I had the first panic attack of my life late one night in the fall of 2004.
It had been a nasty hurricane season in Florida, with five strikes (four hurricanes and a strong tropical storm) in six weeks. We’d been without power, air conditioning, reliable plumbing, traffic lights, general infrastructure for over a month. A storm would hit, knock everything down, it’d take a week to get the lights back on.. and within a day or two, the next storm would knock everything down again.
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Every so often – not so much these days as it used to be – I find myself talking to someone just on the starting end of self-employment. Newbies are always cute. You see the younger version of yourself. They say and ask all the same things you used to say, and much of it boils down to a single question: how long before I can stop worrying about the day-to-day stuff?
And the answer, of course, is you never can. Stability is temporary, fleeting and often illusory. Clients go. Projects change. Checks arrive when they arrive. The bills relentlessly show up in a steady flood. Often everything doesn’t perfectly line up. And sometimes you have to think fast.
We had a moment like that this week.
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There are times I go back to 2009 in my head. I relive the same few days. Did I do the right things? Did I say everything I could have? Why didn’t I fight harder for myself? And Rob reminds me that I did everything I could, that I fought for myself the only way I could, that there isn’t anything I should’ve done differently. When I get nostalgic for teaching, I remind myself how bone-wearyingly tired I was at the end. Four years on, I still get tired thinking of it.
My weekends now are relaxing, peaceful. My time is, for the most part, my own. I can make appointments for any time of the day. I can have lunch with my husband. I can sleep until 10am, work in my pjs until 3pm, and eat cereal at noon. We can go on vacation any month of the year, for a length of time we determine. There are no papers to grade, conferences to attend, and completely incompetent administrators who behave out of spite. I can do interesting things and not have to worry about if today is the day I get the chop.
And so there is no real deep longing to be back in the classroom. This time of the year is always a reminder of who I used to be, who I no longer am, and who I have become.
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84 days until Kauai.
So for the last twenty years or so I’ve been reading a book. I started reading it somewhere around 1994, and have yet to finish it. It’s my white whale. One of them, anyway.
The book is Magister Ludi, by Hermann Hesse. It has barely a plot, is basically four hundred pages of prewar German existentialism, and I’ve never managed to get beyond about half of it. Every couple of years I take another swing at it, figuring that eventually I’ll either plow through and be free of it, or finally get the more sublime underlying message that scored it a Nobel in 1946. And every time I get about a hundred pages in and get distracted by some other book and back on the shelf it goes.
Been doing this now for almost half of my life, and now I’m doing it again.
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