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For a few decades, I was convinced that my life was an interminable cliché. Any breakthrough, epiphany and light that went on would immediately be mirrored in a book, film, or someone else’s (read: more famous than me) reality.

Then it seemed my life more closely resembled the myth of Sisyphus, condemned for eternity to roll a boulder up a hill only to watch it roll back down. Sisyphus was punished for self-aggrandizing, and I, who had reached the peak of my career, became condemned, every time I tried to get there again, to watch it all slip from my grasp.

I thought I was done with Sisyphus, no longer enamored with telling his story as my story, when by chance I stumbled across a post my ex husband had made to his Instagram account. He posted a cartoon of Sisyphus and wrote, “Sums up my first marriage.”

I thought I was done with him, but after reading that I wondered why he was thinking about me after so long a time, and wondering why I cared what he thought about us after so long a time. Coincidentally, an editor contacted me then about entering an essay in a journal entitled “Letter to My Ex.” Fueled, I wrote one, and submitted it, but in the end declined to have it published. Instead, I sent it directly to my ex. Here is an excerpt:

Most of all, I forgive you. I gave all I had to our marriage for 15 years and asked for pretty much one thing in return: for you and I to be a family, to have a child. For years, we fought over this imaginary child. “You don’t want a child, you want to want something,” was what you told me in the North Beach apartment. “I know you will resent me one day for not giving you a child,” you said in our New Orleans apartment. “If you want to have a baby, I suggest you divorce me,” was your argument in the Portrero Hill apartment. Then by the time you were willing, it was too late. I was past 40 and able to get pregnant but not hold a baby. So we began a new version of the argument. “I am not adopting someone else’s child,” you said to me in the San Rafael house after the pregnancies stopped. I see the humor in it now. I did resent you. I feared having a child would mean I would lose you. I did. I feared you would leave me and have a child with another woman. You did. I feared being a single mother. I am. It has been a dozen years since these events ravaged my life and our marriage. I still have trouble connecting myself to the woman I was who did this. Now, it has only been a few years since you and I exchanged those final emails. I have not received a Christmas card since, but imagine your boys are bigger now, while my son is still young. 

Funny how life is short but it’s wide, here we all are sitting in our houses during a pandemic. We were asked to get out of our rut and be still. Thankfully, I learned long ago the only difference between a rut and a grave is the dimension. So I’ve tackled my restlessness and spent nearly a decade learning to be still, learning to accept what life throws at me, but even so, once again, Sisyphus and I share this story in common.

A friend gave me a 5-year mom’s journal five years ago. I have kept up with it because you can only write a sentence or two a day. It’s a gem I will hold onto if only as a reminder that some things change, and some things do not.

I took down the breakfast cup I bought in an antique store in San Francisco many moons ago. It’s precious and my fear that it will break keeps it safeguarded in back of the cabinet. I needed to risk its preciousness. Unlike a mug, you can’t walk around with it. Unlike a tumbler, you can knock it over. So this breakfast cup invites me to sit in one place, still, and take studied sips of the tea I don’t even know I’m drinking when using another vessel.

I cut the first hydrangea blooms and brought them in to put in my Aalto vase. I rarely use the vase because I rarely cut flowers from my garden to enjoy. When I first moved into the 100 Men Hall, I had noticed the old growth hydrangeas in the back garden, and I thought I will take cuttings and put them on my kitchen table. And I never did until this pandemic allowed me to do the one thing I have been yearning to do and that is garden.

So the pandemic has offered me time to write in my 5-year mom journal, use my precious breakfast cup, garden and enjoy fresh cut flowers in a vase rarely used. While this pandemic has been horrendous for many people – losing loved ones, fighting on the front lines, enormous revenue loss – it has offered some of us an escape from a life that was not serving us. I was not really living. I was on a conveyor belt to my grave.

The real question is how to do we retain what we’ve gained when the pandemic is over?

Step 1 – Don’t panic.

Step 2 – Morning walks in nature.

Step 3 – Meditate.

Step 4 – Have a close cadre of friends at the other end of a text, call, email.

Step 5 – Bike rides along the water with people you love at a distance.

Step 6 – Enjoy the respite.

I try not to be a harsh critic of myself. I know too easily how it’s a slippery slope into outright condemnation. The voice that speaks to me when I look in the mirror is an awful judge. After I’ve crossed over into 60 last year, I’ve noticed every possible flaw my body holds – my once beautiful skin is now wrinkled, thin, marked. My once thick arms and thighs are dappled with curdled fat. My ass is flatter. My stomach rounder. And let’s not talk about my once pretty fine breasts – they are definitely shadows of their former selves.

And so it is, that late last year I gave up caring about my body. I decided it was separate from me and I didn’t really want to claim it anymore. So I began a slow descent into my own personal weight gain program. Step one, eat whatever you want whenever you want and make sure to always eat a lot late at night. Step two, eat sweets whenever you can because gluten free treats don’t present themselves often and you deserve them for the crazy schedule you uphold. Step three, give up any love you had of your physical body because it is not doing what you want – being sexy, being agile, being flexible, being comfortable.

In March, I went to the doctor for my annual exam and I was not surprised but disappointed to see that I had topped out at my highest weight in my lifetime. I sighed and continued to follow the same path I had been on. That harsh critic in the mirror said to me I wasn’t looking for love, especially body love, so keep on keeping on.

Then I called about my life insurance, a policy I had taken out years ago before I had Tin and is going to run out in a few years. The insurance agent told me that not necessarily my age, but my weight was too high to qualify for the same status I had before. Not only was I not the same, but two levels down was where he pegged me, right before you get to LOSER status. I told him I had packed on my COVID 19!

And still I struggled to care. And then one day after a long conversation with my friend about weight, I realized I was in a hole that only I could climb out of – I had gone to the other side and needed to cross back. Only you don’t go back the same way you came with weight loss. Oh it’s all sugarplums and lollipops on the journey to gaining weight, but it is the whirling blades on the way back.

I saw this dog sitting outside the yard he was supposed to be guarding. He was beside the the sign that warned of him. He acted like he didn’t even know his role, his place, or why he should be feared. My weight gain was similar, I sat outside my body watching the weight pile on thinking no one would notice, not even me. I realized it was me allowing the weight to accrue. I have been shocked out of my denial. And the first person who appeared is that harsh critic – how could you? how despicable? what is wrong with you?

To this critic I say get over yourself – I know what to do. I started a program last Monday to shed the unwanted pounds — my goal is to be at my fighting weight by summer just in time to take out a new insurance policy for my son. I’ll see all of y’all on the other side of this challenge.

Not your plans.

This was told to me one time in a community meeting – Follow your spirit, not your plans.

How many reinventions have I had?

Joan Didion said, “I can’t remember half the people I used to be.”

Reinvention is reinforcement against a world that is forever crumbling.

Everyone is rushing back to their lives, I don’t want to go. I want less cars on the road, less scheduled time, less pollution, less consumption, less of everything. And I have had to accept that means less of what I was striving for – less security, less money, less certainty.

When I lived in San Francisco, I went to see Jane Hirshfield read her poetry and I was gobsmacked. This is one of my favorites – I read it at my 40th birthday dinner:

Da Capo

By Jane Hirshfield

Take the used-up heart like a pebble
and throw it far out.

Soon there is nothing left.
Soon the last ripple exhausts itself
in the weeds.

Returning home, slice carrots, onions, celery.
Glaze them in oil before adding
the lentils, water, and herbs.

Then the roasted chestnuts, a little pepper, the salt.
Finish with goat cheese and parsley. Eat.

You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted.
Begin again the story of your life.

Do you know someone who has had a challenging life? You think why her and not him? We are all born with amnesia but more than likely this person was standing in line when they gave out assignments and she raised her hand and said, “I want to be challenged!” Perhaps her previous life she was like a house cat, sitting around waiting for something to happen.

But she decides to take on a bigger assignment with challenges that come large, come small, but always come and always stand out like a red eyed beast ready to dismantle with the swipe of a hand what she has just created.

Sound familiar?

Over two decades my life has not been about winning; it’s been about losing. Yes, I do believe I was the one in the front row saying “Ooooo Oooo” I’ll take that adventure when they were handing out assignments for the next incarnation. The life where there are way many epiphanies and ah ha moments, and too many times where that smug smile gets twisted and contorted into “Oh No Oh No” and then off to a new adventure.

A friend who is a social worker said there is a degree in social work that allows you to take classes on Saturdays. I said I’m interested. What? Well, why not? I’m no longer chasing the brass ring where I return to the financial comfort of a career – that expired – I spent the last nine years chasing that fantasy but there has been no magic portal opening up allowing me reentry. So I’m here to be of service. I believed it was the 100 Men Hall, but maybe it’s something else. As I said on a Zoom life coaching call the other day – I’m open, receptive, flexible.

This weekend, a friend of mine drove out to Bay Saint Louis to get out of New Orleans for a respite with her young son. She stayed with other friends here. She is part of a great love story that had a painful twist. The father of her son – the great love of her life – died of cancer without him ever seeing their child.

On my walk with Stella this morning, I listened to a meditation by a woman who spoke about Loving Kindness in Challenging Times. She spoke about how Love is often viewed as being in the hands of another — someone who could give it to us and who could also take it away from us.

My years of therapy with Ellen showed me a different view. When I worried after divorcing my husband I might not ever love again in that capacity, she said, “But Rachel, it is your own capacity for profound love that you experienced. It is within you, so you hold the key to love.”

That was 14 years ago when she said these words to me, and the truth is I have never loved again and I must admit I don’t know if I ever will. Yes, I do love my child, my friends, my family and even myself, but I am speaking about love with a romantic partner.

The meditation teacher was focused on agape love and she spoke of love as being an ability not a feeling. And despite what I said a paragraph earlier, her words gave me hope, because I know deep within lies the ability to love but maybe I’m short on the desire to love again.

I’ve been content to leave my own footprints in the sand, and every year this becomes more of who I am.

Even this pandemic has taken my yin yang with being an introvert/extrovert and ratcheted up the Introvert in me in a very pronounced way. I’ve had one too many friends call out for help because they are quarantined with their significant other. Hell, there are times I crowd myself out in my home. Perhaps the truth is I have no imagination for what love would look or feel like in my life now.

Yesterday, I witnessed the unprecedented – the price of oil dropped to negative $40. While oil price gyrations send shock waves throughout too many industries to name, let’s talk about what it means to me.

At the end of 2011, I was laid off from a company I helped build where I covered Global Media along with a wide array of other industries. When I left, two long-term clients came with me. Within a year, both left their companies which effectively canceled my contracts with them. I could not have predicted this: one had worked for his company for 27 years, the other 23 years.

In 2014, I began covering the Oil & Gas industry for a former editor/reporter of mine who had left the company before me. Six months into this contract the price of oil dropped from $85 to $40. I was able to keep the work but my rate was cut.

In the meantime, I sought other work, new careers, trained to become a facilitator and mediator. However, for four years, the O&G work put food on our table and kept us from food stamps (although some years we were close).

Then in 2018, with oil prices around $60, the price began to drop again, and by 2019, my O&G projects dried up completely. So I focused on a new business – a nonprofit in Mississippi.

Now in 2020, a pandemic hit and my new business is temporarily shuttered, potential new work I had been courting has been shelved. Then I got a call in April to work on some quick turn reporting again in the O&G industry – yes, prices were low, but most believed the industry had hit its bottom.

They were wrong.

Oil prices sunk to negative $40 a barrel yesterday. Unprecedented. What does the drop mean to me – chasing work has required me to constantly rise from the ashes. The small amount of work I had contracted a week ago vanished overnight. A part of me believes I just cannot rise one more time, so my daily work is to remember that I always have.

This often seems like the most difficult question to answer – whether it’s what do you want this day to be or what you do want your life to be.

World peace rolls off my tongue, but as to what Rachel wants, I’m often stumped.

Maybe I wanted this messy life, filled with love and beauty, trials and error, poetry and trash memes, friends who stay, friends who come and go, friends who leave, indelible lovers and lovers easily forgotten. Hot mess.

At one point, I would have said I wanted to be somebody important, maybe someone famous owing to a life of publishing literary wonders that explained multitudes. At another, I wanted a family – a passel of possum joeys – all huddled and cuddled in a king size bed. And in its recent iteration, I wanted more time and space to breathe and be (spoiler alert: I got it).

I have formed a habit of not wanting or wishing for a future I know nothing about, not in fear of disappointment, but only to leave myself receptive to wonder at what comes next. It’s never truly what I envision but often times it can be construed as what I wanted, only transformed into the unexpected, and always with a dash of are you kidding me?

Yesterday was the last night of Passover and I’m still eating matzo. This morning, I made my Earl Grey Lavender tea, broke a piece of egg matzo, and put some blackberry jam my friend Kim gave me for Easter. Yes, it’s all a mash up. I had something old – the bread of our affliction, I had something new – Kim’s blackberry jam, I ate it sitting by a pillow that was not necessarily borrowed – Jean gave it to me, and I’m blue.

Not blue in the way you might imagine. I’m blue because I’m watching Ozark by myself and this is a series that needs someone next to you so you can scream each time something really fucked up happens (spoiler alert: it happens a lot). I’m blue because I’m almost out of that jam Kim brought me. I’m blue because I keep saying I’m going to have my tea in my breakfast cup that I save for special occasions and I keep not getting it out of the cupboard even though I would definitely call this a special occasion. I’m blue because I truly missed our Passover seder this year and it was like pulling teeth to try to improvise with Tin on a night when I was just not feeling it and then I watched this Passover video and I cried and laughed the whole way through it.

I’m blue because I’m burying old pieces of myself. Facebook prompted me to have a fundraiser for my birthday and I did it. I arbitrarily picked $5000 for the Hall and before a week was out, I had raised it. So just as arbitrarily I ended it two weeks early. $5K would pay for months of no revenue. I told my friends who asked me to keep it going that I don’t need the next two weeks because I’ve finally learned all I need is what I need.

Oh, I have dreamed of money in the bank. Money saved. Money rolling in on a consistent basis. And all those dreams have been dashed for some nine years. Now, I dream of not wanting those things. I dream of peace of mind. I dream of this crazy thing that the pandemic has handed me on a silver platter – time. I dream of being loved and I am. I dream of helping others and in a small way I can.

Tomorrow morning, I will get down the breakfast cup. The cup and saucer I spotted in an antique store in San Francisco so many years ago and fell in love with and have rarely used because I don’t want it to break. Tomorrow I will bask in the fragility of my special cup and in the illusion that money in the bank brings security, happiness and certainty.