing the work. You don’t climb the mountain to Nirvana,** dust off your palms, and call it a day. You eventually have to climb down the other side. It’s not luck that you have the tools necessary to do so. You’ve trained and prepared for both parts of this climb. You can chop wood, carry water to get yourself up. You can chop wood, carry water to get yourself down. In other words, Nirvana isn’t as simple as reaching a peak and staying there. Peaks come and go throughout life: relationship stability, financial security, home ownership, job satisfaction, etcetera, etcetera. Reaching one, or two, or some, or all of them,*** doesn’t guarantee happiness. True happiness comes when we aren’t laser-focused on the future or dwelling on the past. It comes when we can be wholly present in each moment, from one moment to the next.

After my run, and before typing the above, I washed the dishes in my overfilling sink. I took my time, carefully soaping and rinsing each one. The water was warm and felt wonderful against my hands. The soap smelled like a lemon meringue pie. I took off my sweaty shirt and relished the freedom of standing in my kitchen in just a sports bra, watching the golden sunlight seep away from the shadows in my backyard, the handful of lightning bugs popping up where the shadows were darkest. It felt so good to stand there after a run and do this necessary, normal, everyday thing. I felt so good. It may sound pat or kitschy or gooey****, but I noticed my presence in that moment and I want to start making it a habit of noticing my presence in more moments, as many moments as possible. When I feel good, I want to have the presence of mind to notice it, recognize it, name it, share it.

Next time I’m feeling anxious, or sad, or just plain off, I’m going to take a deep breath and think: chop wood, carry water. I can take on any challenge if I approach it one step at a time. That little reminder is enough to rebuild belief in myself. It’s enough to help me seize the moment, myself in that moment, and take the next step necessary.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

X

Sam

Notes:

*Zen Buddhism has been around for a long time, after all.

**I really, really tried to pick a Nirvana song that best encapsulates the proverb #chopwoodcarrywater, but none felt right. That’s probably the point and I’m not mad about it.

***Please, don’t tell me if you have. I’m happy for you, though. For real.

****Choose your fighter.

Taking a Long Walk

Sometimes, I need to take a long walk alone and listen to sad songs. I woke up today feeling bad for no particular reason. I didn’t want to reach out to friends or family. I didn’t want to go out. I didn’t really want anything. So around 5 p.m., I decided to take a walk.

It’s 81 degrees (F) in Pittsburgh right now, so humid your whole body feels as if it’s been dipped in a lukewarm bath the moment you step outside. I wore a tank top tucked into a pair of my mother’s Levi jeans. These jeans are probably older than I am, but still sturdy, still good. My mom and I, at 29 years old, could have swapped a lot of clothes; at least I have a few pair of Levi’s she wore in the 90s to support this claim. But within a few minutes, I regretted wearing them. I could feel the sweat start to gather under my thighs and around my knee caps. Maybe I wanted some discomfort, though, because I kept walking through the bus way tunnel onto the other side of Wilkinsburg. I kept walking up the hill for a whole half mile until I reached Frick Park. Yesterday, when the sky cleared after a beautiful summer thunderstorm, I ran to Frick and had all of the paths to myself. I wasn’t so lucky today. Besides, when I got to its edge I lost the desire to go further. I didn’t want to see anyone, especially not people I didn’t know.

I walked for about 2 miles or just under, maybe 45-50 minutes. I’ve finally sprung for Spotify Premium after years of gritting my teeth through the ad-filled free version. It was a little joy to be able to listen to whatever song I wanted, whenever I wanted, and I mean that in the most genuine sense. I put on a playlist of what I’ll call my “contemplative songs,” which happen to be about loss and heartbreak and longing. I run to this kind of playlist often. It’s a great way to think through whatever melancholy I’m sitting with and can’t name. It’s a great way to think about writing, too, especially if you’re working on an emotionally heavy piece. Maybe it’s about your mother and her Levi jeans. Maybe it’s about your father and the way he used to talk about his family’s summer cottage. Maybe it’s about you in a way you haven’t quite figured out yet. You’ll need a few more runs, or long walks, for it to take shape or have a name.

It’s okay for me to hold space for these feelings, however bad or uncomfortable. I came back from my walk to find both of my cats on the daybed I set up in my apartment’s sunroom, the only spot that gets any kind of good light. I laid down beside them and let myself go limp, corpse pose, looking up at the corner of the ceiling, still listening to music. I sat there a long time just feeling bad. Then I got up and started writing this.

I don’t think there’s a take away or sound bite to share. If there is one, maybe you can name it.

Visitations

The week after my mom died, I dreamed about her every night. Except, it wasn’t exactly her that came to me. It was her corpse. I won’t describe these dreams here, because I don’t want to shock you or be emotionally manipulative. You would probably find them disturbing and macabre. I know I definitely would if I came across them from some other writer. But believe me when I say that, though the circumstances of each of these dreams is objectively strange and terrifying, they brought me a real sense of calm, even comfort, both at the time I had them and whenever I think about them now.

I’ve always had vivid dreams, pretty much on a nightly basis. I’m grateful to have them; even more grateful that I remember them pretty clearly when I wake up. I’ve read that dreams are an important biological feature — not just a cool side effect of our sleep cycles, but a way for our brains to process and store information. It’s healthy to sleep and dream, in that dreaming serves a real purpose in the way we fundamentally function.*

That’s not to say that if you don’t dream often, or don’t remember your dreams, that there’s something wrong. Merely that your brain may rely on other fundamental functions to do the same things that dreams can accomplish. Here I should mention that 1). I’m not a sleep expert, and 2). the science of dreaming is ever evolving. But, regardless of the studies or research, I love that I dream and feel as though dreaming helps me, both on a mental and emotional level.**

And regardless of my personal opinions on the matter, there is one thing that most of us can agree on when it comes to dreams: listening to other people describe their dreams is (most of the time) insufferably boring. I mean, dreams are surreal and insular and run on their own kind of logic specific to the person that’s, well, dreaming them. I don’t think we yet have the language to communicate our dreams to each other in a way that captures their essence, and I don’t necessarily think that that is a bad thing. My own rule of thumb, when describing my dreams, is to sum them up in two sentences or less.*** For instance: I dreamed that I was in my hometown, but it wasn’t my hometown. There was a train track loop around the whole valley and I rode a train on it to my house, but it wasn’t my house. Often in my dreams, I recognize a familiar place or person by a feeling rather than by physical similarities to its real-life equivalent. Often, the dream versions of places or people look nothing like their real-life versions. So if I dream of my hometown, it’s almost as if I’m experiencing a whole new town, one that I know on a deep, almost molecular, level and recognize as mine, but which looks and operates completely differently in my dream life than it does in my waking one.

This is also what happens when I dream of my mother.**** After that first week of corpse dreams, I never had another one. The dreams that featured my mother from then on, featured her alive. I can count these dreams on one hand in the almost five years since she has been dead. I savor these dreams, and am fiercely protective of them. I won’t describe them here. But I will say that in each of these dreams, it feels like I’m getting the chance to see my mother again, or a version of her that I didn’t know in life. She is my mother, but she isn’t my mother.

I told this to my therapist in Oregon, in the first year following her death. I said that sometimes I dreamed about my mother, and that I woke up from these dreams feeling a lonely kind of longing; a longing that was tinged with a dissonant note of happiness, even relief. It was a confusing mixture of emotions. The dreams made me miss my mother anew, with the same intensity I experienced the night she died. They also made me hungry for more. I wanted to dream about her every night.

My therapist was a thoughtful and caring woman. She nodded as I talked. Then she said something to me that clicked: “Of course you want to dream of her every night. Dreams are different from memories, which are finite and immutable. In dreams, your mother can come to you in a way that you can’t remember from a memory. Your dreams present your mother as an amalgamation of your memories of her, which means she can come to you as a new experience, or encounter, one you never had in real life. It’s like a visitation in that way.”*****

Yes, I remember saying, feeling as though she had cracked open and solved a puzzle I’d been worrying at my whole life. It does feel like a visitation when she comes to me in a dream, because it feels new; it becomes a new memory of her I can cache in my mind, a fresher one that won’t distort with age, for a while at least, like all the others. I get to see her again, and for a few moments after waking, remember what it means to have a mother in the waking world. I can’t bring the visitation of her with me when I wake up, but I do bring the emotions these visitations elicit. For the rest of the day following such a dream, I feel fragile and vulnerable and close to the surface of things. It is a weird, but not unpleasant experience. Even when these dreams could be considered scary or bad, I look forward to them more than any others. You see: she is my mother, but she isn’t my mother. She isn’t, but she is.

“Oh,” I thought upon waking this morning, feeling open and exposed, both content and ill at ease somehow at the same time. “She was there. She was there.”

In two sentences or less, what did you dream about last night?

Thanks, as always, for reading.

X

Sam

Notes:

Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker, PhD, is an excellent read about the importance of sleep and dreams on our health and well-being. Unlike me, Dr. Walker is a sleep expert and his insights are fascinating. This book will, at the very least, make you think about prioritizing good sleeping habits.

**When it comes to the brain, these two are one and the same, no?

***So naturally, I’m writing a many-paragraphed blog about dreams.

****Or, as it happens, her corpse.

*****I’m paraphrasing because memory is maybe not as immutable as we would like, but this is the essence of what she said to me that day.

The Privilege of Quitting

“Sam, where did you go?” you may be asking, after I boldly promised a blog every week in my last post…four weeks ago. And I get it, you’ve been waiting impatiently to hear my thoughts on Lil Nas X and his Montero music video (I love it), or how the Twilight movie served as the catalyst for my queer awakening (Kristen Stewart), or why I’m obsessed with running YouTube channels (turns out I love watching men run with their shirts off, who knew).

Well, I can promise that all of these topics will be tackled in due time. I plan on maintaining a consistent schedule, but sometimes life gets in the way of even the most earnest of intentions. I left off last post on a bit of a cliffhanger, teasing a leap I was about to take without actually saying anything explicit about what that leap might be, or even look like.

On March 26, I officially finished the last day of my two-week notice. I rode the bus downtown for the first time in a full year, cleared out my cubicle, and turned in my work equipment (badge and computer). Then, I left. What I’m trying to say is, I no longer work in corporate communications. I quit my job.

When I first moved to Pittsburgh in 2017, I worked a series of low-wage jobs as I furiously applied to places where I hoped someone might look at the fiction degree on my resume and say, “Yeah, let’s give this chump a salary and some health insurance!” Lo and behold, a year later, in 2018, someone did give this chump a salary and health insurance. For two years, I worked under an incredible manager in communications marketing and felt equal parts relieved, grateful, and bored. Relieved because I could make my student loan payments without worry each month, grateful because I was able to pay down those loans with money from a job in which I spent the majority of the time writing. Bored because, well, it wasn’t my dream job — I mean, it’s not like I was writing for a blog titled “All Things Sam Mitchell Is Either Extremely or Mildly Excited to Shout About” (which, incidentally is the formal title for this blog [I am very good at titles]).

When my incredible manager switched teams, then left altogether for better opportunities, I was entering my third year of employment: 2020-2021. As you know, lots of things happened in this year. I got a new manager, I got a new team, a worldwide pandemic changed every single person’s life, and I decided to start saving money more seriously than I ever had before.

Everyone has those moments in life that give one the gift of clarity. These moments often come at a very high price, at a very inconvenient time. Something terrible happens, and changes your life, and you look around, and you think what the fuck am I doing? If you don’t like your answer to that question, the life-changing moment gives you clarity. It tells you — sometimes only very briefly, in a flash of brilliant inspiration and wisdom — what to do and why.

When the pandemic hit, I was relatively spared. My family remained safe and healthy. I kept my well-paying job, and even got to start working at home. My student loan payments were paused indefinitely — but regardless, I was able to pay off multiple individual loans while all interest was halted, too. I lived in a spacious, affordable apartment which was only two blocks away from my girlfriend’s equally spacious and affordable apartment. I got to hang out with my cats all day. I got to run outside any time I felt like it; I just put on my running shoes and went. Life wasn’t just not bad, it was good.

As of this writing, life is still good. I’m fully vaccinated; I’m properly medicated for my anxiety and depression; I have a wonderful, supportive network of badass, conscientious friends; I have money in the bank; I was able to quit my job without another full-time gig lined up, because of standing freelance contracts and the promise of more opportunities in the near future; I was able to take some time and make my moment of clarity — that rare gift — even rarer still by stretching it long, stretching it wide. I’m in this moment still, giving myself time to figure out my next step: my what to do and why.

The pandemic threw my life into perspective, even if it didn’t throw it into disarray or despair as it has with so many others. I am incredibly privileged to be spared, both on a systemic and individual level. It’s a privilege to be able to take stock of my life and have the ability, wherewithal, and time to change it, or even to not change it. It’s a privilege to have options.

This blog is meant to help me both take and not take my writing seriously. I wanted a low-stake option for honing a craft I’ve been trying to hone for a long time. I don’t know if what I write on this or any post will reflect my thoughts and opinions a year from now, two years, ten years, etc., but I intend to keep every post as is — to see the changes and the growth, the nuance of my thoughts when trying to corral them into some semblance of idea or theme or thread, how these threads weave together or unravel over time. What kinds of designs the threads will make. In a lot of ways, writing is as close to my life as my life is to writing. They are both a form of evolution.

So, my life is evolving (as is my writing, and vice versa). I guess what I’m trying to say is, I’m excited to see what happens next. What my options are. I’m feeling very grateful and fragile and wanted to be transparent about the whole tapestry, if you’ll excuse me for extending that cliched metaphor.

What are you grateful for today?

Thanks, as always, for reading.

X

Sam

The True Fear

One of my biggest fears is that I’m actually just a lazy person. Sure, I have a lot of big dreams for myself, but I get almost as much joy from thinking about these dreams as I do from taking actual, concrete steps toward realizing them. I’m very good at spacing out, thinking big things, then switching on Netflix or tunneling down a YouTube rabbit hole (this time, the algorithm served up a video series about Canadian stealth camping that I’m obsessed with now) — otherwise, spending a good chunk of my limited time on this earth passively consuming rather than productively…producing? Part of this issue comes down to simple astrology. I’m a Pisces sun sign. It was written in the stars at the time of my birth that I would find a certain easy solace in creative escapism. But I would be remiss if I didn’t also attribute this comfort with thoughtful inaction to my struggles with anxiety.

In high school and college, I was a notorious procrastinator. I left every essay until the night before it was due and spent a Red Bull-fueled eight hours cramming in a month’s worth of research and writing. I know I’m definitely not the only student who has done this for a majority of projects, even major ones, so maybe that’s why I never tried too hard to change the habit. Everyone else at the library was staying until 2 a.m., drinking coffee or energy drinks, tap-tap-tapping away at some kind of paper or thesis or lab report or whatever it was the non-Liberal Arts majors had to do (calculus? organic chem? at least one bullshit gen ed that included at least one paper). Also, I didn’t really have to change the habit in order to get good grades. My grades were fine, even great. I knew I could procrastinate and maintain my status quo, so it was easy for me to indulge in more instant gratification by going out during the week and saving all the homework for late Sunday night. Of course, those Sunday nights were brutal. But I got through them, graduated with a high GPA, and yeah, never thought about grades again because they didn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things (you know, if anything really matters in the grand scheme of things).

And, though I’m a few years past even grad school at this point, working a full-time job with some freelance gigs on the side — I still goddamn procrastinate! I never miss a deadline, but I’m still kind of addicted to that tug-and-pull feeling of equal parts relief and anxiety that can’t be induced more astutely than by pushing off a project till the next day.

So, what has this got to do with my fear of being lazy? No, I don’t think people who procrastinate are lazy. And with this blog entry, I’m not trying to advocate for some kind of toxic hustle culture that prioritizes working over mental health and well-being. These are actually good subjects for another entry down the line — maybe about the nature of work and our relationship to it in a globalized, late-Capitalist economy? I just read The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand for the first time and have THOUGHTS (don’t worry, I followed it up with a re-read of The Communist Manifesto to balance out the ideological propaganda, man-as-an-end-to-himself, indeed, Sure Jan).

What I’m trying to say here is that my fear about being lazy isn’t actually a fear about being lazy. I know I’m not lazy. I set up challenges for myself on a monthly basis in order to improve some aspect of my life or learning. So far, I’ve successfully completed 30 days of yoga each day; 30 days of no take-out; and 30 days of writing at least 250 words per day — which actually resulted in the first short story of mine I’ve written and haven’t hated in a good while. Currently, I’m in the process of another 30-day writing challenge. And even this blog is a challenge, as I’m hoping to complete 52 blogs in the next year, one blog per week. I’m also a very consistent reader and runner, which has kept me very healthy, both mentally and physically, for a big part of my adulthood.

So, I’m not lazy. That fear of laziness is just masking the true fear — that I will fail if I try for what I really want. In high school, in college, in grad school, at work, big and important projects were/are incredibly intimidating. Instead of facing these challenges head-on, it felt easier in the moment to wait, push it off, tackle it another day — perhaps a day when I’d have no choice but to tackle it because time was running out. I’d backed myself into a corner and that corner was responsible for finally getting me to do what I could have, or should have, done much earlier: Get. To. Work.

And, even if I made the deadline, even if the project came back with a good result despite the time crunch, what procrastinating gave me was worth the weeks of stomach-churning anxiety with which I paid for it. Procrastinating gave me the excuse that I could have done better if only I had given myself enough time. Whether I passed or failed, if I procrastinated, I still had the chance to believe that had I not procrastinated, my work could have been — no, would have been — that much more illuminating, original, funny, great. Except, I never cashed in on that belief. I never gave myself enough time the next time a due date loomed, near or far, in my future. I chose to live on that sense of promised potential instead of finding out what I was really capable of.

Even though I’m mostly talking about school papers here, I can extrapolate this issue of procrastination to other, much bigger, parts of my life. I can say, pretty honestly, that I don’t want to hide behind procrastination anymore. I don’t want to waste my potential because I’m afraid that the promise of it I’ve banked on for so long isn’t actually worth as much as I thought it might be. I want to start giving myself enough time. I want to stop making excuses.

What does that ultimately mean then, you might be asking (if you’ve made it this far, bless you). Well, it means that I’m going to be making some pretty big decisions soon. I’m taking the first step in giving myself the gift of failing, because failing is ultimately trying. And I’m finally ready to let myself try really hard for what I really want.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

X

Sam

My Mother’s House

At first, it was a “formal” living room, which my mom decorated toward an exotic animal theme. She hung pictures of lions next to pictures of tigers. She outfitted the coffee table with a chess set of ceramic monkeys striking various poses while holding bananas. She arranged two plush leopards to guard the backs of both leather love seats, and tried to throw in a zebra-print rug to tie the whole concept together. The jungle room, as we started calling it, shared a wall with the real living room, the room where we gathered, alone or as a family, and spent 85 percent of our time, mostly watching TV. No one really used the jungle room until my sister hooked up the family computer in there.

I spent a lot of time in the computer room, accidentally downloading viruses onto our ancient ‘95 Compaq desktop, deliberating over which song to place on my MySpace page. Eventually, we got Wi-Fi and laptops and smartphones; the computer room, once again, became another unused space in the house — much like the dining room where we ate exactly zero of our meals and where my dad had given up any semblance of domesticity by placing his 600-pound gun safe in one corner.

Though no one used it, the computer room featured its jungle decor, and that Compaq, for years — from 2001 when we first built the house until 2014, when the room transformed once again.

The love seats came out, along with the leopards and zebra rug. My dad boxed up the Compaq and relegated it to the basement. Then he bought a new television and placed it on the Compaq’s former desk. In the space leftover, he brought in: one hospital bed; one motorized wheelchair; one special lift machine for hoisting someone from wheelchair to bed; two small, three-drawer Tupperware containers filled with sweatpants and medical supplies; and finally, one mother, my mother, for whom this new set-up was necessary.

In the last two years of her life, my mother would rarely leave this room, relying on us — her family and neighbors, nurses and friends — to come to her. This is the room where she eventually died.

***

The above is the intro to an essay I’ve started and stopped going on three years now. It’s an elegy to my childhood home as a metaphor for how my family grew and changed within its walls. In essence, it’s an elegy to my family when my mother was still alive and a part of it. See, the house is still owned by my father; he lives in it as of this writing. But it stopped being my home, the place I could always come back to if things became too hard or overwhelming, when my mother died. Of course, as she was dying, it didn’t occur to me that my home was dying, too. I didn’t think of my mother as home until my dad got remarried the year after her death and the house transformed into their home. His wife’s home. They knocked down the wall between living rooms, replaced the carpet with vinyl, simulated-hardwood floors, painted the front door a bright red, moved the laundry and dryer to the basement, converted my siblings’ bedrooms, and my own, into guest rooms, got rid of the downstairs toilet (the only one you could use without climbing a set of stairs to reach it), and filled every room with antique furniture tinged with that barn-wood-as-pantry-door aesthetic.

Objectively, the changes are nice. I especially like the red front door. But I can’t help noticing how every sign of my mother’s life and death in that house has been removed, painted over, or boxed in the basement. Every ramp, stair lift, accessible part of the house erased as if, with my mother and her debilitating illness gone, there are no longer such needs. I can’t help thinking about my maternal grandfather, sitting on his living room couch a month before his death in 2018, lamenting that he’d never put in a bathroom on the first floor of his house. There was a toilet in the basement and a toilet on the second floor — and a steep set of stairs to navigate when he needed to use either one, something that had become daunting to him when cancer began weakening his back and shuffling his steps. What will my dad and his wife do if the flight of stairs in their home were to become, God forbid, insurmountable?

Maybe I just have to accept that it’s not my problem to figure out. It’s not my home, it’s not my life, it’s ultimately not my choice what they decide to do, or not do, remove, or keep as is. Maybe the essay about my mother’s house is so difficult to pin down and finish because my relationship to it, the house, my mother, my father has changed so much — is changing so much — from month to month, year to year. I can only assume it will keep changing. I can only hope that that change is toward a gradual evolution of acceptance and empathy. That sometimes seems like a far-flung, impossible goal — but, well, at least I’m trying.

I miss my mother every day, in a way I never truly anticipated, though I certainly got the chance to experience a lot of anticipatory grief as her health slowly declined. I miss my dad too, as our relationship has seen its fair share of strain since my mother’s death. It’s hard to recognize, as it’s happening, that when the first person to ever love you unconditionally no longer exists in the world, her absence isn’t all-consuming for everyone who feels, or notices, it. What I lost when my mother died is not the same as what my father lost. What we gained through that loss isn’t the same, either.

My dad got a second chance at marriage, a new family, a new home. I don’t want to begrudge him that. I only wish my mother could have gotten her second chance, too.

Basketball Is My Favorite Sport

I like the way they dribble up and down the court. Actually, I really like the way one particular player dribbles across the half-court line, drives into the paint, and sinks a switchover lay-up with his non-dominant left hand. That’s if, of course, he hasn’t already danced a few ankle breakers and drained it from his signature sweet spot somewhere one or two yards before the three. No, I’m not talking about Steph Curry, though I wouldn’t hold it against you for thinking that. I’m talking about the third overall pick in the 2020 NBA draft and favored Rookie of the Year (RoY): LaMelo Ball.

If you follow any sort of basketball coverage at all, you already know about LaMelo and the hype that has followed this kid since 2016 when he was an eighth grader playing on the Chino Hills varsity team with his two older brothers, Lonzo and LiAngelo. The Ball brothers would take this team to an undefeated season against the best high schools in California and across the nation, front-lined by eldest brother Lonzo, himself a 5-star recruit and UCLA commit.

Since then, the Ball brothers have been trending at the top of the basketball strata, thanks in part to incredible highlight reels on social media and their Facebook reality show, Ball in the Family. But also, these guys are just plain good. And Melo is arguably the best of the three despite being the youngest. In fact, watching both his brothers forge a path to professional basketball* ahead of him most likely inspired his own nontraditional route to the NBA.**

I honestly could go on about the Ball brothers ad nauseam. There’s a lot to unpack, both on the professional and personal spectrum of their public lives. But, what I really want to drive home, at least here, is the excitement I feel every time I catch a highlight reel of LaMelo’s latest game.***

The Charlotte Hornets, LaMelo’s NBA team, is based in Charlotte, North Carolina and owned by someone everyone knows, regardless of basketball-specific cultural awareness. I’m talking about the GOAT or Greatest of All Time: Michael Jordan.**** Despite its luminary ownership and a recent 120-million-dollar ($$$) free-agent deal inked to acquire Gordon Hayward, the Hornets have always been middling at best. They haven’t had a winning season since 2016, and the team hasn’t won a conference title, let alone an NBA championship, in franchise history.***** So, why are Hornet highlights pulling in millions of views on YouTube in the year of our Jordan 2021?

Well, if you put LaMelo Ball in the thumbnail and title of your highlight vid, the algorithm will take it from there. Scroll through the comment section and you’ll see why. So many people are tuning in to the Hornets because they’re really tuning in to LaMelo. And though there are the haters who want to see him fail and the hometown crowd that will root on any Hornet, regardless of clout, skill, or name — the overwhelming majority of commentators is comprised of fans, young and old, who want to see LaMelo eventually fulfill his All-Star potential. Will he turn out to be a bust? Or could he really be the next Magic Johnson? Could his savvy passing, high basketball IQ, superb play making, and quirky jump shot****** one day put LaMelo in the company of the greats like Johnson, LeBron James, Steph Curry, and yes, even Air Jordan?

Honestly, only time can tell, but I’m pumped to see what LaMelo will continue to do on the court, because even at the start, he’s been an absolute pleasure to watch. Go ahead and accuse me of jumping on the band wagon, because I’ll whole-heartedly agree. I didn’t care that much about basketball until I stumbled on a YouTube video, deep in the summer of Pandemic 2020, featuring a scrawny kid from Chino Hills putting up a 92 point game like he could do it in his sleep.

From there, I just followed the algorithm, baby. You can buy into the hype yourself by starting here. I won’t apologize if you’re ordering a #2 Buzz City jersey in a month or two.

Thanks for reading.

X

Sam

Footnotes:

*Lonzo plays for the New Orleans Pelicans; LiAngelo is currently a free agent, allegedly in negotiations to play abroad.

**Usually prospective draftees play Division I college ball before becoming eligible for the NBA draft at age 19. This is called the “one-and-done rule” because players typically stay one year in college, then quit once they reach NBA eligibility. LaMelo started playing professionally in 2018 when he signed with Prenai in Lithuania. Though this move made Melo the youngest basketball player ever to sign a professional contract, it also made him ineligible for NCAA recruitment. Instead of college, Melo signed a contract with the NBL in Australia, where he played for a year until he could legally enter the 2020 NBA draft back in the United States.

***Yes, I watch on YouTube. Someday I’ll pay for an ESPN subscription, I promise!

****Jordan’s the best. You can’t change my mind.

*****As of Feb. 23, 2021, that is.

******I think it’s important to note here that LaMelo is the youngest NBA player in history to put up a triple-double.

Am I a Writer?

I flipped through my first collection of stories the other day. I found them in the bottom of a Tupperware container, underneath a pile of yearbooks and the christening dress I wore when I was barely a year old. I pulled out the dress, crinkly like paper with age, and there it was. The blue notebook with Winnie the Pooh on the cover, metal spiral pulled halfway out and catching the edge of my thumb, dangerous enough to almost draw blood. I slowly pulled back the cover, careful to make sure I didn’t rip it entirely off, and saw the faded pencil markings of my third-grade self: large and confident, not an eraser mark in sight. Each page boasted a one-paragraph-long story about a friend turned animal — Tyler the Tiger, Carley the Cat, Mitchell the Mongoose, etc., etc., until all my friends were accounted for, all the white space used up.

These aren’t bad, I thought, and then I put the notebook back beneath the dress beneath the yearbooks, replaced the Tupperware lid, and returned the container to its spot in the hallway closet. I wasn’t looking for stories when I’d first hauled the container out, but that’s a good enough metaphor to leave on without telling you what it was I actually wanted to find.

Since third grade — since years before third grade, when I first learned to read — I had the complete conviction that I would grow up to be a writer. I loved books but, more importantly, I loved writing. When other childhood dreams fell by the wayside (oncologist, marine biologist, veterinarian, Air Force pilot), I held on to Being a Writer. And I read, and I wrote, all through high school. I went to college and majored in English. Then I stayed an extra year to get a Master’s in Creative Writing. And then, I went to grad school in Oregon and I got another Master’s in writing!

In that three-year span of graduate education, I wrote two theses chock-full of essays and stories. I even started a novel. I even started a memoir! I wrote like a maniac because I needed to bring something into workshop. I needed to bring something to my thesis advisor. I needed to bring something to someone, anyone, to justify leaving my dying mother three thousand miles behind to pursue this literal childhood dream turned compulsion.

When I came back home, my mother gone, my family irrevocably changed, I had three degrees, $500 in my bank account, $31,000 in undergrad student loan debt, no job prospects, and only one publication under my belt. I can’t remember just how many rejections I’d racked up to this point, but you’ll forgive me for not scrolling through my Submittable account to jog my memory. I was lonely, depressed, incredibly grief-stricken, and scared. My dad wanted me out of the house almost as much as I did, so I moved to Pittsburgh in November 2017, after finding a room on Craigslist and a front-desk position at a family-owned hotel on the same day just two weeks before. It was the first stroke of luck in a straggling series that led me from the front-desk of the hotel to the front-desk of a swim school in the suburbs to finally landing my first “career” job on a communications team in the corporate services division of a large company with headquarters in the heart of downtown. I proceeded to write blog articles, featured stories, ad copy, web copy, brochure copy, copy copy copy.

I stopped writing just about everything else. I halfheartedly penned one story or essay every six months, sent it out, waited for the inevitable rejection, got it, still felt lousy even after anticipating it, filed the story or essay away, and promptly forgot about it until six months went by and I’d start washing, rinsing, repeating.

Writing had slowly morphed from something that I loved doing and never wanted to give up, to something that I felt I couldn’t quit even if I wasn’t interested in it anymore — in fulfilling the idea of myself as an adult in the world that I’d cultivated as a little kid. When do you say to your third-grade self that you aren’t actually cut out to be the next Beverly Cleary? That by the time you go off to college and grad school, Beverly Cleary is just one of a hundred dear authors you think on fondly but haven’t wanted to emulate in a very long time?

“Listen, kid,” you want to say to the kid scribbling away in her Pooh notebook, so intently the sides of her palms are stained gray with graphite. “There are so many things you haven’t read, languages you haven’t learned, people you haven’t met yet to be dictating what I’m supposed to be doing right now! You don’t even know that you’ll despise J.K. Rowling by the time you’re 28 — let at least that morsel of blasphemy slow your goddamn roll!”

But you don’t say these things because, though you think you believe time is linear only because humans haven’t developed the technology to move through it in any other way, you don’t really believe that. You just want to believe it, because this belief leaves room for the possibility that your mom is out there, on another timeline somewhere, and one day, if you’re lucky and science is on your side, you’ll be able to find her again and say you’re sorry. Or, barring that, you’ll be able to find the kid with the Pooh notebook and tell her a few things so she doesn’t have to learn them all the hard way. That her heroes will change, or die. That her sense of self will go through a million iterations before she turns 15, let alone before she turns 30. That she’ll be so very unlucky and so very lucky at different points in her life; sometimes she’ll be both at the same time. That the end of the world will come, and it will be devastating, but she’ll still wake up the next day, and then the day after that, and then the day after that. If time is a line, maybe it’s one that does loop back on itself.

That’s tough to explain to a third grader. It’s probably impossible. So you start a blog instead.

Maybe I am a writer in the sense that I have something to say and a means with which to say it. That, for now, has to be enough. At least, until it isn’t. But I’ll cross that bridge when, not if, I come to it.

Thanks for reading.

X

Sam