I drafted the below Substack on Sunday and then an artist popped into my studio before I could read it over and hit send and then we got a massive storm and lost power.
There’s still no electricity, which is a wild experience in a place that already doesn’t have cell phone service and is definitely haunted. Also the storm that blew in and blew out the power was intense — 70 mph winds, at one point, and horizontal, heavy rains for hours. I went to bed early and hoped the old windows would hold up.
In the morning the worst of it had passed and a dear friend came to visit. We went into San Francisco, a city I don’t know well. It was good to be somewhere new, somewhere busy, with good croissants and people watching.
This residency has been fruitful. I’ve got 14 pages of a second book written, which is a huge feat when you consider that I’ve been trying to get a single page of it for about seven years.
The people I’ve met here have been lovely. I’m sharing a table at a cafe right now with a man name Evan who is working on his drone certification, which I didn’t know was a thing. He’s young, sweet. Has kind bright blue eyes and, when we’d done the precursory chatting and shifted gears back to our screens, he said “Nice to meet you, Amanda” which is one of my favorite things a stranger can do. Remember your name and repeat it back to you. It’s a simple, wonderful thing.
I often feel my time in the desert has made me forget how simple and wonderful the world can be and how brilliant I can feel when I’m in it, not in its outskirts.
My time of solitude is coming to an end. Slowly, but certainly.
The first night without power I sat with my tarot deck and stared at The Hermit for a while. I pulled him a lot last year and, more recently, I’ve been pulling him in reverse — a signifier of loneliness and withdrawing from loved ones. Solitude and self-reflection gone wrong or too long.
I’ve always liked that he has a staff and a lantern. The Hermit knows and can see a way out, when he’s ready. He need only look up.
I wrote about stillness and some second half to my life on Sunday and, from the sunshine of Tuesday, I recognize that part of this life shift requires a wandering back out.
From Sunday:
There is no cell phone service at Headlands and there is only wifi in the studio buildings, so my time at the house where I stay on the property here has mostly been filled with reading and working my way through a VHS collection.
I watched Sideways last night. Paul Giamatti was 37 and Thomas Haden Church was 44 when they filmed it. Somewhere about halfway through the film I thought, “Oh. I, too, am middle aged.”
I don’t know that that’s entirely fair — I’ve always thought of middle aged as somewhere around 50 — but I certainly feel like one half of my life is quite…finished.
I’ve maintained an inherent sense of limitlessness for most of my life. That I could live anywhere for a year, do any job for six months, date any guy for three months, be anyone for at least an afternoon or an evening.
I’ve managed to do all of these things more than a few times. This has been my life force; kept me alive the same as breathing, eating, sleeping. It’s also brought me a lot of adventure, joy, and love. But in the last year I have felt more pulled to a certain kind of stillness. Not necessarily to one place or one role, but to a consistency inside; to being a through line where I have mostly been a dot or dotted.
I don’t want to be anyone, anywhere, anytime I want anymore.
There’s a grief tied to it, though. And it does feel like aging, in the crueler sense of the word.
My mom has had a magnet on her fridge for 20+ years that says “Ask a teenager for their advice while they still know everything.”
I was certainly reckless in my teens, but it wasn’t until my 20s that I was pretty sure I knew everything. And by that point, I had a Tumblr that had gained some level of a loyal following, which is how I came to receive this question when I was 28:
Anonymous asked:
You use the phrase, "The world is my oyster." I was recently told that as encouragement, but I'm 30 years old, never went to college, unemployed for six years, only just now learning how to drive, and desperately trying to find a way to move/find work two hours away so I can be with my girlfriend. Maybe the world is my oyster, but I have no idea how to see it that way. I'm trying, but it's so hard to breathe like this, so hard to keep from collapsing into a pile of terror.
And here is how I answered:
Have you ever seen an oyster in the wild? Have you ever tried to open it? It’s fucking hard.
Do you know the origin of the phrase “The world is my oyster”? It comes from Shakespeare’s play The Merry Wives of Windsor:
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