Part of it was being busier than almost ever before. After finishing my dreadful assignment at Insurance Place, I enrolled in a full semester of art history courses at the University of Minnesota. Writing twenty-odd papers in sixteen weeks, plus wall labels for my internship in the Contemporary Art department at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, left me no time for recreational blog posts.
After I scraped through the semester, I was asked to curate my very own exhibition at the MIA. I was to be the one who would decide on a theme, pick the artworks, research the artists and the time period and write the wall labels. Having this amount of responsibility and creative freedom as an intern is a rare opportunity, and I was determined to make the very most of it. That meant that if I was going to spend my time writing anything at all, it had better be wall labels.
Learning as much as possible about Zeppelins, standards of nineteenth-century hygiene, roller coasters, anarchist bombings, cabarets, corsets, electric light, antisemitism, luxury ocean liners and giant telescopes seemed to pay off. Despite the few small errors that were pointedly brought to my attention by members of the public (really, we're talking a gaffe as miniscule as omitting wood from the list of media that make up an entire bicycle) I am very proud to say that A Means of Escape: European Posters from 1889 to 1930 was my first exhibition.
If I want to make a career of mounting such shows, I will need at least a master's degree and, preferably, a PhD. I started working towards that goal as soon as my show was up on the walls, and I plunged into studying far more math than I had thought about or attempted over the last ten years. I was dismayed to learn that I could no longer remember how to find a percent difference when I'd once been able to do calculus. My GRE preparations also humbled my opinion of my command of vocabulary. I took the exam on Halloween, achieved passable results and began writing personal statements for five different art history graduate programs. I submitted the last of them on January 15.
So I've been busy over the last two years. But time constraints were not the only thing holding me back. I found I no longer knew what to write about. I started this up as a travel blog, and it was almost difficult not to find material whilst living in new places. During my expatriatism in London, Dublin and Sydney, I encountered new adventures almost daily and, whether these novelties took the form of fun or frustration, the experiences were frequently worth relating. What in my American life of laundry, dishes, commuting and routine could be story-worthy?
Mainly my ludicrous experiences as a temp. I documented those for a year or more, until I finally found a permanent job. It is absolutely not lack of material that has forced me to stop writing about the workplace. Rather, companies generally frown upon their HR professionals spilling intimate secrets on the Internet, and I care more about being fired now that I have good benefits and friendly relationships with some of my co-workers.
These are all issues that could have been surmounted. The most serious problem was that when I did put pen to paper, I wrote things that I wasn't ready to believe or acknowledge. There had been many small signs that it might be time for Andy and me to end our relationship. They pricked at my consciousness and frequently disturbed my thoughts, but I could ignore them well enough as long as I didn't write them down.
I told myself that increasingly identifying with lyrics about heartbreak and loss on the radio didn't mean much. It was normal for couples to argue with and annoy each other a lot more after being together more than three years. Our longevity could also explain why I didn't miss him as much as I once had when he went on business trips. Outside stress was causing my uncomfortable uncertainty about whether or not we'd still be together by the time such-and-such future event rolled around. His busy work schedule was the reason why I felt like I didn't really know him as well anymore, like we were now one against the other instead of one against the world.
There was no obvious transgression or problem, so I countered every doubt or frustration with an increasingly weak reassurance that these problems were temporary. All I had to do was remember was how elated I'd been to find him in the crowd at the Charles de Gaulle airport arrivals gate, the feeling of being invincible and collectively amazing when we were together, the custom-decorated cakes, the surprise ticket to a sold-out show I really wanted to attend, or any one of the little favors he did for me on a routine basis. Things were never that bad, so it seemed like they might one day revert back to what they had been before. But they just never did. Eventually, recalling those memories only emphasized the chasm between what we'd felt then and what we didn't feel now.
Since our love for each other changed so slowly over time, it was hard to decide what to do and when. We talked seriously about breaking up two or three times, but neither of us was ready to face the thought that we would have to let the other go. Finally the strain between us was too great to ignore, and we decided to act on the thoughts and fears we'd been trying so hard to suppress.
I got my own apartment in September. Andy came over the day of the move, just to reassure me that things would, in fact, be fine. The next day, we went to our old place together to load our cars with the things that hadn't required a U-Haul. He called me in a panic the day after because we had misunderstood the date by which we were supposed to completely vacate the apartment. The place was still a right mess and our landlord was livid. I went over to help him scrub, dust, mop, vacuum and argue with our landlord about the cleanliness of the oven and the outside of the windows.
The supportive tenor of those first few post-breakup days has remained, and Andy is still one of my best friends. I will always care about him in some way, and I still think that he is an indisputably caring, creative and talented person. Continuing to be present in each other's lives as we move on as separate entities will sometimes create painful situations. But I am grateful to take that risk.
Our romantic relationship ended and I no longer needed to avoid the concretization of my concerns. But I still couldn't write. This was now nothing more than a lack of momentum, but as I learned when I was between temp assignments, that can be staggeringly difficult to overcome. I repeatedly vowed that I would write something more than an email. Tomorrow.
I started to despair over my lack of creative passion. I envied the people who enjoy something so much that they feel compelled to do it. To get out of bed early, stay up all night, lose all sense of time and place and work unseemly long hours, all for the sake of chasing a ridiculously tempting muse. All I felt compelled to do was procrastinate as long as possible.
Until Raf said I needed to write. I don't know what it was about his particular urging that actually produced a result. I had known what he told me for quite some time, and Erinn had frequently nudged me as well. Maybe the time was right. Maybe it was his choice of words. Maybe the preceding glass of truly terrible wine had created the appropriate sense of gravity. I will never be certain.
Whatever the delicate and ephemeral mixture of intangible elements, it produced a new resolve. I have written something nearly every day since. And I finally overcame what increasingly seemed an insurmountable barrier--I published a blog post. And with it, I have rediscovered my passion. I remembered how driven I can be to find the right word, to create lyricism in a sentence, to convey my thoughts in a tangible, meaningful and entertaining way. I feel the need to move people with words. I don't think I have succeeded in that yet. But I intend to keep writing until I do.
