I'm swearing off "fresh starts"

and jumping right into the messy middle this time.

Often my energy comes back like a light bulb has been switched on, and I am left blinking and bewildered. But then I squint over my shoulder and discover all that anxiety actually had a source.¹ I look back and suddenly see with clarity that there have in fact been some big fucking boulders in my path. And it’s not that I didn’t see each boulder as I approached and climbed it, but somehow I didn’t put it together that this path has been full of them for months. For years.

On the Appalachian Trail, a hiking path that stretches from Georgia to Maine, the part that passes through Pennsylvania (where I live) is known as Rocksylvania because the path is fraught with fields of boulders and jutting rock walls and slick stone slabs. Of course, Rockslyvania is notorious—every AT through hiker has heard the lore and is, in principle at least, prepared.

I’m never prepared. I can never seem to see the rocky path except in retrospect. In recent months it’s been multiple big-project deadlines, stressful family situations and obligations, mundane illnesses, piling up one after the other. And of course, stretching back even further: the surprise heart failure diagnosis, the extreme fatigue, the tests, the surgeries. In retrospect, it forms an obvious years-long uphill path full of switchbacks and swamps and fallen trees; but starting out, the mountain was shrouded in fog and I had no idea what lay ahead. I’m like the goldfish for whom the castle is new every time.

One recent morning, that lightbulb flipped on: I woke to the unusual and long-forgotten sensation of being without anxiety squeezing like a thick snake around my torso, a not-quite-a-panic-attack sort of anxiety that leaves me slightly nauseous and feeling like I can’t take a deep breath. That morning, I stretched and wiggled my toes in the sunlight streaming through the window and looked into the future and saw—nothing, blessed nothing—for weeks and weeks.

I texted a friend and they texted back, “Do you feel so free?”

I’ve always loved “new beginnings”—the office-supply-store-new-notebook-and-pens freshness of it all. My life used to have so many of them, and the anticipation of the next one carried me along: the back-to-school/summer break cycle of the academic year; the liturgical seasons of Advent and Lent offering built-in contemplation and ritual; and of course, the shiney hopefulness of the New Year as the calendar turned yet again.

The truth is, though, I’ve mostly loved the idea of fresh starts, the anticipation, the it-will-be-different-this-timeness of the next one on the horizon. The reality was usually far less satisfying, as each new threshold was crossed by the same old me.

It turns out it was the feeling of being me that I wanted to leave behind, as though I could go to Staples and buy a whole new atmospheric strata that I could wrap around myself, but this time with more sunshine and clearer air. But just like the earth’s atmosphere clings to it no matter how fast it spins and speeds around and through the universe, that feeling of being me stuck with me—like the mess floating around Pig Pen in the Charlie Brown cartoons. But still, I would get lulled into the hope of it all over and over, multiple times a year, for years on end.

And this time, as I wiggled my toes in the sunshine, I almost did it again. I thought: I’m going to tackle the mess in my study. (I ought to know by now that using violent American football metaphors to describe my sunny new plans should always give me pause.)

The first thing I did was make a list so I could put things in manageable chunks and prioritize to make sure I did things in the right order. This is how we’re meant to get shit done, right? I had the opportunity here of a fresh start, a blank slate, and I was loath to squander it! After all, who ever knows how long I will feel this good?

And my study, my beloved green study, it’s become such a mess. As I sat with my notebook poised to make my list, I was suddenly stunned by the mess of it.

see?

In truth, I have been feeling stunned by the mess of my whole house, how unlovely it’s become, as though no one has truly lived here for a long time. There are, of course, remnants of loveliness, hints, ephemera, pointing at what was planned, and the hopes and dreams of making this a home, a creative community hub.

But six years later, it still doesn’t feel like that.

I thought that by now, when I looked back, what I would see was myself creating and curating and making art out of the canvas of my rooms and my gardens. I thought by now my home would be a haven of loveliness, a place where my shoulders go down, like they do instantly in a forest or at the sea. Instead, as I look around, it feels like the aftermath of a natural disaster, the detritus left as the floodwaters recede, logjams of stuff that doesn’t go together and that is no longer fit for purpose, littering every surface, every corner, ever drawer and cubby.

Suddenly my fresh start didn’t seem so fresh. My list was so dreary and methodical, so joyless and plodding, and in the few short minutes it had taken me to write everything down I felt the creeping tendrils of anxiety wrapping themselves around me as a new flood of overwhelm threatened to crash through … and I just said—

No!

No no no no noooooo!

I flipped a page in my notebook and remembered back to the last time I felt really free and creative, back to a time when I got lost in the flow of all the new ideas rushing into my head, to a time when I fearlessly rushed headlong into them. It was only a few years, to be honest, between the apocalypse of the divorce and the catastrophe of heart failure. But I remember. I wrote in my journal about how “I found a new way, a spirally/messy way, and I threw myself into that mess, embraced that mess, a mess where I was always in the middle—in middle age, in the middle of so many projects all at once, and finishing shit wasn’t the point—making, exploring, learning, drawing, having visions and most of all sharing it all with the world—that was the point.”

I have felt for far too long now frozen, indecisive, agonizing about the “right” order of things, demanding of myself that I start acting like a grown up, deeply afraid of the shame of starting something new and failing, abandoning yet another project, terrified that I’ve had all my good ideas, that my generative, creative period is over. I have slipped back into linear time as my metaphor, back into the demands of compulsory executive functioning, back into the expectation of focused, responsible productivity. I have exercised so much damn self control and it Has. Not. Worked. It has not made me happier, more financially secure, more productive, or less full of anxiety and shame.

So this is where the soft underbelly of Spiral Time has brought me—it’s brought me back to my fucking senses! It has brought me back around, almost to the same sad, stuck, shame-filled place…

Except I’m not in the same place. By the time I had written my way through all of this in my journal and snapped it shut, I was wiggling my toes again in delight at the possibilities for all the spirally loveliness ahead of me as I jump right into the messy middle.

1. This isn’t always the case—sometimes there is simply no rhyme or reason to the “generalized” nature of my anxiety, which then slimes into depression, because being that anxious all the time about nothing in particular is really fucking depressing. But that sort of swamp of anxiety and depression doesn’t usually click off like a lightbulb. I look over my shoulder and see nothing obvious, just a muddy uphill path that has slowly plateaued and dried out. Seemingly inexplicably. Usually on account of medication. But I digress…