QUITTER

Once upon a time, I was a loser and a quitter.

I dropped out of art school when I noticed my peers graduating and getting work at laundromats and coffee shops and nowhere else. I wanted a career, not an expensive hobby.

I got fired–laid off, lost that job with no possibility to be re-hired–from the position of goldsmith by the person who apprenticed me because he could not afford to pay me and pay a decade of back taxes. It was him, not me, and we stayed friends.

I left the Chinese restaurant, my first waitressing job, when a position as pie-baker opened up at the diner across town. Being yelled at in Mandarin exhausted me, but baking five fruit and two cream pies before 7 am made me happy. I quit during the flood of ’93. My part of the kitchen was underwater. Cockroaches fleeing the water fell from the ceiling and into my meringue.

I quit painting miniatures and murals when the income needed to be more bread-and-butter than feast-and-famine. Those tiny birds on hollowed-out eggs made people so happy, and so did a painting of a house on the wall of the hallway of that house. Birds on eggs, houses in houses: the inside-outness still makes me smile.

I fled the tattoo shop when my boss’s wife thought I was The Other Woman and threw all of the potted plants in the waiting room at me. I loved those plants, and I took them with me on my way out of town.

I left the flower shop when my paychecks bounced so often that my bank would not accept them any more. I loved my co-workers and my boss, but I could not make peace with no one else getting paid if I stayed.

I quit the nursing program when my then-husband got cancer. I could not do clinicals and chemo with three children. He’s fine now. We are not together.

I stopped decorating wedding cakes when I learned that chronic mononucleosis was a real thing and that I had it. Food service and I broke up for good as a measure of public health.

I finished my undergrad degree and learned the fine art of reading rejection letters without tears. I was Educated, but my practical skill set and Sociology paired awkwardly. The coin shop where I worked offered a partnership and I accepted.

At a grad school fair at my university, I asked the women holding court at the Social Work info table what was most challenging about their program. Both responded at the same time, “The writing. You will write so many papers. You will, like, write really long papers in every class.” Hmm.

When I had just entering the Sociology program, I made an appointment with a professor to comb through my first ” really long paper”. I had not written a research paper in my life, if you can believe that. That professor skimmed all fifteen pages of the rough draft and told me that doing any more would be a waste of time. I was not writing at an undergrad level.

I was writing at a graduate level.

I didn’t think I could do all of college. One random professor’s comment about my writing told me something else, and he doesn’t know it. I need to send a thank you note. A much less random professor asked me what I would do if I could choose anything.

I graduated last summer with a Master’s in Social Work, and I am never ever ever going back to school, because this one was for me and not a “what the hell, why not?”. I am a therapist. I am this. I did not quit because my people rallied around me, held me up, scooted me out the proverbial door to my education and career. And I wrote all those papers.

Thank you.

STRANGE ME, INGRATE EDITION

I see a stranger when I catch myself in a mirror. Whose face is this, with the bones and veins so close to the surface? Whose legs are these, with knees round like grapefruits and thighs like wiffle ball bats? I am an anatomy lesson: here is the iliac crest, here is the sacrum, here is the solar plexus, count the vertebrae. If I’d landed in this body for a different reason, I might see myself as the unusual shape I was born to inhabit. Now, I’m insulted by my reflection.

In December, I learned that I had breast cancer. I have been numbingly furious at my body since that day. Betrayed, and ashamed at being sick again after a lifetime of too much of that. I am not alone. I need two hands to count friends and family living with cancer and working to escape it. Alone would be better.

In January, I thought that I might die sooner than later. The fury at maybe being forced to leave the front row seat of this beautiful life left me mute with rage. I still choke on the words that might help me find peace. I gag when I think of saying an angry word, because my cancer is gone and I should be relieved that I did not need radiation or chemo, with selfish selfish fury at my lack of gratitude.

This silent fury doesn’t speak in words. It makes me turn away from myself to keep from weeping out loud and scaring my dear loved ones. Away from myself is safer than crawling around inside and seeing my ugly angry heart and the failed attempts at finding my way back to me. I liked me and I miss me. Am I still me?

So, I am pecking and picking at ways to feel less like a stranger to this body and its harsh sharpness. Two pairs of jeans in an absurdly small size found after trying on every pair of pants in the store, peck peck. Three new soft long sweater dresses to smooth out the edges and to muffle the angles a little, peck peck. One constant train of self-talk to push away the distress of what if what if what if I look sick and strange now, forcing replacement of sick and strange with remembering my long history of being the kind of skinny that makes well-meaning people gently ask if I have eaten today or yesterday or the day before. The answer is always yes, I have eaten, and yes I will eat again soon, pick pick and finish the leftovers later.

Today I will sift through clothes to cobble together a little wardrobe that fits and circumvents the despair of putting on a favorite anything just to have it fall off or gape open where there used to be enough of me to fill those spaces.

The spaces fill up with the anger resentment betrayal fury rage fear and I hate it. I hate it for myself, and in myself, but I hate it more for the people who have to see it in their front row seats to my own life. It’s not fair to them. My spaces filled with ugly things don’t leave room to see the beautiful that must still be even if I can’t find it. That’s the work now, setting aside the choke of fury and betrayal to see what radiated goodness and awe before I broke.

I’m so sorry.