2009: I’m Over The Hill

I’ve spent the last couple days compiling my year end report. I’ve thought about the annual reports every year since I had a grasp on the whole changing of years thing – with spotty results on the recording it for posterity part. Since I started journaling in 1996, I’ve been pretty consistent with the wrap up/evaluation/forecast report process, though. I like to leave them as time capsules for my future self.

This year I was prompted – internally – to consider the report as a five-year-plan: what did I want five years from now: have I accomplished what I wanted five years ago? Then I was on the brink of the “dreaded” Forty. Now I am on the brink of a “curious” Forty-Five. I have come to the conclusion that I am now “over the hill”, but not in a manner most might expect – in the report writing process I have discovered that the phrase doesn’t mean what it once did to me.

Like all people living lives in this world, I am and am not the same person I was five years ago. In January of 2004, I was a corporate IT manager who wrote novels at work. I was married to the same husband, living in the same house, and driving the same car. I had a different male German Shepherd. I had Alien Perspective and I had two novels in print: Blood Is Thicker Than Water and Love & Benjamins. I had Brain Burn for Naruto. I did not have World of Warcraft. My youngest niece/nephew was born. I did not have significantly different views on politics or religion. I had a lot of the same friends I do now; though, I did not meet Barb until May of 2004, and other people have come and gone over the five years.

I have not located the journal that contains my 2003 year end report. I do remember where I stood on many key issues, though. I stood on yet another hill, looking into the valley of the year ahead, hoping that maybe there was a hint of the great water – the sea of success and freedom – somewhere over the next rise. I had stood there with high hopes I would walk into the mist-shrouded valley below and find the something I wanted - or a surprise I wanted. since my school years, I had nurtured this concept of years being hills and valleys one traversed. Each holiday season is a pinnacle with a vista of a promising year to come, followed by a slide into a valley of pleasant and comfortable summer, and then a slow climb through a new school year back up to the hope of “the next year”.

In the five years between Forty and Forty-Five, I wanted to discover something wonderful: the magical doorway in the wardrobe, fairy dust that would let me fly to the first star on the right and straight on until morning, the male body I wasn’t born with, a child, a fantastical version of my husband that was new and different, and most importantly, creative “success”. I day dreamed about getting “the call”. You know, the one from the agent in New York with the results of the rights auction of your masterpiece novel – or the one from an agent in Hollywood with the option offer for the same novel – the one you receive just before you go into a boring meeting so that you can smile at everyone, give them the finger, and tell them you quit.
I have wanted that call for most of my life: that validation from beyond that would tell everyone how great I was and that I deserved something better, that I have been under-appreciated, that I am special. And I have thought the sea where those calls come from was over every hilly year.

That sea is a place of sandy beaches where talented creative people launch projects that can sail anywhere. And when they’re not sailing, they sit around and discuss their next joint venture while sipping fruity drinks, eating lobster, and watching sunsets. My father always called California “the good coast”: it was that in my imagination. I wanted to make movies – that was my art form of choice – so Hollywood was always that sea.

When I was young, I used to sit on my ass and just dream about it. I would have spurts where I prepared for the journey, but I always let myself get distracted. And then in 1996, I found a road map called The Artist’s Way. I thought it led to that sea: to “the Good Coast”. I followed it. The way due West seemed too difficult, so I decided to proceed east to the other coast. There are connections between the great bodies of water, and I figured I could sail around the world to “the Good Coast” if I could just build the right boat and get someone to finance the venture. This new coast was the New York publishing industry. I envisioned it as the new England coast, where people sat in cozy drawing rooms filled with classical artwork and sipped martinis while discussing whether or not they liked the cut of someone else’s jib.

When it became obvious that I wasn’t going to design, launch or rig anything the drawing room crowd would want to venture capital on, I struck off on my own. I went in search of the Northwest Passage through the Artic Sea. I struck off into rarely-charted territory. Several years into that, I reached the hill at the end of 2003 and the beginning of 2004.

When I hauled my first novel over the mountain shoulder from the rocky watershed for the drawing room coast to the cold and indifferent watershed of independent publishing, I had expected it to just sail downstream, and people would be in awe, and… well, the rest would be history. People were in awe, there just weren’t a lot of them up there on the tundra. And there just wasn’t enough water – money – to float it where I thought it had to go. Not a lot of cash flow on the north slope…

So at the beginning of 2004 I was praying the next valley contained water. The Kids (my muses) had this idea for a boat well-suited – though I wasn’t really aware of it at the time – to the northern climes. The Raised By Wolves story was a twinkle in my eye… I would discover Will’s voice by that summer. I would haul it along and add research the following year. I had stumbled into a deep valley with lots of little vales – four of them – a series of them if you will... By January 2005, I was seeing that my relentless march west was leading downhill a little, and possibly toward open water. So, I commenced building a ship in each little valley, launching it, and trudging over the next hill to build the next one. But, except for flights of fancy, I didn’t think they were the final ship: the big one: the one that would sail me out and around the world. They were designed for the shallow water of the independent sea. I still yearned to make a boat that would make people on both coasts sit up and talk.

Meanwhile… Remember when I said I hadn’t traveled when I was young: that I hadn’t even left home and tried to reach the sea – I kept getting distracted. Well, what it really was is a lack of a cart: a lack of a mode of transportation – at least for all my shit. If I had walked to “the Good Coast” when I was young, I would have had an easy go of it. Many of the big mountain passes are easy to traverse if you’re just a solitary person with a pack on your back. But I would have arrived there with nothing but a handful of dreams. I wouldn’t have had anything to offer the beautiful people, and I wouldn’t have had anything to sustain myself with. I wanted to have someone take me. Or barring that, have someone to go with. Or – the least favored option, but the one not involving wishful thinking - establish a base of operations that would allow me to acquire resources and assets and then enable me to have a wagon/cart to haul my assets to the coast. In short - lol – I wanted to be able to live on my own, or better yet, get married: out of the parents’ house: into love. I wanted some personal and immediate validation…

So there was this period in my late teens and early twenties where I scrambled over rocky, desert terrain; going in the wrong direction. I finally picked a better direction and got married to my husband and established that homestead. That, probably more than anything, allowed me to try and travel to the coast again. It took years, though, and now I had a cart… filled with stuff, and I was hitched to it with a person who didn’t think “the Good Coast” would be Nirvana to live in, though he enjoyed what came out of it as much as I did and the idea of living on the sea of success appealed to him. He thought - and still thinks - that I can build something that we can sail on, and he was willing to support my attempts to reach a coast. He was pleased to watch my initial forays east toward the Northeast coast and publishing with the drawing room crowd. When that failed, he even supported my one attempt to forge due west – even though it cost us a great deal and put some of our stuff at risk attempting to traverse risky mountain passes. I was the one who decided the way was too steep for the stream I was following.

After that, he heartily applauded my decision to seek the Northwest Passage. So I started there hauling this cart that contained gear, equipment, etc… for mountain climbing, and long distance travel across plains, and living in one place, and… I was like all the great and stupid artic explorers from England. I was not equipped for the artic. I was hauling a cart with wheels over soggy tundra or ice. I was not dressed for the cold. I was hauling a typical suburban existence and a corporate job – a Winnebago – across territory without roads.

Well, to make an already long story a touch shorter… The cart broke down somewhere in 2005 – at least my job portion of it. So we dumped our stuff on a sled. And we started realizing we probably wouldn’t have much use for the Winnebago at our final destination. Heck, we wouldn’t want it. We needed to learn to build igloos. We needed to learn to live off a leaner land. And it was really hard: the realization about this future I was dragging us towards, and the sudden deprivation as we were forced to jettison things we took for granted.

I realized a number of things while standing on this hill this week. I did not have an epiphany about all of them. I just had the vantage point to look back over the past five years and see the broken-down Winnebago, the debris field of discarded notions that we had been tossing off the sled for a few years now, and the subtle course correction toward easier ground. And I can look ahead and see where I need to go.

I just want water. It doesn’t need to be “the Good Coast”. It doesn’t need to be a deep and endless ocean in a warm climate. I just want to be able to float my own boats. I want to be able to dump all our stuff on a boat and live there – probably on a flotilla of boats. I want to be able to support us with my books. It will take time to make that many books. And I have to be floating them in deeper water. But I don’t need to reach Hollywood, and I don’t need validation from the drawing room crowd. By the Gods, it will be enough to sail. Most people dream of it and never achieve it. And all those other joint venture projects and big ships require too much work anyway: too much politics: too many people involved.

The thing I did have an epiphany on, is this: I’m not going to reach that water while walking perpendicular to the watershed. I need to follow a trickle to a stream, to a river, to a lake, or bay, or small sea. I’m not going to get anywhere marching up yet another hill to try and see the distant ocean. I have a sled and someone to pull it with me. I have found water and I see where it leads. I have boats and more boat plans than I can build in a lifetime.

I’ve climbed my last mountain range; I’ve crossed into my last watershed; I’ve climbed my last hill. I’m over it.

My hopes, wishes, and expectations for the next five years are very tame and reasonable. I’ve already had my midlife crisis. I already have everything I really wanted: a wonderful husband, a good house (though I don’t want to die in this one, I would like to live by actual water…), and appreciative fans of my creativity. And I’m my own boss. And… I get to spend my days creating. My only regret is children, but the Universe moves in mysterious ways, and I can see how life would be very different, but perhaps not better – for us or the child(ren) – if we had had kids. That, and some other fantastical assumptions, are things that I need to learn to stop climbing hills in the expectation of seeing in the years to come.
I got it good, and it will just get better if I walk the valley.