Sucker for a Crossroads

Lovelies,

I'm a sucker for a crossroads. Tell me you're at a crossroads and I'll drop everything.

I'm not in it for the pros and cons. I'm not even in it for the hopes and fears. I love a crossroads for the forced reckoning. Which version of yourself do you choose? Who does this crossroads reveal you to have ALWAYS been?

Never are we so fascinating, so positively shimmering with personhood, as when circumstance forces us to recognize ourselves. 

Of course it never feels shimmery when we're going through it. It feels chaotic and swampy. It feels both inconsequential and apocalyptic. Or it feels like nothing at all, and only in retrospect do we notice a pivot point of our lives.

All of this struck me over the weekend as I was doing that most treacherous activity of sorting through notes from my past. It was for purely decluttering reasons and I had a stated DISINTEREST in introspection, but of course the past has ideas of her own. I avoided all wormholes but one: five pages of urgent scrawl on glossy paper, tucked inside a Bob Slate Stationer bag with a once-used pen and receipt of purchase.

It seems our angsty heroine not only recognized a crossroads but was so romantic about it as to buy a special pen.

Don't get me wrong... I was UPSET. Paragraph after paragraph of doubt in myself, confusion about my purpose, dismissal of my value and values. I'd arrived at the end college and felt myself a fraud. 4 years of hard-worked papers... and not a single idea had been my own.

But alongside this dissolution arose a clarity: Wasn't that, in fact, the assignment?

And is that what I cared to do with my particular lifetime?

I realize now this was my first step away from academia and toward <gasp> the life of the artist. And sure enough, in the months that followed I forewent grad school applications for a one-way plane ticket to California to be a singer/songwriter.

It's nice to remember the young woman who assumed she'd be an Anthropology professor. I think I would have spent my career pushing the edges of academia with artistry. Instead here I am pushing the edges of artistry with abject nerdiness.

That will be my conclusion this morning. These crossroads moments are everything. But also, they're an illusion, because we never really forgo our unlived lives. They weave our dreams. They're the space between our gestures. At their best they're the sites of our most exciting rebellions against the lives we did choose.

All my nerdy love,

Rachel