Gdansk, Poland; ~8:30 am
Sometimes plans change. We can either respond to what our guts tell us to do or spend every moment fighting them. We either live with the internal turmoil or accept outer chaos. This year I have chosen the outer chaos.
When I got to Cork, it quickly became clear that the living situation would not be tenable for me at this point in my life. For starters, the address that my landlady had given me was incorrect and was in fact for another of her properties. I was to live in a suburban duplex with her 30 minutes outside of the city center. Now at first I tried to steel myself, to think that I should weather the initial discomfort, and at first I did. But then came the rest of the intolerable circumstances. My landlady, a good-natured old Irish woman, had very specific ideas about how I should spend my time and live my life. She seemed assume that my desire to leave the U.S. was an expression of some fundamental immaturity and lostness when for me it was the opposite: something I chose to do while feeling, as I have this year, at an all-time high of self-possession. There is that reaosn, the complex, and then there is the simple fact that I refuse, at 24 years old, to be told how to make a sandwhich or do my laundry. This will be unsurprising to anyone who knows me well.
After a few days I packed up my things, checked into a hotel, and booked a fight to come here. Ireland is maddeningly expensive. There was no chance of my finding other housing within my budget and I was hemorrhaging money on food for the few days I spent there. After a week here where I am comfortably independent and goods are pleasingly affordable, I intend to come home and, finally, settle into a life which I am not constantly threatening to leave.
To have gone to Brown, to have made friends with whom I made friends, has had a sort of dizzying effect on my psyche. After graduation, because of who I was dating at the time, I denied myself the truth I had known since about sophomore year which was that, although I was glad to go to such an elite school, I missed my friends and family back home and felt that I thrived under more comfortable circumstances. In reality, I have spent the majority of the 16 months since graduation in Springfield, but I have not liked to tell that to anyone, let alone myself. No, I like to talk about the ten countries I visited since then and about my plans to move or to travel for extended periods of time. In short, I like to talk about all of the ways I have set myself apart from that place and my plans to continue to do so. It is as if I cannot admit to my friends from school (or to the version of me who made friends with those people) that I am happy to forgo glamour and flash and remoteness, for comfort, love, and acceptance.
I am not saying that my European fantasy was all farce or even that the part of me that entertained moving to New York for so long was somehow wrong. No, I have enjoyed this time traveling. It has been deeply enriching for me personally and I have gotten quite a lot of work done on my book. And I am even proud of my ability to imagine living a life in a city where I do not want to live for the sake of someone I loved. What I am saying, although it is painfully cliché, is that I am tired of running away.
I moved back home to the Ozarks after graduating from Brown. I traveled with the woman I loved at the time because we could not agree on where we should live. When our relationship didn't work out, I clung to the version of myself that was in love with her and let it pull me away from the good life that was unfolding constantly before my eyes. Now I have decided that I want to go live that life.
I came here because she and I had discussed coming to Poland at the end of our long, meandering European journey last year and so I had already done some amount of travel preparation for this place and had it in my head that I would at some point make it here. We ended up going to Romania instead. Now, being in Poland alone on the trip we never took, I have had time to face the ghost of that relationship, the ghost of myself in that relationship, and to recognize the ways in which I have been allowing that person to make decisions for me. It is as if I am still trying to impress someone whose opinion of me no longer matters.
The dream of Europe for me has always been of a sophistication that was not accessible to me anywhere in the first 18 years of my life in the Midwest. This dream only strengthened during my time at Brown when I met the children of America's elite who had been floating around this charming continent their whole lives. Their clothes, the languages they spoke, and even their manners reflected a degree of European refinement that was entirely unknown to me and therefor irresistibly beguiling. I morphed to this image. I learned languages that would allow me to get around the continent. My wardrobe quickly began to reflect trends trickled down from fashion houses I couldn't afford. My speech began to be that of an American who was well-traveled. I brought this remoteness home with me and I continued to embody it in my constant declaration that I would soon be leaving.
Sometimes plans change and you can either accept the inner turmoil, the feeling that you are not right with yourself, or the outer chaos and have to report, to yet another old friend, that the everything you told them the last time you caught up has gone out the window and that you have an entirely new plan and that you yourself are entirely new again. Well this year I have chosen that feeling of being right with myself. I have been reinvented a hundred times. I have abandoned the stable career path I thought I might take, left the relationship that got me back on my feet after Luke's death, and spun myself in circles trying to figure out what should be the setting for all of my madness to unfold. Well, it seems like it's going to be the same one I keep coming back to. While the traveling is great for characters and plots, I get more real work done in that old, welcoming pastoral setting. And I get much better work done when I am not constantly fighting myself and trying to move every few months.
The author Zadie Smith says "You can either write good sentences or you can't. There is no 'writer's lifestyle'. All that matters is what you leave on the page." Well Zadie, it turns out you're right. I'm not Ernest Hemingway or Vladimir Nabokov. I can't stand to drink myself silly and get good work done and I'll never be able to afford to live in grand European hotels while I preen my manuscript.
I'm certainly not saying that I'm done traveling or that I am all of a sudden going to become a stable predictable, person. I literally started laughing as I wrote the last three words of that sentence. What I am saying is that I'm done letting that old life rule me and decide what I do. I am an Ozarks boy who worked hard and got himself into a good school where he met interesting people and had new experiences. Some of those relationships will be carried with me into this broad, open, wonderful life, but most won't. What I will carry with me, forever, is the knowledge that my life is entirely up to me. This is power and this is freedom. No one else's opinion, really, matters all that much. All that matters is that I am at peace with myself and that I am working towards my goals.
In a week I will be home in all of my old haunts saying again and again for the 500th time this year, with a big ole grin on my face, "sometimes plans change."