The morning after I saw a heart in the sky, I didn’t stagger onto the train half-awake, music pumping into my headphones and thumb poking relentlessly at the screen of my phone. Instead, I hopped on the train like a third-grader going on a field trip to the dinosaur museum and proceeded to smash my face against the glass for the entire ride into San Francisco.

I expected to discover something artsy and obvious, like a big fat heart hanging from a towering crane parked in the middle of a field, for instance, just swaying on its tether in the gentle breeze above a scraggly field, poignant in its rusty and bleak surroundings, and sometimes I have an overactive imagination.

But I saw no heart whatsoever. Not that morning, and not the next morning, and not that week, even when I declared that blinking was for pussies and redoubled my efforts.

I wasn’t disappointed, though. If anything, I respected the sky-heart all the more. Oh, sky-heart. You saucy minx.

Even if it never happened again, and even if I would have to forever live with the suspicion that there had been no sky-heart at all and I had just suffered some sort of ominous brain bleed, the fact was that I had been graced with sweet neon love from the sky. Somehow, it seemed like a shame to waste that experience, as brief as it was.

Somehow, it felt like my turn.

So, in honor of Sky-Heart, I decided to dedicate myself to the sort of observation usually reserved for much younger people. I had grown up, which meant I had become a natural survivor who only looked at what I needed, navigating my way from known landmark to known landmark in an efficient but intellectually impoverished display of economical instinct. I decided to work counterintuitively, to purposely seek out anything and everything I could find that was utterly irrelevant to me personally. I didn’t know exactly what I might gain from this, but that was sort of the point: to cast a wide net and find exactly what I could never expect. It might take a while, I thought, to uncover my next Sky-Heart. But did I really have anything better to do?

I promised myself I would be patient, but as it turns out, I didn’t have to. The payoff was pretty much immediate.

Every day, I walk to the train station. Every day, I turn right to walk onto the platform, where I then stand with my feet planted on the concrete, facing the tracks, straining for any sight of the train because, judging from the fact that everyone else is also doing it, it will show up faster that way. That’s how we do things in California: we run trains on willpower, to cut down on the greenhouse gases.

Logically, if I stood there facing something, that meant my back was turned to something else (and, at that time of year, that something would be cloaked in darkness by the time I returned). You would think this would have occurred to me, and you would think that at some point I might have felt some curiosity as to what the hell was behind me. But for months, I had never once turned around. I had preferred, instead, to stare down a set of train tracks in order to witness the arrival of a locomotive traveling down a set path. I had chosen, every single morning, to focus my attention on the most predictable thing in my existence.

Note to self: that thing runs ON RAILS, okay? What’s about to happen here is really not going to blow your mind. You know you’re mortal, right? Seconds and minutes and hours, just pouring down the drain? And this is still how you’re going to spend your time? Just checking.

The new me, the one who received valentines from the ether, turned around. And … holy shit, you guys. The entire time, THIS had been happening right behind me:

What on earth.

Apparently, every morning, I had been pointedly and rudely ignoring Abe Lincoln rocking formalwear while … racing a locomotive across the desert? HELL YES. (It actually isn’t Abe Lincoln, which explains why Google searches like “Abe Lincoln racing gold train” and “Abe Lincoln badass motherfucker locomotive” did not yield any insights.)

And who is the shadowy villain that angry pseudo Abe Lincoln is racing? ZOOM! ENHANCE!

Is that … an evil turtleneck? You show that pretentious art-gallery owner who’s boss, Abe!

It is humbling to realize that every day, I can stand twenty feet from a gigantic, vivid, super-sweet mural of a drag-racing Abe Lincoln doppelganger and have no idea it even exists. Humbling, and damning. I was starting to realize how embarrassingly self-absorbed and pragmatic I had become in the name of saving myself some minuscule amount of energy in my daily life. I had made a lifestyle out of denying myself that magical moment of surprise in which we are knocked deliciously off-kilter by some unique little facet of reality, that moment in which we gain something that costs us nothing and will last forever.

But I was determined to do things differently from now on. I would do Sky-Heart proud.

Everything only got better from there.

Here is the thing I took forever to realize about happiness: It will never be the only thing I want. Not even close.

Choosing happiness instead of those other things can be startlingly difficult and visceral work. Sometimes, I will suffer in the name of happiness. Sometimes, as counterintuitive as it might initially seem, that suffering is not only appropriate, but the only way.

Discipline is possibly the most wildly underrated facet of happiness there is, along with a very healthy respect for cause and effect. This is why I will always advocate sports to even the most uncoordinated nerdlings: They will teach you to suffer with a clear head, and they will teach you that your actions impact your reality. Your actions — not your thoughts, or wishes, or fantasies. They teach you to survive the plateau, that thankless realm where you work and work and work and get nothing in return for weeks or months before suddenly shooting forward out of the invisible cannon you’ve been unknowingly building all along.

How can anyone stand in a universe powered by physics and consider happiness to be an intellectual pursuit? Happiness is a physical battle, right down to sitting on your hands to keep them from feeding you a cupcake or biting your cheeks to keep yourself from getting into that same old argument with someone who isn’t worth it.

When I moved to California, I had entered a relationship that wasn’t going to work if I wasn’t healthy. So, for the sake of my relationship, I stopped running from certain financial realities and health concerns that were all too easy to ignore when no one was counting on me. I turned around to face them, and I decided to fix it. I did this by slashing spending down to a level that no one thinks they can survive — to a level that would hold my social life hostage for a while — and by signing on for a job that would give me health insurance and a lot of other career bonuses.

I knew that job would annihilate my well-being for a while, and I was right. I spent months feeling completely incompetent, enduring correction on mistake after mistake, working late every night. I skipped my lunch breaks. I worked weekends. I mourned the freedom I had felt as a freelancer. I shoved cheap, fast, obscenely crappy food into my face and watched the number tick upward on the scale, praying that I’d eventually be able to pull up from the free fall I was putting my body through. I didn’t make friends. I didn’t go out. I didn’t buy pretty things. I scarcely bought anything at all.

I promised myself that I could quit in a year if I still hated it. I ignored the fact that a year felt impossible.

Falling into bed was my favorite part of the day, because it meant I had survived another one without, you know, bursting into tears or screaming myself hoarse or anything.

It sucked. Really fucking hard. And knowing that this was the right thing, that this misery was what I needed, did not make it any better at all.

The thought I had most often was, It’s a good thing I’ve learned to not give a crap how I feel. Because that’s what people want you to do: to listen to your feelings, to keep yourself in a state of constant bliss. If you hate your life right now, if you are sick to death of your current reality and feel as if you’re forcing it down like a barium shake, you’re obviously doing it wrong. Except: I don’t know any successful people who don’t give themselves a little hell once in a while, who don’t know the feel of their own boots against their throats.

Anyone who tells you that it isn’t going to be hard work, that it isn’t going to hurt, that it isn’t going to cost you dearly, probably just really wants to believe that themselves. I can’t really say I blame them.

We all have our limits, of course, and a few weeks before it showed up in the sky, I was reaching mine. My thoughts were darkening toward What’s the point, anyway? and my fatigue was starting to resemble its more dangerous relative, despair. I was at the highest weight of my life — a perfectly healthy weight in medical terms, but awkward and uncomfortable and really kind of lumpy on someone with my small frame. I felt like a walking exercise in futility.

Sometimes, you can hate a plateau so much that you beat it out of spite. Hatred can become triumph. Pain can become gratitude. That conversion is the most magical thing in the world. I heartily recommend it.

It’s a feat of circumstance that I saw it at all. Once you’re mired enough in depression to make the truly epic mistake of pitying yourself, you start to perpetuate it. You keep your head down, trudge along in your sad little patterns. You forget why you’re here or how to get back home. Your calculated suffering is forgotten in favor of mindless habitual suffering even after you’ve mastered whatever you originally intended to master. I had long become one of those people who clambers onto the train, plops into my seat, and stares at my cell phone in search of some kind of consolation prize. I had made the same foolish mistake that just about all unhappy people make: I had stopped paying attention.

For whatever reason, though, I did glance upward through the train window at just the right time, and there it was: a big illuminated red heart, just floating there in the night sky, just for as long as it takes to inhale a startled breath, before it disappeared.

I blinked at the dark window as if I’d just woken up from something. When you do the same thing over and over again every morning and every night, you stop expecting the world to have anything very interesting to offer you.

We had long left the city; I couldn’t think of a reason it would be there or what it might be hanging from way out here. I’m not a spiritual person, but it felt like a reminder of something I had forgotten: In just about every corner of the world, little gifts await those who keep their eyes open.

I didn’t know who had put it there or whether it had been there the entire time. But the idea of it living up there without my knowledge, and the possibilities that suggested, pleased me enormously. Maybe it beamed its unconditional affection at me for months on end while I sat oblivious. Maybe it had been dark before, hanging invisibly over my head, awaiting some mysterious occasion.

I decided to look for it again, to see whether I could solve its mystery. And just like that, with this solitary tiny mission, I had something to look forward to.

I spent almost the entire year before that in relative unhappiness. I had nuked my entire life flat and moved to California with a guy I had known for four weeks. I did this because I didn’t think it was a mistake, because my instincts told me to jump.

It wasn’t a mistake. But oh, starting over has its price.

I knew it would; I still remember the last time, years ago now, that I moved to a city where I didn’t know anyone but the man I had arrived with — how I became convinced I had wrecked my life, how I wept almost daily in the bathtub out of loneliness and fear. I remember how I longed for some kind of source of familiar comfort in my own life, some carved-out nook to curl up in, and had found nothing. You do eventually find some beginning point to chip away at, and what you unearth will be nothing less than all-encompassing revelation, but I hadn’t known that the first time.

No friends. No hobbies. No rest. No time for anything amid the tsunami of romantic and professional transition, with those same old reliable instincts telling me to respect the exhaustion permeating my bones, to bide my time on moving forward. I bore it as patiently as I could. If I have cultivated any form of discipline over the course of my life, it’s the patience to endure the desolate landscape of in-between, where there isn’t much air and very little to grab onto.

I’ve learned not to flinch away from the suspense, not to give in to the temptation to just grab a story by the arm so I can make something happen already.

People have gotten entire academic degrees just to make something happen. People have entered marriages, had babies, and gotten divorces just to make something happen. So much of the rhetoric of our culture is built around going out there and making something happen that I sometimes forget I’m not my own personal deity, a mistake for which I have paid dearly.

So I waited. I met the train every morning, rode into the city, detrained in an orderly fashion on the other end, waited for the crosswalk man to light up a few times, and arrived at my desk. Hours later I did the whole thing in reverse. I did this a seemingly impossible number of times. All the while I waited for a pattern to emerge, waited to make a trail long enough that I could look back and feel as if I’d gotten anywhere. The future has to arrive eventually; that is what it does.

Sometimes, in those involuntarily contemplative moments we all must endure on the train platform, I thought maybe I could hear it coming.

I’ve long moved on from my divorce, and my memories of what it felt like to be so full of sorrow, to be brimming to the point that I stole a quick cry every time I bent down to tie my shoe or turned my back to stir my tea at the kitchen counter, are fading.

Before those memories disappear entirely, I want to root for those people one more time, out loud. Brand-new divorcees of the world, I’ve got seven things to say to you:

BE PROUD OF YOURSELF

You’re battling a bogeyman that some people would do anything to get away from, that a lot of miserable people decry with histrionic fervor. Right now, somewhere, a man or woman is tolerating treatment that erodes his or her humanity just to avoid the experience currently hitting you in the face with a sledgehammer.

These people, the ones who still need their lives to be a story that makes sense, say it loudly, so that the monster under the bed will hear: Divorce isn’t an option. Well, you’re making it an option. You’re making it an option like a fucking badass. Maybe you found yourself dumped into an arena against your will, facing that monster gladiator-style while the deadbolt slides into place behind you and you clutch whatever weapon you can find in terror. Or maybe you dragged that fucker out by his ankle and have tackled him out of sheer rage about everything that has happened in the last months or years, everything that made you feel broken, alone, or so bored you could scream. Either way, you are fighting, for yourself and often for your children, and that is hard.

You’re making your world from scratch, and that requires tirelessness and bravery. Be proud of yourself.

DON’T GET NOSTALGIC

I’ve said it before: Two happy people do not wake up one morning, get into a playful fight over the last bagel, and wind up in court. Something got you here, and I’m willing to bet it wasn’t “No, I love YOU more! No, YOU hang up!” Divorce isn’t a masked man who pops up out of the shrubbery and demands that you hand over your happy relationship. Divorce is your relationship, or at least what your relationship has become in this moment. Nothing has been done to either of you that doesn’t happen to couples all over the world. If you want to work it out, work it out — but with honesty and an extremely discriminating eye for eliminating the issues.

And before you moon over those wedding photos, remember that it’s easy to look happy when someone else has done your hair, your new mother-in-law has just given you a really nice rice cooker, and a photographer is waiting in the wings to Photoshop out the zit on your nose. It was easy to look happy when you were still in the youthful business of condensing your better moments into something everyone could see.

Your life right now is no accident, and you can’t afford to lie to yourself about that. Don’t get nostalgic.

REMEMBER THAT THIS IS YOUR FIRST TIME

Maybe you miss your spouse. Maybe you miss your house or your children. There are a lot of very logical reasons for your distress, for the feeling that you don’t know what to think about or where to put your hands, but remember that unfamiliarity causes a great deal of distress on its own, regardless of context. You’ve never been in pain like this; you have no idea how long it’s going to last; your life experiences thus far have not yielded a map out of this dark maze. Remember your first breakup, how you thought you’d never heal, how you thought you’d ruined everything? Yeah, like that — except this time society agrees with you, because unlike other breakups, this is a breakup we’ve been taught to pretend will never happen, a breakup we aren’t allowed to accept as a standard part of learning and growing.

People have asked me if I’m afraid to get married again out of fear of having to go through divorce all over again someday, but I can’t imagine any divorce being as bad as the one I endured, because at least half of my misery came from the utterly false notion that I had permanently damaged myself and my life, that I was a ruined human being. If I ever get divorced again, I will have an enormous advantage over the last time: Experience will have taught me that I will be just fine.

You are nowhere that you’ve ever been. Remember that this is your first time.

DON’T MAKE ANY BIG, CRAZY DECISIONS

I know you’re going to anyway, but … I just … later you’ll … oh, well. Your hair will grow back, I guess. Just be aware that your opinions will oscillate wildly for the next year, or two. You’ll be so sure of something only to later realize that you were speaking out of pain, or fear, or anger. It’s okay to have those feelings, but try let them marinate for a while before deciding they’re worthy of action. Don’t make any big, crazy decisions.

IT’S OKAY TO BE SOMEONE ELSE NOW

Every day is going to make its mark on you no matter what, unless you’re okay with living a life devoid of personal growth. Every experience changes you — that’s just part of the process of becoming one of those badass senior citizens who fart anytime they want and are willing poke rude people in the sternum on the bus. You’re only stressed about the change now because you think that the new you is the unhappy version, but that’s not forever; grieving always sucks even when it’s time to move on and do just that.

But eventually, you will feel better, and you won’t mind your new perspective so much. In fact, if you’re like many people I know, you’ll struggle a lot less with fear than you have in the past, because you’ve seen firsthand how tough you can be, and you finally trust yourself to handle whatever comes your way.

You will never be the same, but that was never the deal. Every heaven or hell on earth you have ever set foot into has resulted in someone else walking out the other side. It’s okay to be someone else now.

LIFE IS NOT THE SUMMARY OF YOUR CIRCUMSTANCES

Life is not the summary of your circumstances. You can be more. Reach outward, just a little, even if it just means making a point of looking around you. You can be the observer of things that have nothing to do with you. You can be someone else’s good day. I know you don’t have a lot of energy, but even a small gesture, a glance upward, can make you feel better. I developed this practice of reaching outward during my divorce, and I’ve kept it, and it enhances my happiness still. Because I’ve looked around, I know a lot of little things, like the fact that the train I ride to work every day, in my new life, was manufactured when I was five years old.

I like to think of it being made while I went about my business in kindergarten, having no idea that commuter trains existed. I like to think of it shuttling people back and forth long before I got here, its doors opening and closing and people pouring in and out while I grew up and got married and got turned around and suffered the devastating loss of my marriage two thousand miles away. I find it deeply reassuring that reality is defined by so much more than what I feel like today, that it is not my sole responsibility to stand here and make this train real, that it doesn’t have to matter so much how I feel.

Look up. Learn something. Life is not the summary of your circumstances.

YOU REALLY ARE GOING TO BE FINE

You really are going to be fine. Look at the divorced people around you. Are they living in some urine-scented alley somewhere, drinking whiskey for breakfast and spending the rest of the day sitting on the sidewalk with their backs against the wall, staring into the middle distance with bloodshot eyes while they hold up a sign that says WILL WORK FOR LESSONS ON HOW TO CHANGE THE FILTER IN THE FURNACE BECAUSE MY HUSBAND ALWAYS DID IT SO I DIDN’T KNOW HOW AND NOW I’M HOMELESS? If you don’t know any divorced people, consider me your token divorced person; feel free to refer to me that way at parties. I am fine.

I am better than fine, actually. I am healed, and happy, and excited about the future. And I have faith that someday, not so far away as you think, you will be, too.

I will be happy when I’m not so cursed. Why does the universe insist on subjecting me to my own individual laws of thermodynamics in which my life is empirically more difficult than everyone else’s? I don’t understand why I had to be born into this particular body, with this particular life, in this particular first-world hell. My existence is rife with misfortune. I’m starting to get another canker sore, for instance. And my shoelace broke. And my brand-new iPhone screen is cracked. Great. Why can’t I just be a blind orphan leper or something?

STAGE TWO

I will be happy when everyone else becomes as enlightened as I have become. Life is a festival of wonders for which we should all be grateful, idiots, so what’s with all the bitching? If the world’s population didn’t amount to a giant conspiracy to drown me in negativity, life would be perfect. People need to stop gouging out my poor defenseless eyes with their unsavory Facebook statuses and snobby Tweets. Why does everyone else have to make my existence so unpleasant when it doesn’t need to be? Also, does it count as genocide if they’re Republicans?

STAGE THREE

I will be happy.

You probably think I forgot about this, but I didn’t. I unexpectedly inspired myself, is what I did, and am working on a project that I hope to tell you about eventually. I’ve done the opposite of forget about it. I walk around with it continually now, this thoughtful little rock in my shoe: not painful, but a little uncomfortable, at least until I know I’m finally making good on it.

In the meantime, this blog might be shifting around a bit and/or burning to the ground. If you loved any particular post, kindly copy and paste it, just in case it disappears. I know, I know, but surely you’ve learned to expect this sort of thing from me by now.

Wishing you the happiest of 2012s,
Jen

First things first: Criticize the timing of the argument. This clever ploy distracts your opponent by forcing them to focus on something they can do nothing about, instead of the problem they initially complained about. The trusty standby is “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” or “Why am I just hearing about this now?” but feel free to lay it on a little thicker: “You could have brought this up before I moved all the way to Iowa with you six years ago.” If you can imbue the current time frame with an emotional significance that implies your opponent should have been especially considerate of your feelings on that day, that’s also helpful: “I can’t believe you want to talk about this on Arbor Day.” People are always choosing the absolute wrong time to bring up your flaws; any caring human being would have the decency to wait until you were in the mood to hear that you’ve fucked something up. Encourage them to remedy their infraction by building a time machine, a laborious and consuming task that will leave no time for conflict, nagging, or snide quips about your inability to shower regularly.

Feign amnesia. You can’t be guilty of what you don’t remember. Who knows whether that statement is logically true or not, but it sounds good, like something someone would put at the bottom of a movie poster depicting Jason Bourne and some explosions. When faking amnesia, it’s important not to seem incompetent or dysfunctional, as that might cast you in an unfavorable light as an unreliable historical witness. A simple, but elegant way to sidestep such a pitfall is to pretend it is completely absurd to be expected to recall a dead-baby joke you may or may not have made in front of a certain someone’s parents at the dinner table twenty-four entire hours ago. Accuse your opponent of holding grudges, keeping score, or any other activities that associate a clear factual recollection of historical events with petty spite.

Simply put: lie. That screaming call to your wife from your mistress? Wrong number. That $500 you spent on shoes? There’s obviously a decimal point missing on your credit-card statement. Lying is such an obvious antidote to reality that some people foolishly forget it even exists. It’s also perfectly legal unless you’ve been sworn in by a bailiff or are provably damaging someone’s livelihood or reputation. No one ever said anything about criminalizing your ability to lie in your own damn kitchen, which is one of the thousands of inalienable rights America’s troops continue to so bravely fight for, probably. Free yourself from the shackles of the truth; they’re only holding you back in your thundering charge toward victory. Square your shoulders, stand up tall, look your opponent in the eye, and say bravely, “I have never seen those panties before in my life.”

Escalate the drama with a meta plot twist. Oh, someone is angry at you? Dazzle and confuse your opponent by getting angry at them for being angry. If your partner is a dignified individual, your willingness to embarrass yourself with this ploy can only be advantageous, like a magical trapdoor that cuts right through the hard deck of tactical engagement. They’re hurt and horrified that you emptied the checking account? Well, you’re even more hurt and horrified that they suspected you enough to snoop through bank statements when you hadn’t ever once given them any reason not to trust you that they could confirm with 100% certainty at that particular point in time. Ensure that your wishes are respected in the future by reminding them that it makes you really upset when they criticize you and that you’ve asked them repeatedly to stop doing it. If you own any fire hoses or tasers, consider augmenting your request with aversion therapy.

INTERMEDIATE

Deflect responsibility by blaming the other person for your actions. Your partner should love you, trust you, and continually monitor you for misbehavior, correcting you immediately and boldly should an unfavorable tendency arise, instead of just letting you do what you’re doing like some kind of pussy. Remember: Anytime anyone lets you get away with anything for any length of time before starting lame arguments, that person has essentially acted as your accomplice, and everyone knows that the only thing worse than a jerk is someone who puts up with a jerk. Make sure you remind your opponent of his or her failing in this regard with comments like “You should have pulled me aside and explained to me that you don’t enjoy being humiliated and degraded at dinner parties,” or “Look, no one made you go on a police chase with me” and “Well, I don’t remember anyone knocking any guns out of my hand back at the liquor store.” For emphasis, never forget to add, “I’m not a mind-reader.”

Ask for examples/criticize your partner’s inability to forgive and forget past infractions. This is an especially clever one-two punch of strategy. The beauty of this tactic: If your opponent refuses to honor your request for past instances of this “pattern” of bad behavior they’re claiming, their accusations seem baseless and unjustified. If they do honor your request for examples, they can be painted as unreasonably bitter and resentful people who tally up your every mistake to be used against you later. This move was probably invented by Chuck Norris; it’s that triumphant. “Name one time I murdered any of your friends and buried them in the basement,” you can say adamantly, and the minute they take the bait, that’s your cue for sarcastic jokes like, “What, you’re the district attorney now? Got an entire legal brief all filled out, do you? Excuse me — I didn’t realize we were in a court of law!” [Note: Does not work in an actual court of law.]

Pretend you were just about to criticize them for something even worse. “I’m glad you brought up my lack of punctuality,” you can say, leaning forward in your chair and pulling off your glasses for emphasis, “because I’ve been meaning to talk to you about your halitosis, which smells way worse than my lack of punctuality.” If they say something like, “Can we stay on topic? I was trying to talk to you about how late you were for my mother’s funeral,” say sarcastically, “Oh, so we’re just going to talk about what I do wrong? How convenient.”

Agree enthusiastically … and very melodramatically. Nothing confuses an opponent like wholehearted agreement: “You’re right. I guess that sometimes, I do leave the little foil cap from my yogurt container on the countertop until it curdles. I guess I’m the worst spouse in the entire world. I guess maybe I should just give myself twenty hangnails or slam my face in a door a thousand times. I guess you deserve somebody better than a pathetic loser like me. I don’t even know why you’re still here. Maybe you should just leave.” Your annoyed opponent will reflexively attempt to disagree with you … which they can only accomplish by telling you that you aren’t so bad after all! Abracadabra, motherfucker.

Apologize … but for the wrong thing. Not everyone is a careful listener. Try your luck with a bait-and-switch apology, like, “I’m sorry … that I’m not perfect,” or “I’m sorry … that you’re a nitpicking whore.” Mumble the last few words if necessary. For extra style points, throw in the mind-bending “I’m sorry my apology isn’t good enough for you.”

ADVANCED

Listen. Review your internal footage and realize that you, without fail, assume you are right. Recognize the alarming uniformity of this assessment. Consider the problem at hand, which likely represents a minor cultural, philosophical, or personality difference, and suggest solutions. Form a plan of action, and thank your partner for being candid and for caring enough to work on this relationship with you. If the cultural, philosophical, or personality difference does turn out to be major, you should probably break up and find someone who agrees with you on the important things, so you can be happy in your relationship. Downsides include a lack of claim to victimhood, the painful acknowledgment of personal flaws, and limited opportunities for theatrical flair.

IF ALL ELSE FAILS

Threaten to kill yourself. It’s a bit of a non sequitur, sure, but when you think about it, suicide is the ultimate tantrum, and its advantages are legion. For starters, dead people can’t lose arguments, so your opponent is likely to feel threatened by your guaranteed (if costly) victory. Second, your threat to kill yourself will convince the other person that you care a whole lot — that this is not just a relationship that’s important to you, but a relationship worth dying for. Meanwhile, their caring for you will cause them to fight even harder for the life you are so selflessly abandoning in the name of love. It’s like a Catch 22 of caring, and logic puzzles like that can keep people conveniently and frantically occupied all night long, you sly dog. If you’re the type to fling yourself to the linoleum and sob, railroad tracks are the logical choice. For a more sophisticated poetic metaphor about being pushed over the edge, any tall structure will suffice. Staplers should only be used as a last resort.

After dinner, we curled up together under the swaying lights and sipped wine as the train horn blew and the lights of towns and farms and factories rolled by outside our second-story window. It was, in a word, perfect.

If this were a lifestyle blog, I would have accompanied the above story with a smattering of darling pictures full of polka-dot ribbons and neat handwriting, and that would be it. But I don’t want that to be it.

I want to be more than my own dollhouse.

I even think I have an obligation, as a human being, not just to try to be more, but to tell you about it here, even if that’s uncomfortable for both of us.

With the life I’ve lived, I might as well have been shot into outer space, climbing into a gleaming rocket and offering that grubby cluster of open-mouthed kids a salute before I took off. I have enjoyed beauty beyond what any of us could have imagined when most of my friends were prying switches from trees in the front yard and peeling off their leaves while the adults stood in doorways, waiting to wield the weapon on its weeping deliverer. I once swam in the pool at the top of the Tokyo Park Hyatt (better known as the Lost in Translation hotel) while the sun set around me. And then there was the gigantic Jacuzzi tub in New Zealand, the one with my breakfast plate balanced on its edge and the gorgeous view of sheep-dotted hills rising up outside its window. And that dinner in the enormous square, at night, in Spain, with all of its balconies and the hundreds of dioramas behind them—some partially shuttered, some flung wide open for all to see. The hotel in Chicago where a maid delivered freshly baked cookies in the afternoon. The first-class suite on the airplane to Los Angeles, where I had my own bed and my own little salt and pepper shakers.

These are extreme examples, of course, rare and unusual gifts or perks that I never could have afforded if I were footing the bill. But that’s the thing about cultural and intellectual privilege: people start giving you advantages that the poor don’t have access to. The dynamic of life favors you more heavily without you noticing, because it doesn’t occur to you that the doorman doesn’t offer the same expression to everyone.

Even in my ordinary life, I’ve funded plenty of my own smaller, more common indulgences, whether I paid for them with cash or time: lattes, salon visits, gym memberships, throw pillows, cupcakes. The kind of indulgences that arrive topped with whipped cream or in a pretty box. The kind that almost anyone I’m likely to associate with can and does routinely afford, even as most of us lament how broke we are. The kind we barely recognize as indulgences at all, because not everyone can afford to choose the color of their walls.

I just wanted to be happy. No matter how much money you have or what you spend it on, I’m sure you do, too. Almost all of us have assumed, correctly or otherwise, that our happiness is the point, or that our children’s happiness is the point.

My life experiences have certainly not been fruitless. I was happy. I am happy. Hell, I’m often drunk on a complex cocktail of profound gratitude, enjoyment, wonder. I’m not here to present my life or yours as meaningless. I’m not discounting our search for beauty, our ability to foster tiny joys by way of coat buttons or key hooks. At least we are joyful. Plenty of privileged people aren’t, choosing instead to exist in a state of astonishingly steady outrage, paired with an amusing but unflattering air of disbelief, as if the rest of us climbed onto the bus to utopia this morning and left without them.

So, no. None of us are monsters. Many of us have used the significance of matrimony as an excuse to spend more money on one evening of our lives than it would have cost to buy my brilliant childhood friend an entire associate’s degree at the community college. But we still aren’t monsters, not really. That’s how complicated this is.

We do make choices that we don’t recognize as choices. We do use “need” in a way that would baffle or disgust anyone still stranded in my old stomping grounds. Some of our bucket lists don’t have a single item on them that isn’t about getting something we want. Some of us don’t even realize alternative options exist, because we have, often with the best of intentions, made universes out of ourselves.

But I think we could be more. I think we could climb out of our own stories if we realized our allegiance to those narratives, our servitude to that photo of a kiss at sunset.

Listen, I get it. I once slept in an $800 hotel room in Tokyo. I understand. I just want to be more than my own life. I want to walk out of the dollhouse and make stories that aren’t about me at all. If you want to be more, too, we should talk about it. If you don’t, the rest of this series is probably not for you. I’m not looking for a fight, I’m not interested in making you feel guilty, and I’m not here to convince you of anything you don’t already know. I just want to be more.

I always thought this was the creepiest house, but there were certainly other contenders.

The neighborhood baby, the one we carted around in a stroller and cooed at to make her smile, died when her mother’s boyfriend beat her in a fit of rage. In the house up the street, my childhood friend’s father shot her mother to death mere feet away from her. A bit farther around the block, a two-year-old child died when his siblings shut him in a car in the middle of summer. No one had been watching them. No one ever was.

I remember once looking out the window and seeing one man whaling on another man with a pipe, across the street. The pipe-wielder was already somewhat notorious, as he had bitten off a man’s nose in a previous altercation. As one does.

And then there were the neighborhood children who would disappear and come back around in cycles, as protective services transferred them to foster care and back out again, and the ones who wandered the streets all afternoon with their pants filled with shit. I would often look out the window to see some random ragamuffin using my tree swing or my toys; a lot of the kids weren’t big on manners, and a lot of their parents weren’t big on caring what they did.

The first girl in our neighborhood to get pregnant was ten at the time. Ten years old. Need I go on?

This is the closest house to my old one that’s for sale. And here you thought $241 was a car payment, not a mortgage.

Me, I had good parents who invested heavily in me, both financially and otherwise, and I also had good neighbors–the elderly ones who had refused to leave even as the neighborhood degenerated–who kept an eye out for my welfare. With the exception of one rather alarming evening that I spent being held at knifepoint by a paranoid older neighborhood boy who was high out of his mind, I don’t know that I was ever in any serious danger.

Yes, knifepoint, though all he did was talk a lot and refuse to let me go home until after dark. I was too young to realize how much differently that could have ended. Years later, he would get shot in a botched robbery. I don’t know whether he lived.

For a few years, my family was as poor as everyone else. We rode around in an ancient blue boat of a car that we named Blue Bessie. Bessie’s seats were pocked with cigarette burns, and she didn’t smell so great. We ate pancakes for dinner, or egg sandwiches. I can still remember the disappointment and confusion of choosing a pretty outfit for myself only to hand it over to the layaway lady.

But eventually, my parents dragged themselves out of their financial rough patch, and each became the owners of their own successful businesses. As my parents joined the lower middle class, I became more of a pariah as, hilariously enough, a “rich kid.”

It’s amazing to think I once knew anyone who thought two relatively new cars in the driveway, a house that wasn’t peeling with old paint, and a pair of Guess jeans made you rich. The notion is even a little refreshing.

From their Have-Not perspective, I was a Have. Kids stepped on my new shoes on the bus to dirty them up, and I came home crying; the situation got so bad that my parents wound up driving me to school until I was old enough to drive myself. I was teased because I was one of the only kids in my school who didn’t smoke–in fifth grade.

My expansive vocabulary was certainly not appreciated. I can remember getting harassed once because I had used the expression “bound to,” as in, “that’s bound to happen.”

A neighborhood girl said, “bound to? What the fuck does that mean?”

“It’s a figure of speech,” I told her.

“What’s a figure of speech?”

“A figure of speech is … it’s … just something people say.”

“You’re making that up,” she responded angrily. Then she hit me in the face with her fist with an odd sort of gentleness–almost like a chin-chuck to the cheekbone–to see whether I’d fight back. I didn’t, choosing instead to use the brilliant military strategy of standing stock still and praying it would end peacefully; I knew a losing battle when I saw one.

She was so amused that she called a friend over to watch and then hit me again, but harder this time.

My parents drove me to school, but I still had to survive the bus ride home. Once, when I was still in elementary school, a group of kids told me they were going to smash my face and then chased me all the way from the bus stop to my front door. I didn’t have the key–my sister did. I twisted the knob in a panic and begged her to open the door while the kids behind me called out sarcastically that they “just wanted to talk.”

By the time I managed to fling myself inside, I was so terrified I could taste it.

I’m not sure I can really blame them. They had nothing, not even decent shoelaces to keep their shoes on their feet; my mother would quietly replace those shoelaces anytime they came over. One of my neighborhood friends in particular was just as bright as I was, but without any of the opportunities. My parents would ultimately scrimp and save to pay for me to go to one of the top five journalism schools in the entire country. Meanwhile, her parents wouldn’t even take her to our elementary school’s awards night, even though she was being featured prominently.

She won enough awards that the awards presenters eventually just got her a chair near the stage, so she wouldn’t have to keep walking up and down the auditorium aisle. My parents, who had driven her there, were the only ones there to see. I’m glad they could do that for her. Later, they would take her out for ice cream to celebrate.

I doubt her own parents knew or cared where she was that night. She wound up in foster care permanently once their rights were terminated.

When I was in college, my parents finally moved out of my old neighborhood and into a nice subdivision more typical for someone of their income. I walked out of my old house, went away to school, and simply returned at Christmas break to a different house altogether–one with vaulted ceilings and a Jacuzzi tub in the master bathroom. I’ve only been back to the old neighborhood a handful of times, and it’s been years now since I’ve laid eyes on it.

Part of me, though, never really left. And now, it seems, that part of me has a few things to say.

When my derby league is nine months old, I realize my season here is almost over. They’ve grown up now; they can do this themselves. They look to me for reassurance once in a while, but their dependence on me is mostly in their heads. I realize I’m not doing them any favors by stepping in whenever they get confused or upset. It’s time to back off.

I feel that same old restlessness setting in, the feeling I always get when I don’t have my shoulder to the wheel, when I’m not rolling a boulder uphill.

I’m going to Portland, for real this time. I’ve been working on Operation Hobo (my project in which I aim to fit everything in my car) all year, but I kick it up a few notches. The employees at Goodwill know me now. I give away paintings, furniture, anything I can possibly live without.

Meanwhile, more in need of a distraction than ever now that my derby league is running more or less fine without me, I go on a date despite what a bad idea that is for someone in my state of flux.

I walk into a bar, just like it’s the start of a joke, mainly because it usually is.

There he is, already waiting at our table: the one solitary guy who survived the OKCupid elimination process. His name is Andy. He has a dog who is also named Andy, which is just one of the many reasons I have found myself unable to rule him out.

I’m late, flustered. But he looks up at me idly, like we’re old friends and I’ve just come back from the bathroom. Nothing in his face reminds me that I am made of meat. I approve of this.

We talk for hours, pleasantly if not avidly—this is not a story of instant chemistry, exactly, but it goes well enough. It’s the wee hours of the morning before we both stand up. I’ve confessed to seeing what I could find of him online and mentioned that I saw pictures of him on crazy high-tech stilts. As he walks me to my car, it is revealed that said stilts are, in fact, in the back of his car. Which is how I wind up wobbling around a parking deck at 3 AM, on stilts, in borrowed kneepads, making a complete fool of myself while giggling uncontrollably.

Right before I stand up on them, he holds out his hand in that same mild way. He’s not timid about it, but he isn’t hungry either—just thoroughly bemused. I take his hand without having to think about it, and he pulls me up onto my stilts, and right then is when I know for sure I’ll see him again. It’s November 17.

He lets me work my way over to him from my guarded perch on the couch over a series of marathon hangout dates. He sets mugs of tea down in front of me, lets me think it over. I can stay, or not; I can sleep in the guest room, or not; he doesn’t seem to mind one way or the other. This drives me completely crazy, but in the best possible way, because it’s not an act. He isn’t playing hard to get. It’s just my decision, like I said I wanted it to be.

No one has ever been clever enough to wait for that before, to leave me stewing on my side of the table until I’m willing to take responsibility for what’s going on, until I’m willing to show my cards.

I am impressed.

Besides, he owns a T-shirt of the grim reaper riding a unicorn and he knows the difference between rifling through something and riffling through something. Who am I kidding.

I concede the existence of our relationship via a Kindle presentation that includes a diagram of a bee’s knee, and that’s that. It’s December 2.

In the next few weeks, I look like hell. I’ve taken the walk of shame and made an entire lifestyle out of it. Half of the T-shirts I wind up wearing to dinner aren’t mine. I smile stupidly at other people, at my own hands, at cans of beans in the grocery store.

I try to hide what’s happening, but my mother is smug regardless. She can tell I’m getting my ass kicked. She has never seen a loudmouth with so little to say.

I bring over some yoga pants, a toothbrush. I’m casually given a drawer in the bathroom and the code to the garage.

A package comes to the door one afternoon: it’s a present for me. I pry it open, examine it. It’s an entire dictionary of the word “fuck,” a word that I’ve likely uttered more times than just about any other.

I have to sit down with it immediately, astonished. He laughs knowingly at the look on my face when I crack it open.

There is a bird called the windfucker. This is yet another thing I didn’t have before that I have now.

I stop talking about going to Portland. He starts talking about where he should look for work now that his contract is expiring.

We realize we have an awkward problem: if Andy gets a job here, he’s stuck here for quite a while, where I don’t want to be. But if he gets a job elsewhere, surely I can’t just come with him after a month of dating. That would be ridiculous. Right?

An opportunity presents itself in Phoenix. Unwilling to say what I mean, I make up stories about the bloodthirsty zombie gnomes that plague the city. I send him pictures of the Brown Cloud, Phoenix’s seasonal haze of pollution. I also casually mention that I hear the West Coast is really nice this time of year, or any time of year.

A job comes up in California. He asks me what I think.

I pause. “San Francisco is one of my favorite cities in the world,” I say.

He understands the way I talk around things. He decides he’ll take it if they’ll have him. It’s December 21.

While we’re waiting to hear about the job, an enormous opportunity arises for the roller-derby league: the chance to play a real arena, something many leagues never accomplish. It’ll be a massive undertaking of ticket sales and advertising and frantically trying to find a halftime act, and we only have a few weeks to pull it off.

We decide to do it, because we’re insane, as per usual. Plus, we plan to donate 100% of the proceeds, so we figure we can raise a little money for cancer research.

Andy hears back about the job, and it’s a go: we’re moving to California.

It is January 14, almost our whopping two-month anniversary.

I don’t want to get married or anything, though. “I like to wait for the big three-monther for that,” I tell him.

Never in my life will I have whistled louder or longer through a graveyard than I’m about to, and I’ve traversed some very large metaphorical cemeteries in my time.

On January 22, the big bout comes. We have nearly given ourselves ulcers scurrying around with the planning, and I’m just frantically hoping we pull the whole thing off, as we’ve slapped the entire event together with duct tape and a prayer; up until the last moment, we aren’t even sure our event insurance has been approved or whether we’ll have to cancel.

By now, everyone has heard that I’m moving to California with some guy I barely know and they’ve barely heard of. People are startlingly supportive, probably because I clearly already know this is the worst idea ever, which seems to reassure them that I won’t be crushed if it doesn’t work out. It dawns on me that people don’t so much mind foolhardy romantic decisions as long as you don’t sugarcoat those decisions into some kind of fairytale. Most people politely fail to mention those hundreds of thousands of times I swore I’d never live with anyone again. This is nice of them.

The biggest thing everyone is hung up on is how on earth I’m going to manage to get all the way to California in a car. I find this both hilarious and sadly poignant. I keep telling them, “It’s just like a road trip, but longer.”

I’m announcing this bout, just like the last one. When I signed up for it, I didn’t realize it would be good-bye, but it’s one hell of a way to go.

Three thousand people come to see us. Many of the faces are familiar, family members and friends who are seeing roller derby for the first time. When the game comes all the way down to the last moment, the entire stadium roars in a way that will later put goosebumps on my arms when I’m reviewing the footage.

Oh, and in the end, we do manage to raise a little money for cancer research. In fact, when I see the total, I exclaim, “Holy SHIT!” and then hastily check to make sure my microphone isn’t on. (It isn’t.)

We present the total while cancer survivors in the stadium stand up and everyone within a mile radius of that giant check weeps into their shirtsleeves, myself included.

It is one of the proudest days of my life.

When the whole thing is over and the stadium is nearly empty, I pull my earpiece out and marvel that I’m really done; I will stay for the one-year anniversary party, but right now is really the moment that I am done with this endeavor, that I can rest. I spend the afterparty with my head on Andy’s shoulder, exhausted.

We drive Andy and some of his stuff out to California. As we cross the bay bridge and San Francisco rolls by, we can’t stop laughing. Thanks to the wonders of Glympse, my family watches from home as we cross that threshold, and they cheer me on via text message. We hang out our heads out the window, amazed at the gorgeous weather and even more amazed that some people are actually wearing gloves and hats as if it’s cold outside; as two people who grew up in a place where the inside of your nose freezes in the winter (quite a weird feeling, if you’ve never experienced it), we find this hilarious.

We go to the beach, we drive around town, and then we find an apartment. When we’re sitting in the leasing office, I wonder for the billionth time just what the hell I think I’m doing.

I sign on the dotted line and fly back to Illinois to finish Operation Hobo.

I go to the league anniversary party in a car that already has everything I own in it, packed and ready to go for the next morning. I fight tears while my rollergirls say incredibly nice things about me. Walking out to my car from the party, I look up at the night sky and feel my first thrill of this-is-really-happening excitement about leaving the next morning. Just a few more hours.

But when morning comes, I don’t feel excited at all. I feel downright awful, frankly, almost incapacitated with doubt and anxiety. I have forgotten this part, how it feels to really say good-bye. I can scarcely bear the sight of my mother crying in the driveway, and for a minute I want to just call the whole thing off. But I program my GPS, pull into the street, drive away, and proceed to sob brokenheartedly all the way through Illinois. I’m not sure why I expected anything else.

Everything is going to be fine—much better than fine, actually. I’ll settle into the Bay Area, get a job, and walk to work each morning while reminding myself that today is a stunningly beautiful day—not because I’m grouchy, but because on my spot on the bay, almost every day is stunningly beautiful, and you forget to notice that after a while if you aren’t careful. I’ll learn my way around the trains, the streets. People will ask me for directions, and my ability to answer them will please me enormously.

Six months from now, California will feel like home.

Awhile after I get there, Andy will tell me about something he did when he was little, when people were being mean to him. It will be a funny story, but I’ll also feel an anger rise up in me. Is someone being mean to a wee version of Andy sometime back in 1983? Because I will claw my way back in time and rip their limbs off. Don’t think I won’t. Don’t you even TRY it, 1983.

A beat after that flash of rage has subsided, I will recognize that protective instinct for what it is. Andy will have become one of mine. He will have become home, too.

On my way west, I don’t know any of that yet. But as the miles roll by, I start to feel a little lighter. When I get to Iowa, I merge onto I-80, the road I will be on for the next 1,789 miles.

I turn the music up, and I start to sing.

THE END

Thanks to the amazing David Vernon for all images except the cheering little boy (courtesy of Hillary Wasson) and the photobooth collection (courtesy of a couple of dorks in San Francisco).