Susan Senator

I’m all out of faith
This is how I feel.
–Natalie Imbruglia

To all of you who think of my life as a roller coaster ride: welcome to Lightning Loops. (Or possibly, Free Fall, the ride that is so horrible they don’t even bother to disguise it as a giant spider or a Tower of Terror. It is just a metal structure with a chair that rises and rises until you hear this BUZZ and the chair is released and you fall downward.) I am feeling so brittle today, like I could break any second, just held together with scotch tape and coffee. The plastic sheen of the blue sky makes me squint and want to take refuge in yet another cup of highly sweetened Peet’s.

What started it? A shaky Thanksgiving. A disappointing long weekend. An uncertain future. The pervasive, snappish cold that tells me that it is absolutely true that winter is right around the corner, even though Indian summer was only last week. Why? Why do I feel this way? When all is fairly well within my combustible nuclear family? Taking the emotional temperature of the four of them, I find that they are all doing really well right now, so WTF is my problem?

Was it the New Yorker’s review of — of all things — War and Peace, the latest translation? Why, you might ask, would that send me into a tailspin? Because it makes me feel like a failure. It reminds me of my lost youth, of the path not taken, or in my case, the path barred to me by Penn and Harvard grad school admissions. You see, way back when, I thought I was going to get my PhD in Russian Intellectual History of the 19th Century, at either Penn (where I got my Master’s in the above) or Harvard, because we were destined for Boston after 5 long years in Philadelphia. But I was not accepted into either program; I probably was not serious enough a student. I did not read 18th century whaling diaries on my vacations at Cape Cod. I did not subscribe to any historical journals. I had not mastered statistics. I did not want to visit the Soviet Union, I told my advisor. I wanted to visit Russia. 19th Century. I wanted to wear those clothes, bustle and all. I wanted to ride in my coach and play Whist, whatever that was, dance at the Rostovs’ ball and decide between suitors. Seriously, all I really wanted to do was figure out why the Russian Enlightened thinkers thought the way they did. I wanted to immerse in it, go back in a time machine. Well, that was just too emotional for those hardheaded academics, so they turned me down. Anyway, so I just came to Boston figuring I’d do something else. And — voila! I did. Oh, boy, did I.

But I still wonder at what I have not done with my life. I read that terrific and interesting New Yorker review and I could not help reading various clever paragraphs to poor pre-coffee Ned. I felt such longing, to steep myself in that academic world of pondering Tolstoy’s every word and then doing the research to prove this or that completely irrelevant but beautiful point.

I am both blessed and cursed with having the time to do what I want with my life. I understand that this is a wonderful, lucky thing, but it certainly brings with it its own problems. I feel utterly compelled to find The Right Thing to do with myself and then Do It. I am longing for a book idea; at the same time I want to start a dance studio for disabled girls. At the same time, I have a partially-filled-out job application to Anthropologie; at the same time I am looking up grad school programs in special needs education but feeling like, Jeebus Cripes I should be teaching these classes, not taking them! My arrogance and impatience get in my way as much as my intertia and depression.

A lot of people have told me that I should give myself a break and realize that I have a hard life. They mean Nat, of course. Nat is an easy target, poor Sweet Guy. But they are so wrong. I know that Nat is not what makes my life its most difficult; I am. I trip over my own neuroses like tree roots in the path. Nat, in fact, has given me a little respite from all that, as well as a chance to strike out on a whole new path through the swamp. Pardon my metaphor, but I am really trying to figure shit out and I am currently feeling a bit lost in the woods.