I was going to title this "Living The Simple Life," but I'm not there yet. Almost, but there's still more to explore, and that's a good thing: I'm having a lot of fun at this. And it's not a destination; it's the journey, of course.
The other night someone asked me in that sincere, interested-in-more-than-a-"Just fine"-answer, how I was doing. And as I answered, thoughtfully, I realized something: I'm happier than I've ever been in my life. I do exactly what I want to do all day every day, and it's quite wonderful. I feel less stress and worry than I did in the past, and I enjoy things that I used to ignore.
So I thought I'd write some about that in case my experience might be useful to someone else. It's been a long process, years and years. I'm not so introspective that I know everything that's gone into it, but I know some of the stuff that felt Big, the stuff that made me sit up and pay more attention.
~~I sat by my mother and held her hand as she died, just the two of us in the room. Two weeks later I turned 50, a milestone I'd been looking forward to but that felt much different, of course, than I had expected.
~~2 years later, I stood by my father and held his hand as he died, and a month after that, on my birthday, I was diagnosed with very, very early stage melanoma (which is fine now).
~~we settled my mother's affairs, a huge, sad wrangling of a lifetime's accumulation.
~~in my 40s, I found out that what was wrong with my fingers was arthritis and that, because it started when I was young and because my father had it so severely, it will probably get very ugly (if I live long enough), mainly because it's in my neck and icky things can happen.
~~the last book I did was an eye-opener. It was a huge undertaking involving months of travel and all my savings, it generated no royalties, and it was remaindered quickly. There were some ugly incidents with people that left me both surprised and disappointed and very disillusioned.
~~our car was burgled, something that's never happened to either of us, and a lot of things I thought were indispensable were taken and never recovered. Plus there was someone else's blood inside our car, and years later we still find tiny pieces of glass from the broken window. This is not a huge deal in the larger scheme of things—people have much worse experiences every day—but it was another part of the path.
~~getting older and having no biological family members, no children, no one who wants the stuff I've accumulated over almost 60 years.
So all of this stuff, none of it particularly unusual (I am not claiming any huge drama here), added up to make me really take a look at how I want the rest of my life to go. I can't control it, and I know that, but I can make it easier for the good parts to show up and the bad parts to seem smaller.
One of the first things I did was to start taking drugs. I've written about this before, but I think if you're going to talk about life changes with the hope you'll inspire someone, you can't be honest if you know that a big part of it is taking mind-altering pharmaceuticals. I take an SSRI (selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor), something I first discussed with my dr. back in my 20s. My mother was suicidally depressed through a chunk of my adolescence, and being aware of the genetic tendency to depression (for her and her parents) and anxiety/worry (both of us) was important. I'd put it off thinking I'd learn not to worry as I got older and wise (not "wiser"), which turned out to be a crock. When my racing heartbeat started keeping my awake for hours, in addition to—when I did go to sleep—waking me up every 30 minutes, I also began taking beta blockers. I'm telling this in the interest of full disclosure so it doesn't sound like I did all this life-altering happy stuff all on my own with just will-power, a screw driver, and some twine. Oh, yeah: and Bond-o and duct tape.
I've written (probably ad nauseum) about giving stuff away, and that has been a huge, HUGE part of this process. I've gotten rid of tons of stuff from art supplies to clothes to shoes to jewelry to my mother's furniture and car to over half my library. It's taken a long, long time, but I'm almost there (there's very little left that I don't love and use/wear all the time, thanks to some very good friends who have helped out by giving new homes to stuff I couldn't donate or sell). I should say here that while my husband has been supportive of my de-owning stuff, he's not on this particular journey with me. I leave his stuff and his man-cave/study alone.
Getting rid of things on its own, though, wouldn't be enough. Just as I don't believe that taking drugs is, on its own, the answer. It's easy to make big, sweeping changes like drugs or de-cluttering, but I don't believe that's a solution. When I began the prescriptions, I made a commitment to myself that I would learn how to work with the lowest level possible to make the chemicals effective. It's easier not to worry with brain-altering chemicals, but I could easily continue my bad habits of thinking about everything that could go wrong (termites! tornadoes! tooth decay! financial ruin!) and the things I needed to do (find more work! make more money! be more sociable! join a club or something!). It's easy to take drugs and then lean back and expect them to do all the work. Non, I thought. Well, OK, that's a lie: I don't think in French. I don't even know French. Maybe non means something else entirely, like "clown" or "dog's butt" or "stupid American tourist person."
I also realized, with the end of my job with my book publishers, that there will come a point in time where I an totally unemployed. I don't know when. I love my job with Stampington and hope to keep writing about creative people the rest of my life, but I realized that I don't really want to do anything else. I don't want to teach. I don't want to sub. I've done those things for years and am done. Mostly, I don't want to hustle trying to get people to hire me to do things I don't really want to do anyway. When my friend Wendy told me, about cutting back, "I don't want to work that hard any more," I was at first shocked. I grew up with parents who believed that work was all and that you did as much as you could until you couldn't do any more (after their divorce, my mother worked two jobs until she was in her 60s and then kept on with one of them until she was in her mid-70s; my father took early retirement at 55 and then went to work full-time for another company). Learning that there's another way to live that doesn't involve working as hard as you can is the hardest part for me.
Here are some of the things I've been doing.
~~sleeping. I sleep more than I've ever slept in my life. My mother said I was never a sleeper, even as a baby. Since I can remember (in high school), I've awakened, heart pounding, every 45-90 minutes. I assumed it was because I'd had a nightmare I couldn't remember. Now I suspect that it was my heart speeding up, for whatever reason. Now I enjoy sleeping. It feels delicious, like other people have talked about naps. I'd always thought, "Oh, please, people. Sleep is a pain in the butt. I'll sleep when I'm dead." But now I see what they mean: it's fun. I go to sleep more easily and wake up instantly, already happy (in the past, I was like my mother: don't talk to me, don't touch me, don't DARE ask me a question or sit near me for at least an hour because I woke up Hating the World. And, of course, already thinking about tornadoes and tooth decay and termites. Not any more. I quit setting the alarm early and started getting up whenever I wake up. I lie down every afternoon, late, with a heating pad on my neck, and I often doze off. It's quite wonderful because when I do, I often have a cat lying on each hand, a complicated ritual to which Lennie and Clarice have introduced me. I think it involves their making sure I'll stay there until they're finished napping, but whatever: it's very companionable, and I don't fight the relaxation, as I once would have. This feels very, very decadent, pretty much like lying on the couch all afternoon watching bad tv, but I feel really good. My neck is better than it has been in years.
~~because I work less and am not trying to pretend to be busy, I don't spend time making work for myself: hunting for things that might turn into work, looking for people to interview, blah, blah, blah.
Here I should stop and talk about money: I've never made much money. I never cared that much about it. My parents had enough money, but they'd grown up during the Depression and were very frugal, and my mother counted every penny. Until they got divorced when I was in college, I'd always though we were poor, and that was OK. I got everything I wanted, but I didn't want a lot. When I married The EGE, he was a first-year teacher, and I didn't have a job; I dropped out of college. We didn't have a television or a telephone and had only one used car. I hardly noticed; crazy love will do that to you. I have a tiny monthly amount from my mother, very tiny but enough to pay for the bare essentials of the things I personally pay for—internet, iPhones, books. Theoretically, I could get by on that, but of course, again, non: there are vet bills, dr. bills, car woes, the aging washer and dryer. Money things to worry about, even though The EGE takes care of the household stuff and insurance that thoroughly protects everything but the cats. And car burglaries.
But if I'm going not to worry, learning not to worry about money was right up there at the top of the list. With the last additional job I had, with the book publishers, I saved $10,000 for each of the two full years, putting $20,000 in an account so that if the washer and dryer and stove and refrigerator and iMac all fell apart at the same time, well: I'd be prepared. I knew the job wouldn't last forever and that having a personal safety net was going to make this whole Learning-Not-To-Worry Thang much, much easier.
Then, since I'd decided I didn't want to look for another additional job, I started thinking about where I could cut expenses. I quit shopping, although I had been drifting away from that for years. I got rid of my website, around $100 a year, and my podcast host, about the same. I quit subscribing to anything. I quit joining stuff. We joined the Jazz Society here one year and then promptly missed over half the concerts because we were traveling. I tell people I don't join things; if they pressure, I just don't go at all. The jazz people are perfectly fine with us paying when we come. I was paying about $50 a month for Netflix DVDs, 6 at a time. When I paid attention, I realized we were sending a lot of them back without watching them because we'd start streaming some detective series onto Roku. So I cut out the DVD part and now pay what? $8? $9? a month for streaming. We have enough in line to keep us entertained for at least the next 5 years.
I did this gradually, as it felt right. We're both still working, so we don't have to do it now; but I wanted to make my own adjustments now, while it's a choice, rather than to wait until a time when it feels like a sacrifice. Learning to live more simply now is just one more way to keep from turning into that bitter old person who hates the world because it's so tough being old.
Going along this path is about how I think, too. Meditation, mindfulness, noticing old habits. Because the book contracts required that I participate in social media, I got more and more involved in blogging and Facebook and Twitter. I had multiple blogs and a FB page and was Tweeting dozens of times a day, and at the end, I hated it and felt like I was starting to believe that I Was Somebody, somebody Important, somebody who Had Something to Say. I googled myself. I was in danger of becoming that diva who tweets what she's having for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and then tweets goodnight, just as if millions of fans are waiting to know she's safely tucked in. So I began working on that, too. I cut out Twitter entirely, got rid of the FB page and the second blog. I spend as little time on FB as possible except to post things I think might inspire someone else or make them laugh. I blocked a lot of people whose drama just worried me, mostly relatives who, for whatever reasons of their own, are constantly mired in drama of all kinds. Some people thrive on excitement and intrigue and gossip and just plain drama; I want to avoid it everywhere. When I'd read dramatic posts from someone we know, I'd worry about them, even when I suspected it was just that: drama.
I threw away my business cards. I am learning to thinking of myself, my self, in a more organic way, not as any of the things I would once have said in introducing myself to someone else. I threw away other stuff—postcards, posters for book signings, all the little ego pumps.
OK, let me wrap this up. It feels as if I've been sitting here for hours, numbing my butt. I'll just note some of the benefits, the ones besides sleeping more and learning how to relax.
~~I love walking through the more-spacious rooms in the house and feeling the peace that comes from not having so much stuff, even when it used to be nicely sorted and organized. It was still there, lurking (albeit lurking very neatly).
~~I seriously love not having to look for things that I can't find. I know pretty much where everything is because there's a lot less of it, but—BONUS!— because I have a horrid memory, if I do think of something and don't know where it is, I just assumed I've given it away and don't even think about it. This is marvelous; I wonder how many hours in my life I've spent looking for shit, for clothes that were in a bag somewhere or a book that got stuck under a pile of fabric or a pair of scissors that were in another purse. It just doesn't happen any more, and that's wonderful.
~~I can open the closets and see everything I own (clothes and shoes), all right there, all in plain sight. No more stuff crammed onto the racks or piled on shelves or stored out in the storage building. No more guilt about expensive stuff that's not getting worn.
OK. That's it, I'm beginning to fidget, something I don't often do. Got to get up and do something else, but hey: thank you so much for reading this far! If this sounds intriguing to you, I heartily encourage you to find your own simple path. It's a marvelous adventure~~
XO
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