Inspiration strikes within me at truly the most inopportune of times. When I moved to France 7.5 years ago, I started this blog as a way to document my burgeoning expatriate life. This has gone more or less by the wayside, as expatriate life slid nearly unnoticeably into normal life. What's the point in writing about normal life? There's nothing special in that, everyone's doing it. Apparently I just do it with wine, cheese, and croissants. (I'll tell you a secret, I've eaten about 5 croissants in the last 5 years. French carbs count just as much as American carbs). So I've stopped writing, stopped noticing the little culture shock moments, stopped reaching into the depths of my discomfort. I'm established enough now that my greatest source of culture shock usually comes when I go back to the US.
Writing takes a non-narrative form for me these days, in any case. Writing emails to colleagues, writing lesson plans, and the big one: writing my thesis. Inspiration struck me at the worst moment yesterday. In the midst of leisurely sipping my Sunday morning French press, a clenched fist suddenly gripped me by the gut and told me to STOP and go write a presentation. It's about my research, which I'm truly passionate about, but ughhhhh, I have to write in academic-ese, and it honestly makes me feel queasy. I feel hemmed in by the structured blowhard language of academia. Little room for narrative, and an expectation for a certain vocabulary that just makes me want to sink into the ground and pull a rock over my head. Still, I persevered and banged out that presentation in no time flat, excitedly turning to my ever-patient husband and exclaiming entirely out-of-context points I was making, conclusions I was drawing. But at the end of 1000 words, I felt uneasy. For one thing, it's terrifying to make claims and then plant yourself in front of an audience and purport to know anything about anything. But mostly, I've felt this need to express myself that I much too often push to the back of my mind for fear of letting go of the control I so tightly grasp every waking moment. So when inspiration struck tonight (an hour before I should go to bed on the eve of an early morning), and I felt an unearthly force pulling me towards the keyboard, I obeyed. Write, write, it whispered. NOW. So I'm writing.
I've been feeling that uneasiness pretty frequently lately. Every second of my life is usually structured, controlled, planned. If I had my way, every second of your life would be according to my structure, control, plan. When I feel like I'm going to start spiraling (which is more often than I like to admit), I open my Google calendar app and stare at all my obligations for the coming day, week, month. It soothes me to orient myself in my own personal narrative. I obsess over small details, other people's forgetfulness plagues me, inattention, forgotten responses, last-minute nonchalance all chafe at my need for the plan to be executed as was agreed upon. Even if no one actually agreed. I am what you might call the freakiest of control freaks. (I am also a highly anxious introvert, so seeing a notification for that agreed-upon email response also makes me slightly nauseous.)
All that need for control can also tend to give one angina. So I've developed mechanisms over the years to deal. It used to be that I called my Dad in blubbering tears ranting that my whole world was ending because of this, that, and the other thing having gone off the rails. And I mean, I called my Dad, because I was in college and still could. not. deal. So my ever-wise Dad finally told me senior year, as lovingly as possible, to cut that shit out. I had to learn to develop healthier coping mechanisms. All this came at an unfortunate time, at the end of college, more years ago than is seemly for a lady to count (11 years, there I counted). I studied music in college, I'm a musician down to my littlest molecules. The creation of music had been my inborn coping mechanism. When I was a kid, even a teenager, I never considered this fact at any greater scale than just what I had to do in my day to day. I had to learn fingerings and bowings, then I had to learn and memorize texts. I never had stage fright because as a consummate control freak, I learned my music so inside and out that I never even offered to perform if I wasn't 1000% ready. Looking back, I probably missed a lot of opportunities, not because of any unwillingness to present any less than my very best, but because of my abject terror of making a fool of myself in a public space. But I loved it. I loved performing, relishing the harmonies, the sweet progressions, the subtle taste of French vowels, the crispness of German. I loved creating a narrative for myself to help memorize the words. I was implicated in the experience, nothing less than my whole body had to be fully present in order to get on a stage and convince an audience that they too were watching the sun rise over a misty lake on a cool August morning...
Anyway, once college was over, that was pretty much it for the music making. My creative outlet had evaporated. Obviously I can open my mouth at any time and sing, but it's not the same.
Time passed. I had a brief stint in corporate America that dissatisfied me to distraction. I made the foolhardy decision to move to a foreign country where I barely spoke the language and had zero job prospects. But it all fell into place. Jobs, apartments, degrees, marriage. And all of sudden, I look at myself in the mirror, and I'm... not young.
You know how when people are trying to get to know someone new they might ask, oh, what kind of music do you listen to? I always kind of shrug and vaguely say, "classical music," knowing full well that besides middle to late Beethoven, I don't particularly like the classical period, but it's the easiest term to convey what my tastes are. People often assume I like opera too since I'm a singer. I don't. Honestly it bores me to tears. All that said, though, I have to admit that I rarely listen to any music at all. I definitely don't listen to music past about 1950. I horrified my friends a few weeks ago by admitting that I listen to... podcasts... when I work out. But I don't—can't—listen to the music I love if I want to make it through the day. That has become my unfortunate coping mechanism now that I don't need to call my Dad in tears every other week. I've found other creative outlets (cooking, and do you even know me? of course knitting), but my first love, my first identity has been left neglected, nearly abandoned.
So when I stare at myself in the mirror, finding new cracks and crevices, new little spots and folds, when I tell myself to take a walk and cool down from something that angered me and would have sent me spiraling 11 years ago, when I feel like an absolute fraud, even when I think I have a good idea, I'm constantly pulling further and further away from that 21-year-old kid who was just starting to realize that she didn't know everything. I have become a different version of myself. A version who no longer listens to the music I love because it's just too difficult. It brings me back to a warm, light, cozy childhood. It brings me back to a home that no longer exists. To versions of my parents who no longer live there. To the warm patch of sunlight that streamed into my window deep in mid-winter, where I'd perch on Sundays and finish my homework while taking in that pervading, but not-yet-known-to-be-precious scent of Mom's sauce cooking. Back to the version of me that only worried about the grade I would get on the math test, who only worried about if my crush would talk to me the next day, who only wanted to get that solo in the next concert. That version who had untold possibilities in front of her, youth, foolhardiness, something unstoppable, but very often something stopping her. That music brings me back to sitting on the bus, alone, with only my Discman for company and protection. Listening to the same violin concerto CD every single afternoon for an entire year. Warding off any attacks from bullies. Cocooning me in that sacred intimacy, allowing me safe passage from uncertainty to home.
Home.
That music transports me to a version of myself who wanted only to please, to do the best, not to be the best, but just be allowed to shine in the brightest way I knew how. A version of myself that I didn't know or appreciate at the time, who wouldn't know me now. It's not that anything about my current version has it especially hard, but I'm a replacement of myself all the same.
Now, I find myself with an armor pulled over me. I'm wise enough now not to let that armor get pierced very often. So I can't listen to my music. I write academic papers so I don't have to try and potentially fail at writing what I would truly love to do, personal narrative, essays. I shield myself in organization and order so I don't fall apart at the seams under the minute-by-minute realization that I cannot go back.
There is a bittersweet pain in getting older. It's not the pain of finding wrinkles or gray hairs. It's the discovery that 10 years ago, instead of being a little kid, you were a full adult. It's the mix of awe and horror and heart-bursting love that your childhood best friend is now a mother. It's not the regret of lost time or decisions not made or paths not taken. It's something subtler, more forlorn, something that makes me stop in my tracks, arrest my carefully laid plans, and ruminate on who I am as a person, and what has made me that way.
And I turn to my first coping mechanism for just a moment. I listen to my music. I can reach deep back inside myself, reach across that chasm of years seeking to caress, to hold, to embrace that small, forgotten version of myself that I still am. Despite myself. Because of myself.
