I’ve become convinced of it: many of us are not living the lives that we expected or prepared for.
Dutifully cognizant of our blessings, few of us are particularly miserable, but we’re not stand-up-and-cheer happy, either.
I started thinking about this during the last round of unimaginably huge lottery payoffs, when all of us were fantasizing about what we’d do if we won.
I’d like to start a foundation called “Second Chances”. It would be for women like me who either made bad choices, had a lot of bad luck or experienced a late metanoia about how they could make this mortal coil an occasion of meaning.
My profession, computer programming, is portable, as has become painfully obvious, since it’s doable anywhere, like in India or China. So, with a steady stream of work, I could live somewhere other than Mashpee, Massachusetts, a depressing place of intense misogyny and misplaced loyalty to corrupt institutions like the Catholic church and the American military.
For the otherwise gloomy period between Christmas and New Year’s, I’ve been both cheered and disheartened as a result of listening to KKJZ on internet radio: cheered because it reminds me of a time in which I was truly happy and disheartened because that time and place are so far away.
I lived in Southern California for about 2 years in the early 1990’s. If not for the fact that I worked for a vicious, male chauvinist lunatic who was run out of town some time later, I enjoyed where I lived and who I “played” with, the physical environment, and the access to some of the best museums and live music in the world.
On the opposite coast and seemingly from a completely different world, I have elusive, vague and hard-to-pin-down memories of farmhouses and collective social gatherings, feelings of warmth and belonging that are summoned by drives through little towns after dark, when one imagines happy times beyond the lights in the windows.
I actually come from a large family although I only discovered that last year, when I met my natural sister and one of three brothers. They’ve chosen subsequently not to associate with us, whether because of disappointment or embarassment. I understand their unease, but still, it’s been a hurtful, frustrating letdown.
Still, it might help to explain that intuition that I lost something behind the windows of some country house in some little town.
My whole life, I’ve been associated with a family who was deeply suspicious of me because I wasn’t of their blood and, therefore, was a competitive threat. It was like they were always waiting for a second shoe to drop so that they could pounce on me, and it made me hypersensitive to other people’s moods and worn out with second guessing how they’d react to anything that was natural to me but foreign to them.
On this New Year’s Day, I wonder not so much how to create a happier life, that would be easy – the trick is just defining it. It’s like having amnesia: not only can I not find my way home, I can’t even remember what or where home is.
And when I try to find it, something or someone creeps up on me and metes out punishment because I’ve tried to remember.
You have to be an adoptee, I think, to feel this in your body, to fully empathize. It explains in part why we can’t simply “be grateful and get over it”, as those with guilty consciences would like us to.