“I mean what does it really matter
You’re going to come now
Or you’re going to come later”
Joni Mitchell, Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire
After 80 miles of straightaway, the black highway curves gently, skimming past some no-account town, a BP insignia poking up beyond the hill, a cardboard sign that says someone is selling rabbits. The blue roof of a Walmart and a boarded up Pizza Hut I could buy at a REDUCED PRICE. And then the road rolls out again and there is nothing really to feed my hungry attention: flat, one-dimensional, cloudless iron sky; peaceful, sweet-faced dead doe on the side of the road. Fields of soy and alfalfa lacerated by gravel roads; billboard overflowing with the florid face of State Farm agent Bill Daniels; sales lot of mingling blue and green combines and tractors; tattered Trump banner flapping above a barbed wire fence: Take America Back!
I reach for my coffee and then remember I drained it miles ago, two or three or eight towns back. I poke at my phone, seeking company and distraction: music, a podcast, something, something, something. And then the familiar invasion of thoughts begins again, of what others have said or done. Of what I imagine I will say or do. And then an image of my father shortly before he died—he whose boyhood was framed by a landscape like this, not so many miles from here. I recall the surprising pink of his scalp through his thin white hair that last time, his cool forehead on my lips. And I am strafed by memories of other drives through this same long stretch of Midwest farmland. As a youngster, sometimes wretched with self-doubt and resentment. As a thirty or forty-something, hypnotized by audiobooks, first tapes and then cds—feminism, philosophy, Buddhism. A hungry ghost flying down the highway, craving knowledge and insight, on a quest for that handful of magic beans that would make it easier to be me.
I have always had a love-hate relationship to these roadtrips “home,” to the place in the dead-center of the country that made me, but to which I am also a stranger. The hours and hours of aloneness, an oscillation of solitude and solitary confinement. When I lived at the mercy of my chattering thoughts—as many of us do much of the time—five or eight or twelve hours alone in the car could be a harsh sentence. If we’re fortunate, we find a way to “zone out,” to achieve a numb sort of relief-state that we may even come think of as “meditative.” When we succumb to our thoughts, though, it can feel like a descent into madness. Brooding to the same dreary songs, obsessing over the same dead bullshit: What she said, what he did, what I meant. And, for me in those earlier years, recoiling in advance over what I might find at the end of my long, jittery journey. My mother’s self-destructive drama. My father’s apparent scrutiny and judgment. Some of the difficulties of my life circumstance were real enough, but sometimes my bubble of thinking rendered me impervious to ease and acceptance even as I craved it. At those times, I would not have recognized love even if it had reached over to brush the hair out of my eyes with perfect, aching tenderness.
Back then I spent much of these long drives ginning myself up. Retelling my stories of hardship, lack, insufficiency and victimization. Refining my script of how I had been misunderstood and maligned, of how hard things were for me. Looking back, I know I could not have been anyone other than that girl/woman on the road—I needed to be her—but I also regret the cruelty of suffering I inflicted on her. Those years of thrashing around in brackish unconsciousness, unable to tug myself to the shore of wakefulness. Not yet, not yet, not yet. Unwilling to fully acknowledge, let alone welcome, the gentle-strong hands that sometimes reached for me from the safety of the far riverbank. I was busy living a life of “normal” suffering, playing out a me-story to which I was devoted. Perversely, masochistically, I preferred—and, at some level, chose—to linger in my familiar nightmare rather than awaken into a dawn that I knew would demand self-reinvention. Some new way of being that would require removing the layers of anger and unworthiness that I wore like a ragged, but comfortable, cloak. Of course I recognize that my early material life circumstances shaped me into being her—and I can respect the constraints she was under—but there were also times when some sliver of who I was knew I had a choice. Moments of grace. When I got it. When I understood that I was more than that. When the soporific fog receded just enough for me to glimpse the way out of suffering. Mostly, though, my response was to burrow deeper into the mud like a frog in winter.
As I traverse this farmland these days—a mature person, a powerful woman, an individual whose life backdrop is one of peace rather than misery—it is still jarring sometimes to discover that I am untroubled and unafraid. Even as some of those familiar old thoughts creep up and linger around the softly focused edges of my awareness. Even as boredom taps me on the shoulder and invites me to rehash old dramas. Yes, there are moments when I still reincarnate as the one who feels she’s been thrown into the middle of a deep, violent river. Left to kick and thrash her way to the other side. But these days, when I permit myself to become her, the identity is lighter and less sticky. And so although I am able to feel the pull of the murky depths below, I rarely lose sight of the flashes of sunlight above. Yes, the roiling water still tears at my skin, and unwelcome thoughts may still rush in: “You are a gravity-bound human body and a weak swimmer to boot.” True enough. But such thoughts do not prevent my brave legs and arms from doing their swimming thing. While it may be in my nature as a human being to become lost in fathoms and miles of suffering, then, it is also my birthright to be able to choose and change, if this is my deepest intention. To grow ever more rooted into the true center of my identity. And it’s not as difficult as it sounds. For there have always been voices cheering me on from the far side of the river. And whenever I decide I am ready—some part of this is always up to me—I can simply take the strong hand that has been reaching for me all along, patiently waiting for me to tire of my played out romance with misery.
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