I wrote this in my journal on Mar 26, 2010, about two weeks after I'd left Oklahoma. I had about a $1000 in my bank account, and no game plan except to go live at an anarchistic commune outside of Austin:
I spent 18 years alone in a room with my books, my writing, and my hard-edged fear, and I am only now beginning to emerge from my cocoon into the external universe. So many writers say that you need to live before you can write, and I can finally understand the sentiment. I will never regret the time I spent alone, but a new phase of my life has begun and I will never go back to that gray room inside my head.
I know you haven't heard from me in a while. I undertook a mission to combat the inertia that had been festering inside of me from birth. I left my grandparent's farm in Oklahoma and set out for Austin. NOmanNO and I spent two weeks living at Echowood, an egalitarian commune in a rural town called Rosanky, Texas. Two weeks in a place where I saw my anarchist ideals come to life. The days were spent working out in the farm tending to goats, mending fences, feeding chickens, building a goat barn and a trellis for spinach, filling potholes, shooting arrows, nights spent around the kitchen table in a haze of smoke, playing cards and talking about the woman who went crazy and began seeing people in the woods and the Vietnam vet who set up ziplines around his tent outside and how politics no longer mattered, drinking beer and sitting around a fire playing a cigar-box dulcimer.
We left and rented out a room in the Austin suburbs from a divorced man who owned a haunted house. There we spent two and a half weeks writing content articles to pay for rent and an endless supply of quesadillas and banana bread. I worked on my novel and on Sundays went into downtown to cook, serve, and eat food with Food Not Bombs and shoot paper airplanes with contact information onto the balconies of rooms displaying anarchy symbols. We dumpster-dived in the back of Double Daves Pizza and Saccone's Pizza, finding enough pizza to eat for two days straight, a few packages of ramen, a package of croutons, and a toy car that made engine noises when you rolled its wheels. Considered staging a revolution against Wal-Mart, for locking their food dumpsters with bolts. NOmanNO helped organize a rally to protest Nazis in Waco, before the Nazis canceled their rally.
Packed up all of our possessions into the car and drove to Denton with the plan to sleep in a state park until we could find another place to rent. A facebook friend who helped organize the Anti-Nazi rally told us he would be at a certain location within an hour if we wanted to meet him, gave us an address. We drove there, NOmanNO knocked on the door and he said we were looking for Daniel.
"Daniel who?"
"Daniel ------, big jolly guy with a beard like Mikhail Bakunin," he said.
A guy wearing a Chomsky shirt opened the door and said we could come in because NOmanNO mentioned Bakunin. Another guy came to the door and asked if we were the people Daniel mentioned who were looking for a place to stay until we found a room for rent.
"Yeah," NOmanNO said, "that's us."
"Oh, you can stay here."
We had inadvertently stumbled onto a collectivist anarchist house. I perused their library, with an extensive Noam Chomsky section, and read my Philip K. Dick and a Crimethinc book, watched the first half of REDS, went for a walk and battled on the lawn. A homeless man the collective knew who had disappeared for three weeks came in at twelve at night to crash on the couch with us. We got up early to search for apartments for rent, and we're now hanging out at Jupiter House in the Denton square before we head out again to look at more places to rent.
I glossed over the inconvenient details in the post above, like how we'd been kicked out of the commune because "We didn't fit in," and how I broke down in Denton and had to be taken to the cheap clinic who'd take me without insurance where they gave me nothing except 10 clonazepam to calm down because a young twenty-something white girl is probably the definition of a drug addict. Still, a pervasive glow illuminated everything.
I think the biggest risk I'd ever taken was leaving home and dropping out of college. I think nostalgia can color both the past and the future, and nostalgia was a sweet, clean, and dark future. I'd take a minimum wage job, write books, sit in fields and walk through Oklahoman forests. And it was fine for a while - I was writing more than I had been in a long time. My aunt and I took long walks through their gorgeous land, my uncle sipping whiskey and smoking a cigar as he trudged behind us in the creek.
But depression sank into me again, like an insidious little thing. It came as it usually did, with extended periods of sleep, with a headache after I woke at 7 p.m after a five hour nap, the bed sticky with sweat. I went six months looking for jobs on my zero experience, frantically applying everywhere I could find with no results. I never regretted the risk I'd taken to come here, but I knew I needed to get out. Again. So I set a date, February 14th, emailed the commune, and left on the Amtrak bus.
"Take a risk," says the self-help guru, "Do what you've always wanted to do." But what they don't tell you is that the risk is only the beginning, and not the ultimate solution. The risk is holding your breath and jumping out into the water. It's setting inertia into motion, and physics propels you into the water. But what happens after, when you're treading in the cold murk? Soon what you've set into motion becomes stagnant again. Find a higher cliff. Jump higher. Assess what went wrong. Jump again. Hell, take the Winnebago or whatever you drove to get to these cliffs and drive off to reassess for another day.
It's easy to become enmeshed into habits. So you went to your dream city, you took the risk - but you visit the same restaurants, hang out with the same people, and spend Friday night at the same bar. You've sunk into a cataclysm of routine. The dangerous assumption is that risk is a one-time process. It's a continuous assessment of your living conditions and your exploration inside yourself. I think there's some biological imperative to continue to seek out new experiences, new modes of living, new ways to dress in the morning.
I've found that when I'm sinking in the mire of non-action, of routine, even changing a small thing can induce more change. Movement induces movement. Take a moment and ask yourself what you need to change, what are the ways in which you've become too comfortable or stagnant in your progress? What are the ways in which you've been avoiding something painful but necessary?
Don't wait for the perfect moment. Get up, and take a single step toward something new.
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Self portrait by me canon t51
Some of my other posts you may be interested in:
Essentials For A Writer's Wardrobe
How Shadow People From My Dreams Taught Me The Power of Fear and Improved My Writing
At the San Diego Dog Beach // PTSD // Recovery Journal
[Short Story] Letter to The Girl That Ate My Skin
[Flash Fiction] A Letter to My Imaginary Husband
What It's Like To Go From Ugly To Pretty
Notes For A Young Horror Writer [Writer's Journal]
[Short Story] Job Requirements For The Destroyer of Worlds
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