Open Pockets —End of an Era

My world was now open pockets in my favorite jacket — that oversized denim patchwork thing. I looked down at its comfortable form and put my hands in those big pockets and realized how that jacket defined me, you know, if I was fabric.

Open Pockets —End of an Era
Big Sur coast, California. Photo taken by my son. The beloved jacket from the story.

What was my life? The year was 2012. Besides being the end of an era according to the Mayan long form calendar, it was the end of an era for me. I just wasn’t quite sure what era I was ending and what era was to follow. I realized my world was now open pockets in my favorite jacket — that oversized denim patchwork thing. I looked down at its comfortable form and put my hands in those big pockets and realized how that jacket perfectly defined me, you know, if I was fabric.

But I had loved that jacket for so long that it was fraying at the collar and the cuffs. I had washed it a million times and it was still functioning, but like me, it was looking a little ragged around the edges.

A few years before after a week respite in Sedona, I stood at the curb in a small old town, a smile on my face and observed my life as a slow-motion movie scene while brushing blond strands of hair from my aging brow and lifting my eyes to the Arizona sun.

I typed in a one finger text message (I know, but I can’t do it the way everybody else does with two thumbs) to my son a thousand miles away.

“Standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona.”

He replied within seconds, “Take it easy.”

I was surprised he remembered those lyrics from the Eagles as he wasn’t really a fan, but he had heard the music often as he was growing up.

My year in North Carolina with family now seemed nonsensical. I packed up and went back to California, the South Bay Area, a place familiar for decades. The year of taking a break had blown out my savings and I had to go back to work. I had burnt out it’s true after my public relations agency died a somewhat unnatural death due to the dotcom crash a decade earlier. I survived for several years off sales of my International Public Relations Guidebook, my paintings, and working for a law office part time. The good thing was I learned a lot about law. Class action, personal injury, construction defect, and a lot of buzzwords (almost as many as the tech industry); attractive nuisance; force majeure, and tortfeasor all funnier sounding than they are in a court room.

By then my reflection was changing. I was feeling the impact of age but mostly the frustration and boredom of starting yet another corporate job. I had already been there and done that for too many years.

The plan started one lonely weekend after I pulled out all my old journals. I have about thirty of them that span decades. They were not as detailed as I remember and much of the content seemed to revolve around some relationship or my inadequacies of being a mother.

Two divorces. Then a substantial history of serial dating and 2-week-stands (is that a thing?), three long-ish relationships that ended oddly. One guy had PTSD and couldn’t cope (should have seen THAT coming), the other died of leukemia, and the last serious relationship was with a guy significantly younger. I had pretty much given up on relationships by then so why not go young? Men do younger all the time, why not women? If you think about it for a minute, it works well. Men over fifty have a little bit of, hmm, let’s call it trouble in that area without some blue pills, while women can keep going. And despite our age difference, he and I endured a few rolling eyeballs in our direction and stayed together for four years. I had to break up with him because he wanted children. With me! And I was like, oh hell no. I already had one of those!

The content of the journals had some surprising information though. Actually, it was the lack of information that bothered me. Year after year there were the same complaints. Where was I going with all this? There was no improvement. I made my New Year’s resolutions but year after year nothing changed. New goals unachieved. Things undone. Yet time had ticked on. I wasn’t where I wanted to be or who I wanted to be. I was a ghost of myself.

I did my bit though. I raised an honest good boy who respected women and usually had more sense than me. I did it mostly alone as a single mother (probably a mistake now looking back — not the divorce just that I don’t think I put enough effort into finding solid upstanding replacements for the dad-type). But I managed to live in a nice condo in an upscale town solely for the purpose of having my son attend the best the public school system had to offer. I had done all I could do. I worked a lot. I was exhausted all the time. I set up my body for anxiety and panic attacks and all the assorted things that go with that. Didn’t feel I had a lot of options. That was the way things were and some part of me felt lucky to have what I had. It was certainly more — much more than I grew up with.

I got pretty good at all those things, but it came at the expense of my own security. I didn’t have money left for a retirement fund or much of a savings and I knew that was going to bite me on the ass one day. So, I hustled. I spent time on projects and small businesses on the side to try to bring in extra money here and there and hopefully set me up for some future source of income that I could maintain until I dropped dead of something.

The bottom line is that the journals were a revelation. What had I been doing? No goals reached! One year I did a visualization board, another year I was into law of attraction BS. I did gratitude and mindfulness meditation but year after year, the journals reported the same result.

What came to mind was that quote attributed to Einstein but debunked. “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” The thought is good, but he was actually talking about quantum theory at the time and in quantum world you CAN do the same thing many times and get different results. However, in my case the former was true.

The thing is that’s all just prep work. Things change when you make a real plan on paper — just like they do in any good business or PR plan. I need​ed to stop hugging myself ​and giving myself ​pats on the back for nothing accomplished and​ stop ​waiting for answers ​to magically come to me. I had to act.

Step-by-step. And that’s when things began to change. And it started with a two-year road trip. In a trailer. Alone.

This is from a series of excerpts from my upcoming book Travel Like a Girl, (coming soon-ish, I have a bigger project first) about my two-year road trip towing my 15-foot trailer all over the U.S.