Saturday, February 26, 2022

The House in the Woods

I turn 39 this year, which means I'm edging ever closer to my midlife crisis. As Millennial nostalgia is now in high season and Gen Z is embracing trends from my own puberty (rude), I get to consider myself having Lived A Life and can start planning for the inevitable next phase—the crone years, the apocalypse maybe, or at least thinking about having a clean house. 

At the beginning of COVID, people were talking about the end of COVID as birthing a kinder, gentler, more community-oriented world. Two years later, as we stumble towards yet another checkpoint disguised as a finish line, it's harder to be assured that this kinder-gentler version of the world still yearns to be built. I have seen friends go into delusional wormholes about vaccines and mask mandates; I have seen Black people in America and my own communities rightly march in the street against police violence; I have cried, watching my son play in the our backyard, knowing that thousands of Indigenous children in this country were stolen and killed or allowed to die at school. As I write this, there is war in Ukraine, food prices in have shot up, and Canada is under the Emergency Act because protestors shut down the Canadian border with anti-science demands. It's a time, you guys. It is a time

Back in 2018, I had an appointment with a social worker, who listened to me for a while and then said, "Yeah, it doesn't actually sound like you have anxiety. It sounds like you're reacting appropriately to what's been happening in your life." She encouraged me to visualize a place of safety and security in my mind, one that I could visit any time I needed to, as an escape from my ongoing crises. This advice struck me as odd, since visualizing an escape is not usually productive. But I was into what my brain conjured up: a cottage in the woods, with a little garden and a trail down to the water's edge. 

I've long been fascinated with all the paths I could take but don't. Some other version of me is in a Master's program, or is a full-time freelance writer. There's probably a version who has three kids, or no kid; one that stuck it out in Toronto and one that never went there in the first place. There are versions of me with dogs, or short hair, or who still smoke and drink like a monster, or who went vegan in 2008, or who powerlift competitively, or who teach Nia, or traveled more, or who got divorced, or who told that guy about my feelings for him in 2010, or who never lived in co-op, or who still has those friends. There are so many ghosts out there: choices I made and didn't make. 

An aside: for many years, I wanted to be a gardener. Someone who could grow flowers, and, importantly, food. My paternal grandmother was the kind of gardener who grew corn in her backyard, and I admired that about her. But for most of my adult life, I didn't put much effort into keeping green things alive. Houseplants withered, outdoor garden space was nil, and so I just assumed that I wasn't much of a gardener. 

In 2020, like many people, I frantically put some seeds into potting soil in the spring, and was astonished when they actually sprouted. When I put them into the ground, they grew. I read about how to care for them and how to make them bear fruit. And several months later, we had a bounty of tomatoes and zucchini and pumpkins. 

It turned out, I could be a gardener, if I wanted it. If I tried. 

It turns out some paths are not permanently washed away. 

I keep thinking about the experiences I want to have in my life: are they a shopping list? Am I trying to become someone I'm not, or am I trying to expose the core of who I really am? When I look at lists of values, I think, "Well, these all sound pretty good!" and it takes me a while to drill down on what it means when I say I value, say, gratitude. 

And I also suspect my incipient midlife crisis could be both mild and deep: what I'm craving is beautiful landscapes, rest, creative time, and community. Some of those require a plane ticket and two weeks off; others require more serious work, a true deep dive into who am I and how I want to live out the back half of my life. (Side note: why does building true community feels exhausting and overwhelming at the best of times? In a post-pandemic world, when everyone's politics and personality defects have been on display for the better part of a year, it feels even more isolating to try to figure out how to create a web. And yet I feel the sort of loneliness that isn't met by a single friend or a partner—it's the craving for a network, a village, a circle. Why does that feel so weird and woo-woo and cringey to write about?)  

I know that the more I continue on as business as usual, the more time I spend on the work-kid-knit-cook-sleep-shower treadmill, the more entrenched I feel in this one version of myself. And I only get so much life to do it all. And I become more and more aware that those other versions are floating away, never to be born into being. 

What is the definition of a midlife crisis, and how do we meet it? Other than throwing seeds into the ground that have never sprouted before?

I keep thinking about that house in the woods. Sometimes it does look like a house in a thicket, with a path that leads to a stony beach and great tide-offerings of seaweed. Sometimes it looks like an apartment above a downtown shop, with tall windows and a tiny kitchen and bright white walls. Sometimes it's plane tickets and a beloved hand in mine. Sometimes it's an ecovillage or a yurt, a drinking tea in a shared kitchen, and dirt under my fingernails by dinnertime.

And sometimes it looks planting seeds in the earth, trying to expand who I am and who I could be. Growth, across the fields of my life.


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