"The Young and the Jobless" — Afterward

I’ve been putting hope into action lately, doing things on purpose.

These are things that usually scare me, and mind you they still scare me when I do them but I do them anyway, because somewhere one day a few months ago, I read some of the smartest advice of my life: The best way to get over your fears is to fall into them — over and over again until they’re not scary anymore.

Scary, and it is, and I imagine that it will be for a long time. But I have to do this for myself. It’s always been a big problem, and I’ve always hoped it will go away one day. But this is the first year when I’m actively taking steps to reduce it. It hasn’t completely worked yet, but I do feel more comfortable. And I think about it when I find myself in applicable situations, and I try to stay aware and fix it.

I guess I was always a shy kid. Even in elementary, I barely had any friends. I was shy because my mother at home was way too tough — she always gave you tests that you would fail. She made you question everything, until you picked up the tactic and  began to question things in your head before you even said them. And then to avoid conflict, along with yelling and screaming and beating, you began to not say them at all. And so I lived in constant fear around my house for the whole duration of my childhood until I left for college.

In middle school, I had no friends. I was the new kid in the school, the kid that was always just a little too late, whether it had to do with the latest teen trends or with friendships that had taken place before I got there. Those three years were probably the most miserable of my life, and with mom unable to adjust to the new changes and slowly losing it at home, I found myself escaping to my own world: I spent every Friday holed up in my room reading a new book and the rest of the weekend holed up in my room writing a journal, pretending I was normal.

In ninth, my parents bought me a graphic calculator for Algebra. The first thing I did on my shiny new gadget was to multiply the number of days in a year times four — that’s how long I had left until graduation, the day of freedom. Home was still miserable, but school was at least better for a while. I actually had a few friends now, though not great yet, and I still constantly glanced back behind me to see if people were laughing at me for some odd reason like they had in middle school. But all I saw was blank faces: I was now just another kid in just another flocked high school hallway.

A bunch of things happened in high school that led to my depression toward the end of it. But all you need to know about that is that I was depressed, very depressed for a long time. Then I got to college, and finally I knew I was free. Things would only look up from then on. After all, life owed me freedom, I thought then.

Four years later, I discovered life owed me nothing — only the school owed me my diploma by mail, in about a month. That’s what went through my head as I went up on stage to receive a placeholder diploma and glanced up to see my best friends quietly cheering me on. I wanted to cry at that moment. I wished I had parents there. I was the one who’d told them not to come, knowing just how dysfunctional we’d be anyway. But when they weren’t there, I realized that I really had nobody in life but my fake family, the ultimate duo: the then love of my life and the girl he’d cheated on me with. I felt so alone then and in those days after. Like a girl lost on a raft in a black, indifferent sea. …

In conclusion, life has taken a much better turn ever since, but I feel that my life’s circumstances and the time I spent during most of the aforementioned period (the majority of my life) taught me to doubt myself constantly and internalize the “fact” that I was not good enough for my parents and did not deserve love from neither parents nor friends or boys. Thus, I believed that I was doomed to a life of … well, um, doom. And as you may imagine, that may have given me a bit of a boost in the wrong direction when it came to interactions with people.

These days, I see myself as a diamond in the rough and not as the rough anymore, and I still treasure the hope that got me through life. I still hold onto it, but as I grow, it grows with me: It grows more positive and wraps itself around me and the things I do, inspiring me and charging me onward. I often stop by a little church on some days — there, I ask God for courage and strength to help me get through whatever I fear that day, week or month. That helps me.

As I said yesterday, I feel that you really have to find what helps you and then follow it. You won’t find it by waiting for it to fall in your lap; you’ll have to try different things, fail and give up at most of them before you finally stumble on a gem. The gem too may be a diamond in the rough, so when you see it first, you might just think it’s a piece of broken glass and keep going.

But I have faith you’ll be back. Somehow, somewhere, whether it’s hope or some other kind of motivator, the thing you cherish the most will end up being your rope that will pull you to the answer.

And that’s why wise counselors tell young minds who don’t know what they want to do in life, “Do what you love, and money will follow.” Because if you follow your heart’s hints, no matter how small or insignificant they may seem, it’s a step in the right direction. And as we all know, the journey of a 1,000 miles can never be completed in a day, and it always starts with the first step. And you can be sure that the journey and the destination will look nothing like the start.

My fear, you ask, then? Finally, I’ll tell you: people. There. I said it. Sometimes, I’m scared of interacting with people. Irrational, but it’s the same kind of fear I felt at home when I was little. Scared that I’ll say the wrong thing as I often seemed to do then, and scared that what they say in return will sting, bringing back memories of all my mother’s lacerations on my tender, young heart. Scared that they’ll laugh, and their laugher will echo as it did in  all those years of school. Scared that I’ll get hurt, in friendship and in love, as I did so deeply in college.

All insecurities. All fears that hold me back. And that’s why I’ve adopted this belief this year, that by putting myself in various social situations — whether it’s volunteering, persuading people to vote, having a regular conversation with higher-ups or strangers — is a step in the right direction for me.

It’s a tough path at times — especially when it’s Thursday and it’s cold out and you don’t feel like leaving the hearth of your home — but it’s necessary. And I don’t mind it so much anymore when I come face to face with awkward silences, or when I notice myself rambling out of nervousness or when I fumble my words and feel like an idiot. Sure, I blush then and feel uncomfortable, but I always remind myself: In not even a year, how much will this moment really matter? And the answer is always the same: In a month, I won’t even remember it, but that moment combined with all those other moments will have made a transitional difference in my personality. Because each moment of discomfort pushes us toward a step in the right direction, and sometimes issues reach far too deep within us for us to be able to pick up our feet on our own and run.

I cooked lentils tonight.

*angelic music plays*

And just like that, the curse of the chef’s block (and by block I don’t mean cheese) has been lifted from my shoulders.

*angelic music heightens then drops off slowly*

It wasn’t even that hard. I just diced some onions, garlic and carrots; sorted and rinsed the lentils; sauteed the aforementioned onions, garlic and carrots; poured 4 cups of water in the pot of lentils; dropped in the rest of the ingredients, and voila!

When I tried it a half hour later, it was a tasteless mass that burned my tongue. An expected failure, I told myself. Serves you right for taking forever to pick up the ladle again.

But I wasn’t really mad. That’s because aside from a productive day, I already had a plan: dress it up with herbs and spices and voila once more … no need for cooking skills!

So, there I was, standing over the pot in my kitchen, juggling glass containers of bay leaves, parsley flakes and red pepper (the latter was thanks to my dad who I remembered added chilis to make his lentil soup spicy three years ago when we lived together in the summer…holy crap, has it really been three years already since then. …) and planning a Broadway show outing with my roommate at the same time.

Another half hour later (or maybe 15 minutes — I don’t remember, time is always on my side, but I never look in its direction), and the lentil soup was ready. My roomie had retreated to her room, and the kitchen was warm and quiet. *angelic music starts* Carefully, I scooped up a little with the edge of my spoon and raised it to my mouth. *music heightens* It still burned my tongue *falters*, but now it tasted like molasses in January *heightens*, a plot full of daisies *heightens*, a mouthful of olives *stops*.

So, it was all right. Not the best, but flavorful enough, actually. But it wasn’t the flavor of home. Well, just wait till December, I thought to myself. Mom will make you everything you want for two whole weeks … that’s 42 whole meals. Wow.

Although I’m sure her lentils will taste nothing like mine, yes, it is a fact that I’m looking forward to them — despite them being one of my least favorite meals of youth. But unlike in the ’90s (the decade of my tender years), Mom now cooks like Grandma. And when I taste my own food, sometimes I taste a lot of what she made back then — a memory overpowered by the savory tastes and smells emanating from the hearth of grandma’s kitchen.

They were happy-go-lucky women, middle-aged moms working on minimum pay — or maybe even volunteering to fill up their time.

Their blond hair bobbed lightly around their face as they moved, and their flashy smiles and cashmere sweaters were all the same. As they held the pen and made a perfectly round signature on my tardy slip morning after morning, I noticed that even their perfectly trimmed and lacquered nails did not have a touch of uniqueness. Same old, same old … day in, day out.

This was life every morning in the PPO Annex, a minuscule, windowless front office on the side of the building, greeting you as you walked in. There was a narrow space for you to stand if you were waiting — and if you happened to have stopped in the Annex, trust me, you were always waiting.

The wait times meant you were forced to listen to the women’s senseless banter. It was the kind of chat that was pleasant, calm and predictable, and I often felt my mind turning off under the soothing drone. Sometimes they spoke about their kids, other times about new recipes they’d tried out last night. This is it, I thought then. The apex of life in the suburbs.

Or perhaps that thought didn’t cross my mind then, as a young impressionable 10th grader, but rather I ascribe it now to my then self, now that I’ve moved out of those suburbs  and into the city and cannot imagine life back there again. And so I make it up.

Either way, there I was one morning, waiting for Peggy Sue or Grace to sign my tardy slip so I could head to class with an excuse, and their topic of choice that day was gum. “Can I have a stick?” one asked the other. Her wish was granted. As they chewed noisily, one noted how gum makes you hungry. “Why is that?” asked the other. “Well, probably because it gets the stomach juices going, and then you want to eat.”

I’ve always remembered that sentence, because even as I stood there quite accustomed to their thoughts and only half-consciously listening, I wondered if that was true. Of course, as a high schooler, I couldn’t care less when it came down to it and didn’t think twice about it when I left the Annex a few minutes later. I had bigger fish to fry back then … or bigger issues to resolve.

But I’ve always remember that moment. My thoughts have drifted back to it multiple times over the years as I’ve felt the gnawing for sustenance coming from my own stomach after chewing a fresh piece of gum. Is that really why? I wondered.

You’d think I’d have looked it up by now, but I never did. Instead, I stumbled into the answer by chance last night, while I sat at my kitchen table reading up on more nutrition last night at 3 a.m. And now I know better.

Were one of our fellow humans to discover a time machine one day, I’d probably choose to go back to that day one afternoon when I had nothing else particularly interesting to do. I’d walk in the Annex then and stand in the narrow space once again and wait for  to Grace go on about the stomach juices. And right when she makes her infamous remark, instead of standing meekly in the corner half-lulled by the commonplace conversation, I’d step forth and raise my hand. “Actually,” I’d offer,”It’s not the stomach juices. Have you checked the label? More likely it’s ‘aspartame,’ an artificial sweetener that causes your pancreas to release insulin, readying the body to receive some kind of sweet. That’s why you feel hungry.”

At their dumbfounded expressions, I’d step even further, take the slip from under their fingers, and say, “And when your body doesn’t receive the sweet it expected — because you’re just chewing gum and not about to wolf down any food — the high insulin levels stay in your body, leading to a condition called ‘prediabetes’.”

And before turning on my heel and walking out of there for once and for all, I’d say: “So, for your children’s sakes, ladies, skip the gum and chew on almonds instead. Good morning.”

I woke up this morning feeling lonely.

I don’t know why.

But I had a strange dream last night, that I was with my sisters, and my parents, and then my sisters again and we were on vacation. But when we got back, my mother died in my arms.

It was a strange sensation, because in the dream, I traveled through it with her, feeling her breath leave her body.

It was odd. So I woke up odd. And stayed odd as I sat in front of the TV and said bye to my roommate, who was leaving once again on another business trip. I watched TV for a while, and the more I watched, the emptier I felt.

So I turned it off, and I sat at my kitchen table, as water boiled for coffee, and read up on more nutrition. I read all about digestion, absorption and metabolism. I can’t believe what a little expert our body is. I absorbed all the information with my jaw dropping with each sentence. “Now I know there really must be a God,” I said to myself. How can there not, how can all this have been created on its own? It’s too smart — it couldn’t have.

I’m going to church tomorrow. Finally — it’s been forever. But I’m not going because of my nutrition-related discovery. I’m just going because I  meant to go for a while. And to meet Greek people. Not necessarily “young single Greek guys” as my mom urges me on every one of our Saturday calls. But just to meet more of the people I’m closely related to … genetically.

“Wanna hang out now?” asks a new guy over texts as a type this. I’m gonna say OK, aren’t I? Probably. Craps. And it’s 1:30 a.m. How will I wake up for church?! Whatever happened to them calling you three days in advance?!!!

It’s a case-by-case basis. Just like our clients ask for when it comes to moderating those message boards.

“Where?” I ask him. “Wherever. You tell me,” he responds. Craps. Case by case … OK.

You may have thought that I gave up, since I haven’t written for the past two days. Granted, it’s interesting that my sabbatical came at entry No. 34 — just under the halfway point, an inch away from dead center.

But my break was no vacation: I worked 13-hour days the past three days! (And sadly, I brought work home this weekend too.)

It would be nice if the company paid overtime, but even though it doesn’t, I actually didn’t mind. I was frustrated — no joke — at times throughout the days, like when people couldn’t get their act together, information was lost, and the inner workings of the company hindered us from reaching our potential, making being in charge of my portion of the project a complicated thing to manage.

But I can honestly say that at the end of these long days, half-asleep on the train at 10 p.m., I felt driven … purposeful. Alive again with energy and creativity.

Yesterday, my boss asked me if I’d like to keep doing what I’m doing or get new creative challenges. (He put it in more basic terms, but this is what it translates to.) I chose the second. Then he suggested I talk to my other co-workers in our department and interview them on the topic of their jobs, to see if I’d like that kind of thing.

So I did that, and you’d be amazed at how different their world is from mine. We have the same title, but in publishing, titles are mostly meaningless. Especially in our company, where work is very hands-on and many juggle multiple roles.

So, I’m looking forward to the near future. It’s hard to put yourself out on a limb sometimes, knowing that it’s good for you but seeing the threatening depth beyond the cliff too. But it’s exciting also, because that’s the only way to learn and discover yourself and what you really want in life — by getting out of your comfort zone. I’ve done that a lot this year, and I can’t say it’s always been amazing and quite easy like they idealists make it sound. Many times it turned out with me flustered and wondering why I put myself out there in that type of activity in the first place. But I can’t say that I regret any of those times. Because the reason I put myself out there each time was simple: to see if I’d like it, and to get the experience.

As a result, I have so many memories now and different experiences. Ask me how how my year was over holiday cocktails, and I can tell you all about volunteering in a music class with the disabled, trying out a Jazz class I couldn’t follow, trying out a Rumba class I couldn’t follow, training and running a 5K (by myself, not in an actual race), canvasing for a political campaign, speaking French to strangers, discovering San Francisco (by putting up with an awkwardly old friendship), taking part in a dance-off, being an usher for an opera, taking ballet, starting my own event planning society for work and trying to update a blog for 69 days straight.

I guess it’s been kind of a cool year. (Even though Michael died and boys are still retarded — but aren’t they always?)

So then, I guess I’ll continue on with this journey, and I’ll see you on here tomorrow.

I had many thoughts on my way back home from work today. There I was at 8 p.m. again, at my usual appointment: the one empty seat on the train.

I sat there listlessly, crammed in between two other bodies, my brain unable to process the stress of the day. I was like a hot coal, and any thought that touched me quickly evaporated into the atmosphere, leaving behind this terrible think, black line of choking smoke.

I thought about earlier that day when I asked the editor to push a deadline once again. She wrote back that it was fine but that I’d really need to start following them from now on. Unfair, I thought, and instead, I asked her to decrease my writing assignments for the year by half, because I had no time anymore. A fine demand since I’m not getting paid for these articles anyway.

She didn’t have time to reply before I left the office, but on the way back, I felt the infinite abyss of not knowing how she’d respond. F#@&.

My chest felt tight all of a sudden. I breathed in, and nothing came in — the air stopped short at my shoulders, disappearing in pain.

I’d had breathing problems all day long again. I knew it was stress and fatigue. My body has a knack for making up stuff to steer me back into the right path again when it feels slighted about something — in this case, the lack of sleep (due to a hilarious conversation with my roomie in our kitchen last night, about headless hens and the endless dilemma of butter vs. margarine) and the high levels of cortisol that poisoned my system today.

But I couldn’t take the lack of breath any longer. In an instant, I got mad, then suddenly I really did say ‘fuck it’ in all its glory inside my head. Fuck it, and fuck it again. All of it.

I rested my head against the back of the seat and breathed in, in and out again, in and out, visualizing the stress dropping on each side, like dryer sheets, smoothly, softly, one after another. And then, I was there … that feeling, that deep realization that nothing, nobody really can touch you, that your spirit runs so deep, it is the abyss itself.

It was quite amazing, and I sat there, wide-eyed I felt, and still in my seat, in the same position (for the whole length of the trip as it turned out), processing what was happening with my mind turned off. And yet a myriad thoughts filled my head at that moment, all beautiful, all profound, all lessons through the lessons i’ve accumulated in this life — like a string, tying its pearls together.

I thought about my dad, as i often do when I reach that inner peace. He came to my mind first, there sitting at the ancient kitchen table in Greece, looking at me squarely under the fluorescent light, narrowing his left eye a bit as he always did. “There are NO free meals,” he tells me, still watching me ominously. He isn’t mad; he’s a philosopher. And this is just another lesson of economics that he feels applies to life.

Years later, I’m sitting in Econ. Not understanding a thing again, despite being weeks away from exams. It’s the 86th day, I’m biting into my bologna sandwich, and we’re talking about meals.

I come back now, and look around me on the train, just to make sure I’m still here. A young man in a hoodie is reading from a leaflet; an old couple looks bored, resting their empty glances ahead on the window. I’m comforted. I sit into myself again and continue my journey.

“Let it go, Natalia,” he says. “Let it go.” It’s Jim now, the healer. In the dim-lit bar, I’m lying on the table, and he’s walking around me, his voice falling clear as crystal. I want to let it go, and I feel it already seeping away from me, away with the meditative tunes wafting around us.

But then, I’m here on the train again. “No free meals,” says Dad, his eye still on me, and he breaks his bread. “Why did he give me that session?” I ask myself again in the mirror and tug on the black circles under my eyes. “He only talks to me about guy things — you know, about women and money. He’s given many women sessions,” says Mark now, then sips his wine and looks away. The glass is cold behind my back, and I wish I’d sat where he had, then I could have a view instead. His glasses perched up on his cheeks, he looks back at me again. “Did they sleep with him?” I ask with a smirk. “They did,” he admits and sips again.

If I were a parent, I’d hate to have a daughter. I’d love her to bits, mind you, but knowing all the crazy things that I’ve done in my life and seeing as to how I’m still alive and intact somehow makes me want to really believe the healer’s assessment. (He holds my hands in his palm now and tells me, “Your spirit is really strong — your soul is so big, your body’s in it instead of the other way around. And you’ve got an amazing angel always over you.”)

Yes, thank you. But the farthest most kids go when it comes to angels is their love of angel-hair pasta. Thus, I believe I’d be either really overprotective (in which case, the little girl will grow up screwed up anyway) or I’d lose my mind. But that’s the future. I can’t even imagine having a kid.

These moments on the train are all I know, and at these times, I feel that nothing else holds as much clarity as what I sense and feel right then. It’s the infinity of truth, and I have a longing to share it with someone. Bottle it up and open it up again, release it later, when I know that I’ll be back, off the train, out of the journey, back trapped within the walls of my body, feeling tiny, so small that I almost lose touch with myself and try to step out of my body so I can watch me interact and assess how I’m doing. But I can’t trap it. It’s pure, it’s independent. It’s elusive.

When I was little, I liked to hide things in corners, roll up scraps of paper or bubble gum wrappers into tiny balls and shove them in cracks on the brick wall or bury them under pine cones. It felt nice. Like I was taking care of my own piece of the world, then storing it safe forever where nobody would find it. And later, no matter what I was doing, whether I was at home or at school or perhaps swinging wildly at the playground, there would be a litter of precious little things lining the trail of my own world that nobody knew existed. And they were safe, and only I knew about them. Nobody could take that away. (Because I would never reveal their locations, even if they asked.)

Some have commented on the surprising twists that my writing takes sometimes, and I’ve wondered too why I do that. Was it the novels I read throughout school? Or was I perhaps trying to escape something? I thought about it on the train again. And remember how I said in a previous entry that everything repeats in this world, everything mirrors everything else? Well, I thought about my interactions with people. The closer I get to the truth, the farther I am from sharing it. I’ll be right next to them, and I will turn to look at them, and I see them, all the time, even  through the thick mortar wall between us. But they can’t see me. They don’t know it. Try to reach and you can touch me, and I’ll laugh and feel warm under your caress, but that vein of truth that runs inside me is so far away.

So it’s always been. When I try to share something I care about, a switch in me turns off. “Get it over with quickly, so we can go on,” something  inside me hisses, turning away as if in shame, as if angry that I even had the nerve to attempt to make a connection with someone else. As if I’m whoring myself out, giving a part of myself up by offering up a scrap of sentiment.

Other times, I’ll boil with feeling alone in my room, whether it’s about singing or some strange scientific concept that I’ve stumbled upon and felt inspired by. But come time to share that with someone, that thing inside me draws the black blinds shut as if it’s suddenly winter, expelling only the leftovers of fall — the bare facts, which fall short on the cold doorsteps.

But then, despite the impudence of my inner being and the constant cold shoulder at my attempts to adjust, something inside me bubbles: I laugh. “I love you, silly” I tell it, jokingly, endearingly, sitting on that same doorstep, outstretching a hand with long fingernails, offering up a daisy, enticing it to come hither. “Ya, whatever,” the little witch responds from inside. “Too late,” she throws out, as if she’s mad at me again.

I drop my hand, and leave the daisy on the stoop. It’s OK that you’re like this, I want to say. I love you anyway.

The beauty of a private life is that nobody has to understand. You’re all alone in there, free to fight and chuckle, to choose the grass or the marble steps, to linger on every stoop of childhood memory and uncover every hidden treasure behind the brick wall. Free as infinity, and that’s why I don’t mind it when I walk by the stoop again a few days later, and her flower is still lying there in the same position as I left it.

Tomorrow may suck, and I’ve been holding my breath all weekend to find out.

I wonder if that has to do anything with the mysterious breathing problems I’ve had on and off since stress and the real world collided when I graduated college… .