This is the intermittent contemplative diary of an imperfect middle-aged interdisciplinary creative and urban hermit obsessed with stopping time.
I don't believe in mid-life crises, I believe in mid-life awakenings, but still, they can be brutal, and mine followed a global pandemic that prompted a shift away from emotional and mental chaos and burnout onto a path of more ease and peace with no clear route toward getting to, and sustaining such slowness—and most importantly, being okay living such a slow life when everything around me and old patterns inside of me insist I must keep up.
I have earned multiple graduate degrees in creative writing (Bath Spa University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago), book arts (UI Center for the Book), and library and information science (University of Iowa), and was aimed, however slowly, toward teaching or librarianship when the lock-down showed me just how overwhelmed, exhausted, and burned out I was trying to be a human in the world every day even doing things I enjoyed with people I loved hanging out with.
I had pursued a career in academia with the same bright-eyed, bushy-tailed fantasy I first brought with me to undergrad. When I dreamed of university life, I imagined classes gathering under the autumn trees—it’s perpetually autumn in all of my fantasies—to discuss life, literature, philosophy, and love. I imagined meandering conversations with like-minded beings that created a beautiful ebb and flow of growth and expansion.
And most of all, I somehow imagined there’d be more autonomy, more self-direction, more freedom than secondary school and, though the reality rarely lived up to the fantasy—I found myself burned out at the end of every semester, rarely able to keep up with the assigned readings and writings let alone dive down rabbit holes of personal intrigue, and constantly in a state of brain fog—I continued believing it was a better fit than the alternative: the 9 to 5 in which I have always found myself much, much worse off emotionally, physically, spiritually and, somehow, financially.
In having to stop nearly completely, I felt in my body just how harmful it was for me to move at a pace that didn’t belong to me. A pace faster than my nervous system could process.
And so as the old adage goes, I thought to myself: if I’m going to be broke, I might as well be broke, peaceful, and well-rested rather than broke, sick, and miserable—just kidding, I’m an optimist, I thought I had a straight forward plan to earning a liveable income in less than six months that did not pan out—and when my last program ended in 2021 I embarked on a fumbling journey toward something—different.
I didn’t expect to find myself going deeper and deeper into mind-body-spirit practices, but as I explored how to do the creative practices, writing, and mark-making sustainably and slowly, I edged more and more into the mind-body-spirit practices, too. And every time I think I know what the path looks like or where I’m headed, I find the Universe sends me somewhere unexpected. The path unfolds before me, and I am learning to allow and not force. I am learning to listen and not assert. Very, very slowly I am becoming more consistently embodied in my truest self even when things seem bleak or hard.
I invite you to join me on this journey of presence through personal narrative non-fiction, poetic lingerings, and mind-body-spirit musings.
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