…a mere three weeks after returning from Buenos Aires. Why, you ask? (Well, you didn't ask, but I'm pretending you did.) Maybe just because… I can?
(Why the question mark after “can”? Is that the reason, or isn’t it?)
I’m struggling with confidence. With making decisions and sticking to them.
The other day, I said to my son, “Maybe I can change my ticket to fly out of Mexico City...” He said, “Why don’t you just stick with your decisions, Mom?”
It made me feel bad. But, it’s true. I waffle and waver and fret. I battle crazy waves of guilt and shame and confusion. It’s actually really weird.
It’s true. I’ve noticed I feel vaguely—no, let’s be honest, acutely—ashamed that I’m going to Mexico. It feels decadent and irresponsible when I don’t have an income and haven’t had one since December 8.
How can I possibly be “going on vacation”?
A tumult of thoughts and defenses ensues. First, it’s not a vacation. I don’t think of it as such. It’s an exploration. I’m testing ideas, testing the possibility of living somewhere less expensive (and more colorful!) for a while, perhaps until my kids start having kids. I figure I have about ten years, maybe less, to enjoy myself before coming home to be… Grandma. (Yikes.)
Second, ironically or oxymoronically, the time between jobs feels like the only possible time to go somewhere else. Working in B2B tech marketing for the past 20 years, I always felt guilty and ashamed when I had the temerity to ask for two weeks instead of one. People always commented. “Two weeks! Wow!”
It was depressing. I always felt like two weeks was far too short to really relax and get to know a place. I still feel that way. And yet, it was “simply not done” or slightly frowned upon to take a full two weeks. This was true at every company I worked at. The censure was subtle, but it was there. Hopefully, this is changing.
Third, Hell, it’s so much cheaper to be in Mexico or Argentina than it is to be here in Oakland, California, where a latte at the Blue Bottle on the corner is now $7.
I feel like I can breathe in these other countries. I can eat amazing food at the covered markets and on the street without being stricken with dread. I can buy affordable groceries, and beautiful produce. A ribeye big enough for two at the local butcher in Palermo, my Buenos Aires neighborhood, was $3.50. Two Niman Ranch New York steaks here are… $67 at my local market. I kid you not.
Also, I want to be somewhere where people are on the street, milling around, filling the cafes and the plazas and the public squares. Enjoying themselves. Of course, we don’t have plazas and public squares here. And, by the way, where are the children? I don’t see a lot of them here in Oakland, California. I guess they’re tucked away in programs and daycares and sports practices and institutions while both their parents work. That’s the way it is here.
Maybe both parents work in these other places too, but somehow it seems like families and children are everywhere. They’re out in public, on the streets, milling about. Even at 2 in the morning, it wasn’t unusual to see a family walking on the street in Buenos Aires (that’s a city that never sleeps). Kids have a place in the society and in the life of the city.
And young people! Youth. For about five years, I was interested in possibly moving to Italy when I “retire” (or break free of the corporate world here), but then I read that Italy has virtually no youth. The average age in Italy is almost 50, while in Mexico, it’s just under 30. In Buenos Aires, the average age is 31. And you feel this. There’s a certain vibrancy, and a vibration. You can feel it in the air, and it’s vivifying.
But, back to why am I going to Mexico, when I just got back from Argentina, and why I feel so bad about it.
I must have been a very good Catholic in a former life.
When my mom died, my dad intoned at her memorial lunch to the table at large, “The Catholic church killed your mother.” Years later, he claimed he didn’t say this (and therefore couldn’t explain it), but it’s burned in my memory, another example of shit you can’t make up.
He must have meant the guilt. The guilt and shame, that I assuredly imbibed like so much water from a faucet—or firehose, as the case may be.
It courses through my veins, poisoning me. It makes me miserable, and I want it out.
Brene Brown, where are you when I need you?
So, guilt. Guilt and shame. I literally feel like leaving my post at home, my desk, my computer, will move God to punish me summarily, by withholding jobs and employment, by ensuring I run out of money, by manufacturing situations where I am sure to fail.
No doubt about it. I will be punished.
This is, obviously, so much malarkey, and I know that in my conscious mind.
But, my unconscious mind has a mind of its own, clearly.
Yes, I need to read Michael Singer’s incomparable The Untethered Soul again. And again. And again. To keep working to banish the voice from my head. Because that voice obscures my life and my own experience of my life. I miss the moment over and over while I’m constantly dithering in my mind about whether I’ve fucked up or am about to fuck up.
It’s a hard place to be.
And yet, I’m going.
And that’s the brave part. To stand up to the voice. To say, Wait a minute. I don’t think it’s so bad that I use part of my severance to travel and explore some possible other life paths, after working nose-to-the-grindstone for decades.
To say, For Christ’s sake, I’ve been working since I was in eighth grade, since I was 13, and I’m allowed to take a breather (if you can afford it, says the voice).
To say, When have I ever trusted my intuition, the small, shy voice beneath the mean one, the one that said, Get a Masters degree in European Realism (literature) as your teacher Elizabeth Siekhaus implored you to do so many years ago. Get a degree in Middle Eastern Studies, as you’ve always wanted to do. Join the Peace Corps, as you always said you would. Become a diplomat!
It’s a little late for most of those things (though I can still join the Peace Corps, and may). The point is, as much as I cast about thinking I don’t know what I want or who I am, there’s a part of me that does know, that has always known. That’s the part of me, I believe, that wants to go to Morelia, Mexico, with the primary goal of trying as much of the food of Michoacan as possible.
That’s the goal and focus of my journey. I figure I can eat for a week in the covered markets of Michoacan for the price of a single dinner at one of the better restaurants in Oakland. So, why not do that?
(Why not, indeed?)