The Future, the Present, the Past
When people ask what’s been keeping me busy these days, I stare at them in mild confusion, while my mind attempts to grasp which month it is. May? June?? That can’t be right—wasn’t it just February?
Though it feels like it must be a fluke of time and space, I’ve just finished my third semester of grad school. How is that possible? Wasn’t I just getting started? How have Michael and I been in Colorado for an entire year? What is time???
I’ve spent the better part of the past two years working toward a Master’s of Fine Arts (MFA) in Nonfiction, and I’m on track to present my creative thesis and graduate in January. Getting my MFA (“writing school,” as one of my advisors calls it) has kept me busy, but with work that presents itself as leisure. For me, grad school looks like sitting on the back porch in my pajamas at ten am, sipping coffee and writing in a composition book. It looks like hours in my craft lab (I didn’t like the sound of “office”) surrounded by half-drained mugs of tea, sputtering candles, stacks of old journals. It looks like taking breaks to watercolor or sometimes to cry.
At an online conference I attended in March, I heard someone describe memoir-writing as a form of necromancy. I spend my days in a basement interrogating ghosts. But at the end of the day, I come up the stairs into the unmediated daylight and I recall that the same people whose former selves populate my days and haunt my imagination don’t actually live in my basement. They’re not metaphysically confined to my journals: they’re human beings who continue to create new stories for themselves.
In the song Unsung Psalm, Tracy Chapman asks, “Do you live for the future, the present, the past?”
Ultimately, I want the project I’m working on to point the future. I don’t want my present life to be cannibalized by the past; I’m writing all of this so that I can ease out of the clutches of the past and make new choices.
Michael and I moved to Boulder last summer, and throughout the winter, I struggled to feel like I was really here, in the present, in a way that mattered. My grad school program is remote, all my writing groups are online. Everywhere I go in this town I seem to be confronted with more ghosts: the liquor store where I work shares the plaza where I used to go for lunch after church when I was fifteen. People I haven’t thought of since we graduated high school together come through my checkout lane to buy craft beer or vodka. Last week I sold college-graduation champagne to the father of a girl I used to mentor, though he didn’t recognize me underneath my mask. Moving back to Boulder, in some ways, felt like taking up residence inside another one of my journals.
But I want to be involved with my present and future in this place, not just my past.
I’ve spent the past few months choosing to invest here, to make choices that will help me feel rooted and present. My mom and I bought flowers for the yard. I started dancing again—nothing else brings me to life the way dancing does. In addition to my hours at the liquor store, I picked up a weekly shift as a work-share farmer at a local CSA, where I get to contribute to regenerative agriculture and connect with the land. For my efforts, I’m paid in a weekly allotment of biodynamic vegetables.
And I’m realizing that this is exactly the life I’ve wanted to build for myself: balanced, creative, restorative. I have time for therapy and spiritual direction and to watch the new Obi-Wan Kenobi series with Michael. My life involves tea and dancing and sitting on porches, and a sense of self-worth not drawn from a title.
I’m not used to how good all of this feels. I mistrust the ease, figuring it must precede a darker, tumultuous season—and I know I run the risk of subconscious self-sabotage to make circumstances fit my expectations. I told my therapist that everything seems pleasant and stable right now, but I’m nervous for the summer: I’m about to go to my school residency, ten days out of town, and then July and August are booked full of visitors, a rotating cast of houseguests in the basement, with a camping trip squeezed over a weekend somewhere. I told her that I was worried that people might not respect my time. But the longer we talked about it, I realized that it wasn't about the other people at all. I felt threatened by my own temptation to people-please, my compulsive desire to be everything to other people at the expense of myself.
This is the life I want, and protecting it is a matter of valuing it. For so long I was passive about my desires. I put off going to grad school because I figured I couldn’t just go do the thing I wanted, as if wanting it wasn’t a good enough reason, as if “wanting it” was a deterrent instead of a reason to go.
The key to protecting my rhythms this summer is to value them, to know that because I love something is a good enough reason to prioritize it.
