Naught May Endure but Mutability

The gaps between blog posts are usually when the most interesting shit goes down. When words don’t suffice, when I can’t find the time, or when I spend a year living on an island in the Pacific Ocean because my life has fallen apart. I’m not just talking about the presidential election. I’m talking about the fact that everything I’d counted on happening after my last blog entry nearly two years ago, did not.

My return to Zambia wasn’t meant to be. None of my grants came through, and promises made to me were not kept. In hindsight, everything is a blessing and does in fact happen for a reason. Since a blog post is an open forum, I’ll just leave that there. Suffice it to say, in the end, it wasn’t up to me. I left behind teaching materials, and I trust that the Zambian teachers are doing an amazing job at helping the chimpanzee keepers and their families learn English. I myself learned many hard lessons from the aftermath of that experience. One of those is this: I will never again leave everything I have (my beloved cat, my cozy home, my amazing jobs, my gorgeous furniture, my incredible friends, etc.) based on someone else’s word that I have a job waiting for me, as well as their support. Not unless a written contract is signed by both parties, in blood. (JK…sort of)

By the time I realized I wasn’t booking a flight to Africa anytime soon, I was in Portland Oregon. That is where some of my (extended) family lives and graciously offered to house me, temporarily, while I figured my shit out.

While spending two weeks in Portland, I came to terms with the fact that my many lives in Chicago had ended. I’d sold my belongings and stored what I couldn’t part with. My jobs were effectively eliminated regardless of my leaving (Trump in charge = international students don’t want to learn English in the Midwest anymore because can you blame them?) and my beautiful boudoir in that adorable coach house was occupied by someone else. Even my regal cat, Cooper, had to find a new home, since I no longer had one and couldn’t have taken him on such an uncertain journey.

My heart broke. I like Portland, but I don’t belong there. I’d landed there only because I had nowhere else to go. This felt like utter failure.

At first it was somewhat quant living on the lamb. In an attempt to get on my own two feet, I left Portland to do the work/trade thing and spent a month in a tree house, aerating future grapes on a vineyard in middle-of-nowhere Washington.

I listened to audio books and the sounds of infinite creatures at night. Birds swooped in the open window and visited me beneath my mosquito netting. The compost toilet was outside, the “town” was a two-mile walk, and there was slow WIFI two hours a day, five days a week. My ex-boyfriend graciously mailed my pillow from Chicago because I did not grow up camping and my body does not sleep well on wooden boards and crumpled laundry without seriously complaining the next day. Eventually I found a cot, and ways of cushioning my exhausted bones at night, but that month overall toughened me up: I became resolute in my recovery. I may not have been in Zambia, my life may have imploded, and I may have been living in a tree house Thoreau-style, but hell if I was giving up.

For five months, I lived off my retirement. At 38, it was between that and prostitution (which means, it was the only option). After my month on the vineyard, I found another work/trade situation on one of the San Juan Islands, at a “rustic” resort. I arrived during the height of summer, which at this particular hideaway meant ample nudity, drinking, and escapism. Being in mourning, I dove right in. Much too old for such behavior I pretended I wasn’t having a mid-life crisis and took advantage of the legal weed, naked spa, and copious drifters who had also left the mainland behind. It was a blissfully ignorant time of music festivals and communal living (yes, that was sarcasm).

Then the weather turned, and those with concrete life plans left to follow them. I stayed because my plans had fallen through. At least there, I was living rent-free while making (shit) money, and I knew I couldn’t get that anywhere else. Also, for the first September in nine years I wasn’t prepping for classes or having stress dreams about not grading all the papers on time. Maybe I needed a sabbatical? That must be it.

Thus, I found myself living on this rather majestic island, in a 7”x14” cabin, working in the maintenance and house keeping departments of said resort: replacing light bulbs and scrubbing toilets, but also using their spa in my off hours (for free), going on hikes, watching sunsets, and enjoying the daily view of the ocean.

Try not to turn green with envy. I was also talking to my little squirrel friends in the woods and asking my evil stepsisters why I couldn’t attend the ball, but that’s another blog entry. It was rough…I will never not tip a housekeeper again (in a hotel…I’ll never not clean my own home). I will also never underestimate the privileges I enjoy due to where and how I grew up.

Living on a resort where the white upper-middle class nouveau riche hippies take their vacations was quite an education. Those who work at such places are forever on the outskirts of the Seattle elite’s revelry. Hence, my co-workers (generally speaking) were not interested in discussing the “real” world, being activists, thinking critically, or making life plans. It was much easier to get stoned, go to the local watering hole, hang out under the stars, and let the days pass. It’s all too easy, when everyone else nearby is on vacation, to vacate from your own life. For someone like me, this is a dangerous cocktail. Vacillating between depressed resignation and fierce retaliation, I didn’t fit in. Which, I realize, is a Godsend.

Lucky for me, last winter was the wettest, coldest, darkest one the Pacific Northwest has seen in many years. I plugged along, continuing to live on island time with people I probably would never have befriended if I weren’t stuck on an island with them. My retirement money was gone. I had a freelance gig, but that cash hadn’t come in yet. Meanwhile, while ingesting many more pieces of humble pie, our current President was "elected". Like many others, I stood dumbfounded with tears for days and ranted and raved and wept some more. I de-friended family on Facebook and became mouthy online. I didn’t care. The world had clearly gone shit-creek crazy. I had zero fucks left to give. I was a maid living out of a suitcase, and I’d lost everything. I thought this was the bottom.

And yet…there is an olive branch segment to this story. I may have been listening to Lemonade on repeat, daily, while sweeping countless cabin floors, but I’m also a pretty lucky lady. Case in point: although this country is bonkers, my friends do actually give a shit about the state of our states (and me). One of my oldest and dearest pals called me right after the election. I didn’t know it at the time, but she called to save my ass. This is a baller of a woman I went to undergrad with who is now raising two kids while writing her dissertation. As you do. I could not have been happier to hear from her at that moment in time. Our conversation went something like this:

“What the hell are you doing on --- island?”
“I’m a house keeper.”
Silence.
“What do you want to be doing instead?”
“Getting back to the work I’m supposed to be doing. The work I started in Zambia.”
Pause.
“You need to come here, get your PhD, and get your ass back to Africa.”

Hail Mary Mother of Jesus there is a God and her name is Wonder Woman.

To have a plan, after months of feeling like the gutter aint’ so bad, is a beautiful and sacred thing. I like plans. Plans like me. I get them done.

I applied to said PhD program at said east coast University because I wanted to get off that island more than the entire cast of Lost combined. The freelance gig mentioned earlier, that luckily came my way via a primate conference the summer before, turned out to be lucrative enough to allow me to leave the island (eventually) and move on. At this primate conference, I’d also seen that most people doing what I wanted to be doing (or, close to it, as it’s not yet being done) had their PhDs, or were working towards them. I saw the benefit of having a University backing your work. I realized that being part of a larger entity was what I was missing. No one was going to risk investing in someone who had beta-tested her work only once, in a non-native ape habitat, with a degree in Humanities. My nine years of teaching and six weeks at an African primate sanctuary wasn’t enough. My dear old friend was right. I had more work to do, much more. It was time to up my game.

It was suggested that I visit the University in person before the admission decisions were made. This happened to be the same week of the march in D.C. to protest the “elected” President.

It also happened to be the same week my beloved cat passed away, without his Mommy, in Chicago. It was the same week of my birthday. The same week I got bronchitis and food poisoning, simultaneously, and barfed up my birthday cake. But because of my amazing friends in Philly, Virginia, Jersey, and Boston, I got through it. Regardless of my heart breaking and lungs aching, I met the faculty face to face. I sat in offices talking to Professors while choking on my own phlegm (wish I was kidding, but I’m not…it was gross). I dragged myself through snow and freezing rain, with a fever, to impress upon these academics the merit of my work. I was not giving up; I was going to do this, even if I couldn’t breathe through my own mucus. I must have scared them into submission, because on Valentine’s Day, I received the acceptance letter.

Whoever said ‘it’s always darkest before the dawn’ deserves a goddamn Pulitzer.

It was March. I had a plan forward on a viable path. I was finally, eventually, leaving the island of the lost. And yet.

Since the previous spring, I had been saying yes to things I didn’t want to do because my previous plans didn’t pan out. I said yes to working under bosses I did not respect. I said yes to living on an isolated island without a single traffic light because “it was free”. I said yes to earning $12/hour because the gig included housing. I had said yes so many times I wanted to scream no, that my former self was eroding. The woman on my resume was disappearing like a ghost. I wasn’t doing what I was put here, on Earth, to do, and this was eating me alive. People around me could see this. I’ve never had much of a poker face. Turns out, those same (male) people, who also live on that island, are not all good people. Some of them came there to escape something big from their past. Some of them are predators who can smell their prey, and waste no time pursuing it. And when you come into a predator’s pathway, it’s only a matter of time. My defenses were way down. I didn’t see it coming. I never thought I would be on the other side of that statistic. Until I was.

As Roxane Gay writes in her book Bad Feminist (2012), “Writers cannot protect their readers from themselves nor should they be expected to”. Dear reader, I do not know your triggers, but I do know we all have them. Hence, for the sake of opaque transparency, I will share a poem I wrote about last March, and leave the rest to you:

---
I love the men that let me leave
Which is all of them, to be fair…
Although my list contains a copious crew,
Few enter the depths of my lair.

I love the men who snore after sex
As I burrow into the nest upon their chest
A slowing heartbeat and deep exhales
Euphoric buzzing amidst measured gales.

I love the men who love cats
Treat me to breakfast and cups of joe
Then help me pack and ship a box
Melting my chest full of rocks.

I love the men who do not take
What they know is not theirs.
Supine with wine ne’er equals consent
Even if my body doth relent.

I love myself but cannot stay
‘Twas a temple, ‘til he took it away
Once again I depart, but this time --
I journey ahead to reclaim what is mine.
---

That was the bottom. I left the resort, and the island, six weeks later. I reported the incident to ensure that this particular predator will not be seeking his prey there any longer. I lived, and am still living, with the physical repercussions of that trauma. I am not the only one. I have since sat at dinner tables, holding my girlfriends’ hands, looking into their eyes, as they revealed they too understood, and they will always be there to support me. And I am utterly grateful to all the help I received to get me back to Chicago so that I could spend a summer with people and places I love after enduring one hell of a year.

One year later, I am here. En route.

On the path I didn’t know existed until everything else fell apart. As it does. As it has to.

I will be starting a MA/PhD track program in Geography at an excellent University in the fall, while also teaching at said University, and I could not be more excited. Why Geography? Because my work is site specific. It involves discovering whether, and how, ESL instruction could be used as a conservation tool on primate sanctuaries in Africa and Asia. Sanctuaries are contested zones of interspecies conflict. Human primates are vying for that resource rich land to survive. Nonhuman primates require that land to continue living. And yet, many of them are now critically endangered. This is a global problem. This is the result of climate change, but also the culmination of so many other issues that all intersect in these small but sacred spaces. There is so much I don’t know, and I will not tackle this issue again until I’m much better prepared. I require further theoretical knowledge to back up participatory action oriented research. Hence, going back to school.

Since I don’t plan to have children of my own, this work is my baby. This is the next thirty years of my life. This is what happens after you fall off your horse (I mean that figuratively, but also literally, as I did fall off an actual horse this year and holy shit that hurt).

We got this, dear readers. As the one and only Queen Bey says, “Ima keep runnin’ cause a winner don’t quit on themselves”. Onward.