In Need of a Patron Saint.

I have been having a few difficult days.

Only in my head though.

It is a kind of vicious irony. For so long one of the only things I knew I really wanted was to get into an MFA program. AND I DID IT! I am in one and it is a good one and it is in Portland and that is awesome and - therefore - I am awesome.

But being here has been hard. It is hard to move very far away to a very different place and to do it alone. The difficulty is compounded by the fact that I am someone who has had to restart his life more than once. Turn-it-off-and-turn-it-back-on. For some strange reason, I feel like that is what I am doing here right now.

I heard a TED Talk the other day with a writer named Lidia Yuknavitch and she was reflecting on her success - or lack thereof - over the course of her life and she said something like, “How many times I have had to reinvent myself from the ruins on my choices …” and because I was in a sour and blue Hamlet sort of mood I thought to myself, “You tell ‘em sister. I know what you mean.”

It occurred to me almost right away though how much of a self-involved idiot I am. From the back of my brain came the voice of that part of me that actually has goals and stuff and it said, “You are not here all sad and lonely because of the ruin of your choices, you dumb shit. You are here because you are one of the relatively small percentage of people who got accepted to one of these things. Of course you are feel isolated, you don’t know anyone in this state and you have been here less than a month. Stop being such a self-pitying jag-off.”

I had to concede that all of those were good points.

Now, that does not mean that the clouds parted and the shown down upon my face and I smiled. Let’s be clear, much of my difficulty is external. To make a long story short - and say it with me if you have heard this one before - : there is never enough money.

I am not starving (yet), but I’ve had constant struggles with the admissions, housing, and financial aid offices, I have not yet been able to find a job, I feel like the other people in my program have figured all this stuff out already (although objectively most of them clearly have not), I’m kind of pissed that this program has not (thus far) given me the support (financial, emotional, or professional) that I was expecting, and - because I am given to flights of geopolitical grandeur - I look at these problems and at most of the chapters of my life and see that the source of most of my life stress has been money - just normal fucking money - and how the hell does it make any sense to build a society where such a thing could be true?

A couple of years ago, when I was in a similar predicament while getting my MA, I tweeted, “This starving artist thing looked a lot better on paper.”

On top of everything else, I had a terrible and nasty cold about two weeks ago (it knocked me on my ass for several days) and I just have not been able to kick the sniffles and the cough. So it has been two weeks now that I have been some amount of sick.

There should be a patron saint I can pray to about these things.

I walk around downtown Portland when I need to clear my head and downtown Portland is full of homeless people. They are just all over the place. Recently I had a conversation with a native Portlander who was complaining about the population boom of homeless people and he said, “I hate them. I just hate the homeless everywhere.” And he explained why and I guess I could understand where he was coming from, but I do not hate them, in fact when I wander around, they make me bashful and a little afraid because I think about how easily I could become one f them. There is some hyperbole to this, but not much. I may not be living on the knife edge of poverty, but I live close enough to it that I can peer over the edge.

So like I said, this starving artist thing looked better on paper.

I know that this raincloud I feel like I’m living under is a combination of being alone in a distant place, being somewhat disappointed by the reality of my program (as opposed to the fantasy land I’d imagined it to be), worrying about money every third thought, and then feeling generally as though my life has been a series of violent, disaster-averting hairpin turns rather than a steady and progressive movement forward.    

Maybe it is all of us, or maybe it is just me, but I have this thorough feeling of un-accomplishment. Of disappointment in myself for all of the things I have wanted to do but been unable to do, so far. This is different than imposter syndrome (which everyone loves to talk about now). It is just run-of-the-mill disappointment. So common it is barely even worth commenting upon, which is kind of heartbreaking in its own way.

Now all that being said, there are cures for all of these ailments. Obviously perspective is one (I’ve been here only about a month and I should chill the fuck out about rainclouds and disappointment). Another is exertion (a week from now I should be able to start running again and until then I should knuckle down and do all this schoolwork instead of feeling sorry for myself). Attitude is probably the final cure for what ails me (Yes life can be difficult sometimes, but feeling sorry for yourself just makes it harder. So turn that frown upside down, asshole).

Anyway, I am going to go do stuff now while attempting to maintain a positive attitude.

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