Who took this vacation picture? Was someone else here? We’ll never know.
Last year I was on the cusp of my life changing. Sure, I was turning 50, but I was about to take a year off to live my dream and write my first novel. Kamala Harris had jumped into the presidential race and was going to be our first female president. That meant I was going to come back to work inspired about working for a female commander in chief and having ample career opportunities to pick from. The self-improvement goals were numerous. I was going to get fit again and eat better. I was going to spend my daughter’s junior year being present, not be such a bitch at home, spend more time with my folks, and be a better friend. It was going to be glorious.
A year later, I’m feeling kind of (using an out of date gen-z word here) meh. I’m proud of my book, but a smidge disappointed in my early reader’s feedback. Now that I’m done writing, what do I do next? Do I take the terrifying step to polish it and try to publish, write the next book, or just quit knowing that the publishing world is cruel? The country is a hot pile of steaming shit for so many reasons, but personally I have zero future job opportunities: there is no work in electric vehicle charging, climate change, or green careers because Harris didn’t get elected. My ex-colleagues are all fired, quit, soon to be fired, or scared. My network is decimated. During our family summer vacation I refused to let my family take any pictures of me because I look like a chubby bridge troll with a permanent scowl and wiry hairs growing out of my mole. Someday we’ll look back on our nine days together and wonder if I was there. (Honestly, did the semaglutide botox fervor have to hit now? Many of my friends look better than they did in their 20s, but I’m terrified of a med spa injecting stuff into my body and face. Sigh.)
Poor me.
Yes. I know things could be worse. I know people are starving in Gaza. Shit’s about to get real in the United States as support benefits are crumbled by the Big Beautiful Bill. I saw the impact this administration is having even on the privileged as we toured colleges this summer: less emphasis on services, less emphasis on equity, less emphasis on choices, less emphasis on diversity, and the University of Delaware didn’t even mention that President Joe Biden was an alum. Meanwhile, I feel guilty because we are a rich white family so my kid will be okay even if we have to pay more tuition. Heck, she may be better off, because international students aren’t interested in attending school in a country where they might be being swept off the streets by ICE agents. (We toured Tufts right after Rümeysa Öztürk was arrested by a plainclothes agent off the street in Boston. Unsurprisingly, it was the worst tour we’ve been on. They were probably distracted.)
I know I’m a whiney old lady. I have had a year off. I have enjoyed quality time with my family and friends. I have delighted being available for my kid before she goes off to college next year. Having my mom and husband read my book (and enjoy it) has been a highpoint of my life. Financially we are doing okay, even without my year of salary, because somehow the chaos since election day hasn’t impacted our investments – see rich white family note above.
Tomorrow I will suck it up and be grateful again, but today is my birthday. Today I get to be frustrated at myself for my lack of willpower and becoming a dumpy old lady. Today I get to be aggravated because in less than a year I’ve gone from being a very successful career woman, who did things like meet Secretaries of Energy and Transportation and accepted invitations to the White House, to a worthless 51 year old woman. Today I get to be frustrated because there is so much work to do with my book, and my dozen this year (so far) for short stories, writing conferences, and jobs don’t give me any hope that I can write more than drivel, so what’s the point anyway?
Tomorrow I will celebrate my birthday with friends. Next week I will celebrate with my family. Today I miss the hope of turning 50.
An afternoon game at Coors Field in Denver, Colorado
I saw two white men kneeling on a brown man, forcing his face into the blacktop of the highway yesterday afternoon. Tonight, in the wee hours of July 4th, my country’s birthday, I cannot sleep because I cannot understand how we got here.
Five of us, two teenagers and three adults, were driving home from a baseball game on Interstate 25. Traffic slowed, and my daughter asked why there was a car facing the wrong way on the road. Sure enough, there was an empty SUV pointed north in the southbound lane. Strange, but we, and all the other cars, swerved around it and drove on. What were we going to do, stop turn the SUV around? Before the next exit, there were two munched cars on the side of the road. The people in that accident were out and about, so I assumed it was a normal highway fender bender. Maybe related to the backwards SUV? We kept driving.
Then I saw the third accident. A person with copper skin, an orange shirt, and kinky black hair was getting resuscitated by the side of the road. He was on the ground and a white man had his hands over his heart. I saw the white man doing chest compressions and I did that thing where I didn’t want to look for fear of the gore, but I looked anyway. And then I really saw. The man was not doing chest compressions. The man, a white man, was kneeling on the brown man. The white man had the arms of the brown man pulled behind his back. The white man wasn’t saving the brown man’s life, but pressing his body into the asphalt. The brown man’s face was smashed into the black asphalt on a 91 degree day. Next to the white man knelt another white man. Then we were past them. I’m humiliated to say we didn’t do anything. We just drove on and got ice cream, like we were planning. While a man was being pressed into the scalding highway we got ice cream.
We aren’t monsters. We talked about the scene. Four of us had the same life saving first impression, followed by an oh-shit moment. My daughter’s friend never doubted that she was seeing a white man kneeling on a brown man. We all agreed that the men weren’t police. They weren’t in uniforms. They were men, like my husband, forcing another man into the street. My daughter’s friend, the one with the clearest vision of the situation, commented that the white men had the brown man’s head awfully close to the oncoming traffic, like they didn’t care if he got run over. She wasn’t wrong. My friend wondered what she could do in retirement to make things better. On our way home, we drove past the scene, but traffic had cleared and the tableau was gone.
How did my country end up here? In my almost 51 years, I never dreamed I would witness such a thing. This was a story my dad would tell me from his childhood in Texas. After the fact, I wonder if I’d been alone, would I have stopped? If I’d been driving, would I have stopped? I’m CPR trained. If they were doing compressions I could have helped. If I had mistakenly stopped to help and realized what was going on, could I have made them see the man as a human being who should be treated with dignity? Should I have called someone? Later in the day, I logged onto the godforsaken Twitter app to check the Denver Police feed, but there was nothing. I checked the Facebook Colorado State Patrol feed and there was nothing. Nothing about a backwards car, an accident, or a public assault on a brown man anywhere.
I know there’s a phone number I’m supposed to call if I see ICE agents in our metro area, but I didn’t think of that until tonight. Do they want to hear about something that happened hours ago? I am ashamed of myself. I am a white lady and I need to do better. The country that exists in my head, where people stop by the side of the road to help people is gone. I’m ashamed of my reaction and my behavior. I have the same sick feeling I had when I learned that other families taught their kids how to be safe with the police, while I grew up in a bubble thinking all police would help me.
On our way into the baseball game, we followed a man whose shirt read “Gunpa, like a Grandpa but with more guns and more fun.” At the baseball game the Colorado Rockies were playing the Houston Astros, and I was aggravated by all the obnoxious Texas fans. I stood quietly during the national anthem, while the woman next to me held her hand over her heart and belted out the song. At the 7th inning stretch I remarked that I was grateful we no longer sang “God Bless America” after “Take Me out to the Ballgame.” Those little differences seem like they could exist in the same country. The kind of annoying disparities that make up a population of human beings. Meanwhile, the chasm between the country I thought I lived in, where men stop to do CPR on another man, and the country I actually live in, where men publicly assault other men on the highway, don’t feel like they should exist on the same planet. I need to learn to live in the reality that actually exists, as awful as it is.
It’s been 6 months and 6 days since I stepped away from my job supporting the US Department of Energy, US Federal Highway Administration, US Joint Office of Energy and Transportation, and National Resources Canada where I helped build and document electric charging stations and alternative fuel stations around northern North America. When I left, the election hadn’t happened yet. Kamala Harris was 47 days into her campaign and people at work were confident in her presidency. I even had one of my bosses scoff at me when I mentioned that one of my reasons for leaving was the potential impact on our work from a Trump presidency. He insisted, “That’s never going to happen.”
It happened. One day shy of two months after I left my job supporting the Federal Government Trump won. Four and a half months after I left he took office, and since then I’ve watched from a distance as he’s demolished the work I spent decades building. It’s weird not being in the trenches with my old co-workers trying to salvage what we can.
I swear, if one more person asks me, “Aren’t you SOOOO GLAD you got out when you did?” I’m going to punch them. I’m sorry if it’s you, but I’m sick of it. I worked in public service because I believe in the importance of what the government does for it’s people. I built a team of smart, innovative, caring people who wanted to change the world and our country for the better. I left for a year, not because I wanted to be the first in the swamp drainage, but because I was tired and burned out from working and doing so much. My job consisted of managing 25 people with 30% of my time, and with the other 70% I supported a $16M portfolio, did business development, and managed five of my own projects where I was an individual contributor. I’m so fucking tired of hearing the bullshit about lazy government workers who do nothing. That was not my experience. I’m sick that my team and my projects are being demolished and I can’t help. But I also know that if I was still there, I’d probably be locked away in some padded room rocking slowly, because I was so far over capacity. I would have had no ability to continue working my ass off while the president and his cabinet destroyed our government.
Instead of having an insider’s perspective on the dismantling of the great experiment that was the United States of America’s constitutional division of power, I have been writing. I also left my job, because I had a dream I wanted to realize: to finish my novel. My first month I polished up a short fiction piece, that I love, called Bumblecat. I’m afraid it might never find a home because it’s been rejected five times since I started shopping it around, and it talks about the USDA, which may be dissolved any day. I wrote a second piece about becoming the United States Egg Czar. That one is quite funny, and was also rejected. (But the rejection said it was funny, so I know it is actually funny.) It’s going up on the blog this weekend, because it’s a timely piece and I don’t want it to expire. I hope you like it. The third piece, which will go up on my blog next week is a gut wrencher of a piece about my cat who died in November of 2024. It was also rejected and since it is outside of my normal satire and speculative fiction space and I’m not in the mood to research a bunch of new markets to reject me.
Rejection is my life’s theme right now. My daughter just got cut from the club basketball team she’s been playing on for 4 years, for her senior season. I’ve had 7 writing rejections in 2025. As a country, we are rejecting the values that I hold dear. Honestly, I feel like I exist in a universe that has no room for me.
Thank goodness I’m creating a whole new universe where I can escape. While I’m woefully behind where I’d like to be in my book, I really like it. The people are fascinating and their struggles are meaningful. When I left in September, I expected to have the manuscript done and ready to start shipping to agents by the end of this month. Ha ha. Turns out creative pursuits do not work like technical projects. I can’t lay out a Gantt chart filled with deliverables, milestones, and deadlines and make something like a novel happen. Thankfully after about 3 months of forcing myself to a schedule, I modified my approach and now have half of a book done. I’ve got a plan for the final half all written out with colorful pens on sticky notes stuck to a cardboard thing you’d use at a science fair. I know where I’m going and I’m excited about the direction. I’ve also got book 2 pretty solidified in my head, and book 3 keeps popping in to say “hello.”
The plan was to give this writing thing a year, and then go back to work. But right now, I don’t think there will be work to go back to. My expertise in electric cars and electric car charging has limited value in our country. My 20 years of experience working across the Federal Government is meaningless once the departments I know are dissolved. And everything I write gets rejected, so even if I get this book done, it’s unlikely to ever find a home. All I can do on a daily basis is kick all those worries down the road for future Johanna. Present Johanna still has 6 months of freedom to finish her dream of writing a book, and I try to push away the fear and worry to focus on creating a new world that doesn’t suck as much as this one. Hopefully you’ll get to read about it someday.
January 2021 things were still strange in my world. I was working at home. My daughter’s school delayed their winter start, trying to figure out executing in-person and remote school, so we were both home. She was in sixth grade.
I’m a bit of a political junkie and January 6th, 2021 provided an excellent opportunity to witness something I’d never seen before. The counting of the electoral college votes. I had a light day of meetings and lots of busy work, so I decided to sit with my computer and kiddo to watch the process as an impromptu civics lesson.
MSNBC coverage of the simple process that was supposed to happen to certify the 2020 election
I knew shenanigans were planned for the floor. Republicans were going to protest the count and try to avoid certifying the results. A potentially additional lesson on how the foundation of our government, the peaceful transition of power, would be tested.
I can’t believe how badly we bombed our national test. I remember flashes from watching the news broadcast with my daughter. I remember the interns, young women in suits, protecting the electoral college votes and whisking them away from the mob storming the capital. In my memory the votes were in wooden chests that invoked the history and importance of their contents. My memory is not wrong. I remember watching a gurney rolled out of the capital building and my daughter asking me, “Did someone die?” With the sheet pulled up over the body, I could only respond, “I think so.” My memory is not wrong. Windows were broken in our capitol and men wearing dead animals on their heads walked the floor of the House and Senate. As a lover of dystopian novels, reality stretched the bounds of my imagination that day while I watched a mob vandalize and disrespect our capitol, our country, and our system of government. I watched start to finish. It was not a “day of love” and those people were not “patriots”.
Image of my television showing the January 6th riot. One man holds Trump flags while another holds a Confederate flag in the United States Capitol.
It was a civics lesson that would continue. I remember the day last year when my daughter came home from her AP US History class ebullient about the importance of the peaceful transfer of power. Her knowledge had finally caught up with her experiences and she went on and on about how January 6th was the antithesis of the principles that make our country special. In two years she’ll cast her first ballot, and she can’t wait. Already she’s a highly informed voter.
My first election in 1992 I was a single issue voter. Straight democrat to protect abortion rights. When I was in my late teens and twenties unwanted pregnancies weren’t about a late term abortions to save the life of the mother. They weren’t about fetal abnormalities or ectopic pregnancies. They were about boyfriends who already broke up with you, and you didn’t want their baby. They were about being on the precipice of starting your own life and knowing your newly hatched dreams wouldn’t be possible with a child. They were about your parents, who wouldn’t understand. They were about getting loans from your friends for the $300 procedure, because if you couldn’t afford an abortion how were you going to afford a kid? They were about not wanting to be a mother and not wanting to join your life to a partner. That precious potential of young women was the most important thing in my world, and I voted to protect myself and my friends.
Now that protection is gone. Thank goodness pharmaceutical abortions were developed since my first election in 1992. When Dobbs took away our constitutional right I immediately ordered abortion medication. Not because I was pregnant. Not because anyone I knew was pregnant. But because I have had friends show up on my doorstep, needing help, and I wanted to make sure that help was available in the future. While mine and other woman’s rights to bodily autonomy are protected in my state, and hopefully will soon be in our constitution, I don’t trust that my country will continue to protect my right to choice.
My memory is not wrong. In high school I was told that abortion rights were protected by Roe and would never go away. Now I am told that January 6th wasn’t a riot incited by a Trump supporting mob. Trump’s Supreme Court nominees have revoked my rights as a human being. Trump’s followers desecrated our capitol and the ideals of our country.
I want to be able to remember how in 2024, we rejected violence and authoritarian control. I want to remember sitting next to my daughter and watching as we elect our first woman president. I want to remember what it’s like to have a leader who has lived in a female body with female vulnerabilities for 60 years and how that changed our country for the better. I want us to remember how to celebrate our differences and learn from each other again. I’m ready to remember the first moments of a Harris presidency.
2020 was a crazy year. In the midst of a global pandemic, I had a really good thing happen. But I never shared the really good thing on Afthead, because Afthead was a public place and the really good thing wasn’t necessarily something I wanted people to know about. Okay, I didn’t want my friends to know, because I was extremely frustrated with some of their COVID protocols, or lack thereof. To cope I wrote a satire piece about them and it got published in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. This publication is a big deal in the humor world. McSweeney’s acceptance rate hovers right around 1%. It’s like getting into the Stanford-Harvard of magazines. I highly recommend checking it out.
Somehow, the idea of reaching out to all my friends whose food intolerances I’d fastidiously honored in the past and telling them that I was publicly mocking them seemed wrong. Also, I wasn’t in a good place with many of them when it was published. I was busy being lonely and angry while they were out camping without me, because I wanted to do ridiculous things like wear a mask. Or their kids were doing remote school together because it was so hard on them.
Four years in the future, several of those people are my friends again (and the ones who aren’t never really were). Most of us have talked about how we were all doing the best we could during those really hard times, and have forgiven each other. Or we just let it go.
But I still haven’t mentioned to them about the most popular thing I’ve ever written. I didn’t tell them that afterwards I got interviewed by The Writer magazine, featured in an article about getting COVID-19 stories published. I didn’t share all the emails I got from strangers telling me how they were struggling too. I didn’t forward the funny comment from Facebook, “Licorice has gluten?” I didn’t want to stretch those strained relationships any farther.
So why post this now? Why not just let the happiness stay quarantined? A couple of things have changed. First, I realized that the friends I was frustrated with don’t read this blog. They don’t see my words. Unless I print this out and shove it under their windshield wipers they won’t know. Also, I did tell lots of people. Work friends got a link. Family got a link. People who I know didn’t follow my exact protocols read it and enjoyed it. Finally, I’ve told everyone I’m taking a year off to write. If I’m a writer, I want to celebrate my writing successes. I decided four years was enough space. It’s okay to let out a little celebratory yay about this piece and say I’m proud of it.
The magical thing about this piece was that it all came out in a whoosh. Normally my writing has tens of drafts littering a piece-specific folder on my computer. (Even this post has 22 revisions!) For my McSweeney’s piece there’s not a single draft on my computer. I wrote it, edited it, and published it from one file. I remember showering and furiously crafting this letter I would send to my friends. I didn’t write a word until I had all the biting phrases worked out. It was like I’d birthed the story fully formed out of my fingertips. Such magic should be acknowledged.
The last amazing thing about this piece? I was in the middle of graduate school when I wrote it. I hadn’t had a creative urge since March 13, 2020 when we all got sent home from work and school to survive the end of the world. I was taking my last two master’s level classes before my capstone. I was working full time and helping my kid do school from home. I was terrified for my parent’s lives, and my support system was fractured and frayed because of my community’s disagreement on the pandemic. It was a horrible, horrible time, and I dealt with it by producing witty, poignant, biting satire. Looking back, I am in awe of myself.
If you want to take a trip back in time and see how September of 2020 felt, now’s your chance. It was a time before COVID vaccinations. We were on the cusp of a huge winter surge. 700 people were dying a day. Somehow I coped by crafting words like this:
People can have COVID and not know it, kind of like that irresponsible room mom last Halloween that didn’t know licorice has gluten. Mistakes happen. You might be laughing and shouting germs all over and never know until someone gets sick. Imagine how embarrassed you’d feel if you accidentally killed my parents. They say hi by the way.
The little masterpiece is still online at McSweeney’s if you feel like taking a trip down that horrific memory lane. Me? I’m going to go reread the acceptance note. It’s glorious.
Thanks for the submission. This is great. We will take it! It should run in the next few weeks. Would you mind sending me a photo and bio for your author profile?
It’s been two weeks since I left my job to live the dream of being a full time writer. Inevitably, everyone’s first questions are “Are you writing?” or “How’s your book coming?” My first week I had a list of activities that would prove to myself and my friends that I was doing the writing thing. I investigated libraries as writing offices. I became my own tech support and installed a new battery in my laptop, then downloaded Scrivner (a software package for writers). I took the Scrivner tutorial, then found all my novel files, and uploaded them into the Scrivner novel template. I rearranged my desk into a writer’s desk, rather than a worker’s desk. I wrote a blog post. I made a writing plan. I worked on a short story. I created a to-do list for my novel rewrite. I started reading a writing book. Look at me becoming a full-time-writer.
But I also left my job for personal reasons. My connections to people outside of work were degrading. So I made cookies for a friend who had a death in the family. I attended parent teacher conferences. I went to therapy. I sent a short story to my mom, so she could help make it better. I went on an anniversary hike with my husband and cut his hair. I fixed our YMCA membership so I could start taking classes and work on my physical health. I managed to slowly run a 5k. I drove my kid to volunteer activities and concerts and helped rescue her broken car. Look at me fixing myself and my friends and family.
The first week was just like working, but at a different job, which is what I told everyone I was going to do. I was proud of my accomplishments, and friends were impressed with how I’d transitioned right over to this new life.
The second week tells a different story.
I also left my job because I was exhausted and my personal life and home life were suffering. All that came crashing in the second week. The cat boxes and guinea pig cages were filthy. I still had seven performance reviews to write for the job I quit. (Yeah, I know, unpaid labor, but it was for people I care about.) My health insurance expires soon, so I got my COVID and flu shots, then spent a day and a half asleep in bed. (My normal booster after-effects, but since my only COVID infection lasted 10 days, I keep getting boosted.) I had my final OB/GYN appointment complete with pap smear. Midweek, I tried a full self-care yoga-mom day: I bought tickets for our winter trip; I actually went to a yoga class; I got my nails done with my daughter (homecoming for her, simple vanity for me). I tried to include more people in my week. I had lunch and walked with friends and spent an hour picking apples with my mom in her backyard. The weekend was filled with homecoming activities – volunteering, unexpectedly staying for the football game to visit with friends, steaming my kid’s dress, taking homecoming pictures, and delivering forgotten items around town. The only writer thing I accomplished was working on my short story, visiting a third library, and thinking a lot about my book. One might say I failed week 2 as a writer.
Three weeks ago my days were dictated by my Outlook calendar. Life was scheduled from 8-4 (or 7-6 on a bad day) in half hour or hour chunks going from meeting to meeting to meeting. Often I didn’t have time for lunch, and bathroom breaks were quick jaunts where I had to wait to start my next conference call because you could hear the toilet flushing from my desk. Milestones were set and documented with clients. I had no time to think deeply or be thoughtful.
My other issue is that I’ve been working since I was 14, and working full time since I was 23. Gosh. I’ve been working full time more than half my life. The only break I’ve had in those 27 years was 13 weeks for maternity leave. Okay, I also went down to 32 hours for about a year when my kiddo had non-stop ear infections, and then went down to 32 hours during my last year of my master’s degree, but in both of those cases the extra hours I wasn’t workin’ for the man were dictated by someone other than me. It wasn’t like this. I really don’t know how to not work a regular job.
This is a whole different life in an unexpected way. I’m responsible for deciding what I’m going to do. I’ll write my own performance review. I get to report if I’m succeeding or failing. Am I allowed to take a day off? Can I knit during working hours? Can I write after hours? What are my hours? Is napping allowed? Someone forgot to give me the unemployed workers handbook. This week, I’m going to choose to be kind to myself. Anyone who has worked for me will say that I tell everyone to expect a struggle in the first 3 months of a new job. I’m going to give myself a little of my own managerial grace as I figure this out.
I’m writing this post from library number four. (Oddly, a library I started working at when I was 16.) So far, I’ve found 3 of the 4 libraries to be productive writing work spaces. They have the right amount of background noise and I like being surrounded by books. Today I was able to research points of view from books in the 808 nonfiction section. (I love the Dewey Decimal System.) I’ve got a plan for figuring out if my novel needs first person, third person omniscient, or an editorial narrator. I’m excited about doing some writing on my actual book, not because it’s on a to do list, but because I’m curious. Tonight is writer’s group and I have a writing conference this weekend. I have absolutely promised myself that I won’t let the writing conference crush my soul, as they often do. If I start to hate a session I can leave. I don’t have to go the whole time.
I’m glad that I’m keeping track of my days, because I want to know what makes a day good and productive and what days are frustrating. Just like in my other job, I’ve found that the to-do items I don’t finish make me angry at myself, but I still forget all the things I did accomplish. Going back to review makes me feel better. I haven’t “wasted two weeks” because I haven’t rewritten 87 pages of my novel. I’m being thoughtful with my time and activities. Instead of thinking that I’ve squandered 1/26th of my year off, I’m going to focus on how I’ve set myself up to make the next 25/26ths a success, however I end up defining success.
For my 50th birthday I am giving myself a gift. The biggest gift (monetarily) I will ever give or receive. (Well unless I get all philosophical and consider the gift of life to my kid, but that’s outside the scope of this post.) I am quitting my job to take a year off to write my book. Goodbye annual salary, hello priceless time.
I started this book in 2013, eleven years ago. Since then I’ve raised my kid to driving age, started and finished a master’s degree, got promoted, grew my team to twenty-three people, visited the White House and increased our team’s portfolio to $10M dollars. But do you know what I haven’t done? I haven’t written my book. I published an essay, a satire piece, and a short story, and was racing into 2020 on a high of acceptances. But then my writing started suffering. It suffered because, for me, a global pandemic and a creative mindset did not go hand in hand. It also suffered because of my master’s capstone completion in November of 2020 and my subsequent brain-fry hangover. It suffered because I took an “opportunity” to do a second role at the same place I already had a job. But about a year ago, I was down to one job, my degree was a memory in a frame, I survived COVID, and the creativity dam broke and I really, really, really wanted to start writing again.
Only an idiot would quit their lucrative high-paying career as a 50-year-old woman. I don’t have a single friend who can’t tell a horror story about a middle-aged woman getting forced out for being too old. I myself was recently informed, by a younger male colleague, that I wasn’t “hungry enough” to do my job effectively. If I quit now, I might never work again. This is conventional wisdom and even my six page list of contacts isn’t enough to make me consider that I’m not murdering my future job prospects with this move.
In 2016 I had a plan. I would get my Master’s degree, as required for female upward mobility at my company, then I would work for a year as required for tuition reimbursement by my company, and then I would apply for a year long sabbatical to finish my book. I would get a break, accomplish my dreams, and go back to work. It was a perfect plan destroyed by COVID-19 and bureaucracy. By the time I wanted to write again the leave policy had changed and the sabbatical requirement had changed to require relevancy to the mission of my workplace. My novel is not relevant.
Why not wait until retirement? What’s another 15 years of work? Can’t your dreams wait? Couldn’t you just find time to write? Your kid’s going to college soon, you’ll have plenty of time to write then. Just give it a couple more years. The fiscally conservative engineering voices in my head have plenty of reasons for me not do this. My heart has a different perspective.
As a fan of Stephen King’s On Writing, I am a believer in the ideal reader. Each writer has a person they are writing for, and my book is being written for my mom. In the past few years, I have made a remarkable discovery. My parents are not getting younger, and a couple of health scares with my dad has been a terrifying reminder that they are not immortal. So if I want my ideal reader to read my book, I best write it while she’s still alive, don’t you think?
I also have an obligation to my daughter. She’s getting ready to go off into the world as a new adult, and has said things to me and my husband like, “I don’t want to hate my job like you two do.” Now she’s a pessimist, but I do complain a lot about my job, and while I want her to learn responsibility and stick-to-itiveness, I feel like I’ve gone above and beyond in modeling that behavior. I also want her to see that you only have one life and dreams are not worthless. She was the one, when I told her my plan, said, “Well mom, when you sell your book, you’ll make up that lost salary, right?” She voiced the dream I am afraid to even ponder, because that engineer brain in my head knows all the statistics about the impossibility of publication. While she is living with me, I want her to see the joy, the pain, the price, and (hopefully) the payback of dreams.
Tomorrow this little egg of a dream will be hatched. I will tell my boss. The next day I will tell my team. I will begin the process of transition. I have a list of tasks and the people I think can take them over. Tomorrow people other than my trusted family and friends will know. People will be hurt. People will be angry. People won’t understand. People will mock and eye roll and smirk. People will be glad. People will see opportunity. People might be inspired. Tomorrow this won’t just be about me, but will be about everyone else. I’m writing this today so that I can remember why I’m doing this before everyone else has an opinion. Why it’s important to me. Why I want and deserve this gift.
‘Cause there were pages turned with the bridges burned Everything you lose is a step you take So make the friendship bracelets Take the moment and taste it You’ve got no reason to be afraid
You’re on Your Own, Kid – Taylor Swift
The bracelets I received at the Eras Tour
My favorite part of the Taylor Swift Eras concert was trading friendship bracelets. I love interacting with strangers, especially short, positive, meaningful interactions. I constantly embarrass my family by telling the woman at the drive up window, “I love your nails” or asking a random walker, “Your knit hat is adorable, did you make it?”
At first I didn’t completely understand the idea. You’re on Your Own, Kid on the Midnights album made it clear that I should, “make the friendship bracelets,” but to me, a kid from the 1980s, friendship bracelets were those woven things made out of embroidery floss. I could make one or two a week, but that wouldn’t yield many to trade at the concert. Then I figured out that in 2023, people were putting beads on stretchy elastic string to make Eras Tour friendship bracelets. Much easier. I made five, while my daughter started picking album names out of our meager supply of letter beads. My bracelets had no words. I did more research and realized that the words were the point. I was supposed to put album names, song names, and song lyrics into the bracelets and the bracelets were supposed to be colored to match individual album themes. Goodness, there was so much to be learned about the Taylor Swift community.
Armed with all the rules and regulations, I first made bracelets with the title of every album, except one, following a more-or-less album appropriate color scheme. (My goal was to use beads I had, and I don’t like purple or pink, which is a problem in Taylor Swift land and I also didn’t have number beads, so no 1989.) Short album titles like Red and albums without the letter E like Midnights were great, because we didn’t have many E beads. Then I made ones with favorite non-E song titles like Karma and The Man. Then lots of bracelets with favorite song lyrics: “too loud” and “calm down” (from You Need to Calm Down); “be patient” and “power”; “clever” and “kind” (from Marjorie).
The day of the concert I went rogue. My endless reading of the Taylor Swift Eras tour Facebook groups taught me that some fans who didn’t get tickets were getting jobs in security, concessions, and merchandise sales. In a last minute fit of creativity, I made “concessions” and “security” bracelets. I left the house with thirty-five tradeable masterpieces on my arms.
The first bracelet went to a little girl with a “10th Birthday” sash around her shoulder. Her mom parked in the same parking lot we did, and they walked to the stadium in front of us, arms bare of bracelets. As we crossed onto the stadium grounds I placed a rainbow beaded “Eras” bracelet into the birthday girl’s hand, which was cupped in front of her as if she was expecting my gift. I said, “Happy Birthday” as she turned toward us. Her mom, who’d looked like a scary momma bear during the walk broke out in a grin. “Do you want to trade?” she asked and unzipped her fanny pack, which contained a shower ring filled with bracelets. Apparently not everyone kept their bracelets prominently displayed on their wrists, who knew!
In line to enter the stadium I traded my Speak Now bracelet with a single lavender glass flower-painted bead to a teen in a flowing lavender dress from Idaho and gave a Red bracelet to her mom. I overhead the girl raving how my special bead matched her outfit. Another little girl got my rainbow star “Eras” bracelet. She didn’t have any to trade, but her mom was so happy. “She’s five and this is her first big concert.” I explained to the five-year-old that this was my first big concert too. We traded with another mom and daughter who were originally from Chicago but had recently moved to a suburb of Denver and then we bonded over our no-line-cutting rule-following enforcement. When the gates open we lost each other, but for 20 minutes we were all best friends.
A lone older lady security guard at the bottom of the escalator got my “security” bracelet. As we raced to the top level of the stadium we found lineless concessions and happy workers. Our first purchase were two lemonades, and those cups with lemons kept our voices fresh the whole night as we refilled them with water over and over. I asked the woman who took our order if she was a fan and if she wanted a bracelet and she did! I gave her one, since she had none of her own. A few stands down was a girl who looked my daughter’s age, so I asked her if she wanted a bracelet and gave her my “concession” one. She beamed.
Back down to our section and a woman in a lavender suitcoat was issuing commands into a walkie talkie. Without asking, I dropped “The Man” bracelet into her hand and didn’t wait to see her response. I mean, of course she was a fan if she was wearing that jacket, but no need to distract her from her important work.
Bracelet trading began in earnest as more fans arrived, and ebbs and flows of trading groups would gather then disband. There were women that had made hundreds of bracelets, and they all knew a rule I had missed, that acronyms of song lyrics were not just acceptable, but encouraged. While my “be kind be clever” 14-letter bracelet needed some explaining, somehow everyone knew the 9-letter NBSKYFTBC was the opening line to “Marjorie,” used less beads, and didn’t require any precious E beads.
Never be so kind, you forget to be clever
marjorie, by Taylor Swift
My last (and favorite) trading happened when I left mid-concert to get the coveted quarter-zip sweatshirt for my kiddo. I missed two songs, but getting the shirt and extra stranger love made it worthwhile. I stood in line for 15 precious minutes with other fans who wanted a souvenir more than they wanted to hear All too Well (Ten Minute Version). I was outraced to the back of the line by a middle school teacher and her two elementary school teacher friends. I joked that I didn’t mind if they beat me, so long as there were still sweatshirts left. Then a gay couple from Utah joined behind us and we all had a lovely chat about their delicious looking dippin dots. Finally, a tired looking teenage boy called me up to place my order. He brought me my shirt and CD and looked to see if there were any last water bottles rolling around. There were not. As he scanned my purchases into his tablet, I noticed his wrists were empty. Over 2 and a half hours into the concert and he didn’t have a single friendship bracelet. When he told me my total I handed him my card and asked, “Hey, do you want a friendship bracelet?” I’ll never forget the look he gave me. It was like a kid on Christmas morning. The exhaustion fell from him, replaced with radiating delight. When he responded “Yes!” I slid one of my early no-letter bracelets on his wrist. It would look totally normal on a teenage boy, even after the concert.
My last stop was to grab a cold bottle of water for one last lemonade cup refill. I had two of my original bracelets left. A woman in her 60s took my order and wanted a bracelet when I offered. I gave her my second to last one, then got distracted by a teenager jumping up from where the food was being cooked and rushing to the register.
“Did you say friendship bracelets?” the skinny green haired teen asked. “Do you want to trade? It’s been slow since the concert started and I’ve just been sitting back there making bracelets but there’s no one to trade with.” They held up 7 loosely strung bracelets that were too big to be rings, but too small to fit adult wrists, made of giant plastic pony beads. They started explaining their offerings, “This one is for Speak Now, and this one is for Lover, and this one is for all the albums.”
I stopped them and pointed to the colorful bracelet that had a bead for each album, “I’d like that one, but I only have one left to trade.” I held it up – light green with cut glass beads and the words “one dollar”. “It’s a little random,” I explained, “it’s for the lawsuit that Taylor Swift filed in Denver, where she won, but only asked for a single dollar in damages.” The teen understood the message that everyone else had passed over all night. It was a weird Denver specific bracelet with beads that matched their hair. They held out their bracelet to trade for mine.
“This is so cool,” they said, “I love it.”
People who aren’t Taylor Swift fans ask me what was so special about the concert and what’s so special about her music. After 3 plus years of pandemic nonsense, connection feels precious. It’s hard to succinctly describe the feeling of belonging when you can walk up to any of 70,000 strangers, offer a handmade bracelet and not be afraid. This concert brought people together from different generations, income levels, and geographies and gave them a venue for common joy. We interacted with strangers in intimate cathartic bursts and then sang together for three and a half hours. For me, the Eras Tour music put words and a voice to what I’ve lost during Covid and the concert provided a temporary community that felt like family.
I always thought when you went over the tipping point that there would be a fall. Instead, I’ve learned when you go over the tipping point the point impales itself in your heart and holds you aloft writhing like an insect being prepared for a museum display.
Internally, I can’t understand why I’ve found myself stuck. All I’ve done is experienced two years of the pandemic in the most privileged way possible. I worked from home in my basement office while my husband worked from home in our bedroom, and my daughter attended school at home; then at home and at school; and now at school. We have money to pay for broadband, computers, masks, and COVID tests. I should feel lucky.
My mom is alive. I didn’t survive cancer. I don’t currently have cancer. My house didn’t burn to the ground. The opposite scenarios are all ones my friends have experienced since 2020. I didn’t get COVID. My daughter didn’t infect her grandparents when she got COVID. Thank goodness.
My co-workers think I’m a great boss and do great work. I’m working on a project to fundamentally reduce the climate change impacts of transportation system in this country. This week, my work was lauded by the Secretary of Energy and the Secretary of Transportation. I am at a career high point.
I know mental health. I’ve lived with a partner with depression for 22 years. I experienced anxiety during this pandemic in a vicious cycle of chest tightening, worrying I have COVID causing additional chest tightening and more worry that I have COVID. I was seeing the therapist at my doctor’s office until she quit. She never suggested medication. I took the quizzes every appointment. I’m not jittery. I can focus. I can sleep. I am fine.
Sometimes feeling bad is appropriate. Sometimes the combined strain of the banal — lost friendships, loneliness, dead pets — and a literal apocalyptic existence leave you feeling kinda crappy. I just checked my favorite John’s Hopkins COVID-19 dashboard and 5,802,066 people have died worldwide. I was tempted to round to 5.8 million, but 2,066 feels like significant digits. That’s 2,066 sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, friends, lovers, human beings. I can’t imagine 2,066 deaths much less the other 5,800,000. An antidepressant doesn’t make that go away. Every day brings new catastrophes. A quick scan of today’s headlines: war, border blockades, delayed vaccines for kids, and voter suppression. Awesome.
I’m supposed to work and achieve. I’m supposed to be a visionary. I’m supposed to lead, mentor, and manage others. I’m supposed to raise a healthy well-balanced child. I’m supposed to care for my family, my friends, and do not forget the all-important self-care. But what if self-care requires alone time to cry or scream? What if I’ve sucked up all I can suck and need to experience legitimate emotions during my endless daily cycle of bedroom, basement office, kid’s sporting events, kitchen, and back to my office for a few more hours before returning to my bedroom to sleep? When do I to take an hour, a day, a week, a month and fall apart because the world is a horrible scary place? And if I breakdown, then what? Do I pick myself up and start climbing to the tipping point again? This isn’t a brain chemistry problem. This is reality.
And here’s the thing. I’m not alone. If I look around there is a mountain range of impaled others. If I listen closely, I can hear a chorus of “I’m fine.” “I’m good.” “Doing okay.”
How am I doing? I am scared. I am exhausted. I am angry. I am stuck. And I don’t know how or when it gets better.
Afthead 