“Wait. What exactly is it that you do?” — Catching up after a year of chaos.

Originally published December 2017.

How do I even begin to capture the now when there has been so much life that has happened in the past year of chaos and traveling and living out of my car and semi raising kids that are not mine and trips taken and bonds formed and tears cried and loved ones lost and lessons learned and truths found? It’s December of 2017. I haven’t written a blog post in months. So much has happened. So much has already changed, and so much more is about to change. How do start to name what has gone on inside and outside of me over the past year while also preparing for the changes that are going to hit me in the chest like a freight train over the next couple weeks? 

You know, sometimes being a writer looks like waking up every morning with the steam of coffee in your nose, its chocolatey smell mixing with your morning breath, your inhale and exhale even and sweet as you enter into that familiar flow of thought into word, that beautiful interaction of pen point against paper, as it dances across the page, or that comforting support and click of finger tips against keys as they scatter about on that all too familiar map of letters.

But sometimes, being a writer does not look so easy or pretty or eloquent. There are seasons where you can somehow continuously find the most random things to distract you or fill up your time just so you don’t have to confront that blank white page or that unfinished essay or book or blog post. There are times where tracking down the right words is impossible, like you’re doing a terrible job leading a dance, you can’t find the right moves to go with the music, and the dance ends up being choppy with zero connection or fluidity or spark, and you separate from your dance partner and feel like you have to apologize for how awful the dance was.

Since around this time last year, my chaotic and inconsistent lifestyle, alternating between a week of work and a week of travel, has made writing feel like leading that bad dance, and I have found myself avoiding the blank page and the unfinished book. I have found myself interacting with writing like one would in a really awkward interaction with an old friend you haven’t seen in a while.

Sometimes writing is like that awkward interaction with that friend you have nothing in common with anymore, so you have the same conversation you’ve had a million times about that one time you experienced that one funny thing together, and then you sit silence looking around because there’s nothing else to talk about. Then after sitting there staring off into space long enough, you finally pin down a good enough excuse so that you can say goodbye and leave.

Recently though writing has felt more like that awkward interaction with that other friend where you see them across the room but the last conversation between you ended with tension, and you haven’t seen them in a while, and you have so much to say that you can’t say anything at all, because so much has happened and where do you start and how do you even begin to explain everything that you want to tell them? Then you get overwhelmed and just play it safe with a wave and no approach or conversation, and the chasm between you grows a little wider. Maybe the time will feel right next time…

And sometimes, you do this for a whole year.

And slowly, I’m learning to accept that it is okay. 

Often I feel that being a writer, especially a blog writer, creates this insane idea that if you don’t write an eloquent poem, essay, or blog post about every significant, noteworthy, beautiful, or ugly thing in your life, you’re not doing enough. Like someone expected something of you, and you let them down. You missed something, and you can get stuck feeling like you are always catching up, like you have to go back and name all of those things that happened last week, or last month, or in my case currently, 6 months or a year ago, before you can write from the now. Because that’s what writers do, right? They name things. Inside and outside of themselves. Always. And they have their shit together. Right?

WRONG. 

I’d say about 90% of being a writer is having zero shits together.

Most of the time, being a writer is dragging yourself to your journal or your computer hoping you don’t trip over your fear or stumble over your perfectionist insecurity that you’re not enough before you even make it to the table. It is overcoming the belief that what you have to say has already been said before, has been said better, or has no place in the world.

It is practicing the terribly hard discipline of consistency, of showing up, of doing your work for today, and then stepping back.

I must go against my perfectionistic tendencies and accept that catching up will be messy. Re-establishing a creative practice/relationship with writing will be unnatural and awkward in the beginning,

I have to let myself sink down and remember how to enter into the flow again, how to lead the dance without feeling like I have to apologize that it is not perfect.

I have so much to say. I don’t know where to begin. Sometimes ideas or stories won’t connect or make sense. Unfortunately for the extreme planner part of my personality that loves order and efficiency, the writing and blogging that will come out of me over the next year will not be chronological, and some of it will probably be bad.

But I have to remind myself that being a writer is living in a way where you orient yourself to be ready to catch the 10% when it surfaces. I must write the 90% of the crazy and messy and out-of-order chaos so that maybe, just maybe, those nuggets of wisdom and ideas and growth and healing that have been planted deep in my spirit this year will sprout and break through the surface in due time, and all I can do is catch them when they finally rise up, breathe into them, and not squeeze them so hard with expectation and projection that I suffocate them before they can even bear fruit.

So, in acceptance of whatever messy, out-of-order, confusing, jumbled way that it might come up and out of me in the coming weeks,

cheers to the spirit of naming what goes on inside of us, no matter how long we have remained silent and distracted ourselves from the work we have been called to do.

2017.

What a freaking year.

I’m sure from the outside looking in my lifestyle is probably the most confusing thing ever. Sometimes I’m posting pictures in the middle of the woods or on a beach or on top of a mountain talking about the stillness and silence of a trip I am currently on, talking about being “homeless” and having all of my belongings in my car, but other times I’m posting pictures of this supposed “work” and “#cottageparentlyfe” that I do which involves a lot of snotty “kiddos” and watching way too many episodes of Spongebob and hard weeks and trauma and growth and change and healing.

Yeah. It’s an interesting set up.

I have worked at the Crossnore School and Children’s Home since July of 2016, which is a residential foster home which serves as a safe haven for kids in the in-between within the care of DSS (Department of Social Services). The children who come to live at Crossnore have been taken out of their homes for various reasons, most all of them associated with trauma, whether that be abuse, drugs, neglect, parent incarceration, etc. Sometimes we have kids for only a week, and sometimes we have them for years, depending on how quickly cases are heard in court (which, let’s be real, rarely happens), or how quickly their parents do what they need to do to get their kids back (which unfortunately again, let’s be real, rarely happens).

These kids live in giant mansions, which Crossnore calls “cottages,” that have 11 bedrooms (9 for kids, 2 for staff) and a dog crate for the cottage dog on the main floor, and a giant basement on the bottom floor with all of the toys and legos and air hockey tables and video games that make up every kid’s play area fantasy. There are two cottage parents per cottage, who are just that, parents raising these kids while their biological parents cannot take care of them.

So. As a cottage parent, I am mom/chef/tutor/nurse/counselor/entertainer literally half the year to 6-9 kids, ages 7-15, though we have kids on campus in other cottages as young as 12 months and as old as 21 years.

26 weeks of the year, from 9am on Tuesday until 9am the following Tuesday, I am 100% on-shift and on-call 24/7, where I live at work and my outside life of friends and family and hobbies doesn’t really exist. The other 26 weeks are 100% off work with zero responsibility or obligation outside of how I want to spend my time.

From the outside looking in, it sounds like the easiest thing ever.

From the inside speaking out,

I have never been so exhausted in my life.

______________________

So what the heck did I do with the other 26 weeks of the year when I wasn’t working?

Well, I became intentionally “homeless” January 1, 2017. I had been paying rent and living with my dear friends, Danielle and Lucas Kovasckitz, who also worked as cottage parents at The Crossnore School, for the previous 5 months in our dreamy little white mountain house with hardwood floors and a hot tub.

It was amazing, but I was traveling so much on my weeks off of work that I was rarely ever home, so I was paying rent to store the few bulkier items that I didn’t always have with me, which was just my bed, my keyboard, my kitchen supplies, a few pieces of art, and my favorite reading chair. I decided it was silly to continue doing that, and I chose to take a risk and take advantage of this weird work schedule of alternating between working for a week and then being off for a week by ditching having a house at all. I would have a kitchen, laundry, and a bed every other week in my cottage at work, and I would have the freedom to travel and go wherever I wanted to the opposite weeks.

I stored those few larger things I didn’t need. And oh, all of my books because let’s be real minimalism can apply to most things in my life, but it can’t apply to my books. I got rid of the other miscellaneous things I didn’t need, didn’t wear, didn’t have a use for. And then what was left over–some clothes, shoes, journals, letter writing materials, a food box, and all of my backpacking gear–was organized in a very specific way in the back of my 2003 Toyota Highlander, which again, let’s be real, hasn’t looked like that very specific way since the first week because road life is hard and messy and everything never gets put back where it goes, no matter how many hours are spent cleaning out, re-organizing, and playing Tetris with your shoes and cans of tuna.

My kids are amazing, but 7 days straight with zero restful alone time does a number to my very sensitive introvert battery.

So, once my 7 day work shift of socially exerting with very hyper, loud children would come to a close, my introvert battery would be at about 1% and I would take my overstimulated introvert self and head out of the tiny mountain town of Crossnore, North Carolina, in my tiny car home, off to whatever town or woods I was planning on sleeping in that week.

I have made my “bed” in over 25 cities this year across 10 states. I have slept in beds, on couches, on floors, in the woods, on the beach, in humid and hot, in dry and cold, by myself, with friends.

Sometimes I traveled to visit friends I already had relationships with. Sometimes, I showed up in a new city not knowing anyone and left hugging the necks of people that had become family.

Some weeks I slept in a different place every night, which involved a lot of lugging random bags in and out of my car (which, let me tell you, gets EXHAUSTING) Occasionally, I would be in one place for the whole week, which was nice to feel somewhat settled in to some aspect of normalcy.

This year of living nowhere and everywhere at the same time really made me re-consider what the idea of “home” meant to me, for “home” took on many faces,

but home was no longer a physical space.

Home was a state of being, a way to orient myself in the world, an internal space that I took with me wherever I found myself.

Obviously there are plenty of difficult things to navigate when you don’t have your own house, which I will touch on more at a later time. Needless to say though, some days it was way easier to find that sense of internal home than others.

These are the most significant towns in which I remember making my home at least for a short time over the past year, though I’m sure there are more. Now that I actually have them all typed out, I’m realizing that the number of towns in which I “lived” during my weeks off is actually greater than the number of weeks off I had.

1. Crossnore, NC

2. Boone, NC

3. Banner Elk, NC

4. Asheville, NC

5. Black Mountain, NC

6. Durham, NC

7. Linville, NC

8. Waynesville, NC

9. Hickory, NC

10. Charlotte, NC

11. Hot Springs, NC

12. Oak Island, NC

13. Athens, GA

14. Watkinsville, GA

15. Atlanta, GA

16. Savannah, GA

17. Charleston, SC

18. Folly Beach, SC

19. Grayson Highlands, VA

20. San Francisco, CA

21. Cedar Point, OH

22. Nashville, TN

23. Gulf Shores, AL

24. Muskegon, MI

25. Banff, Alberta, Canada

26. Lake Louise, Alberta Canada

27. Field, British Columbia, Canada

 Pretty dang crazy.

I traveled a lot, most weeks to two or three or sometimes four towns in one week, and a few weeks to one town for the whole seven days, which all was only possible financially because the sum of money with which I would have normally been paying rent went fully towards gas money and plane tickets. I’ll speak more on what budgeting looked like later, but it involved a lot of minimalism and wearing the same shirts I’ve had since high school.

____________

Around March of this year, I began to take time to intentionally consider what would be next for me, post-Crossnore, for though I loved everything about being a cottage parent at that time, I knew that this job was not the full manifestation of what I want to do with my life, and unfortunately, because of my personality, I knew the job would eventually become unsustainable for me. No matter how much I loved my kids, I knew that my introvert battery would reach a point in the future where it would not be able to reach a full charge on my off weeks anymore, because cramming a month of normal social life of friends and family into only two weeks often led to me living as an extrovert on my off weeks. I found myself constantly surrounded by people, trying to keep up the level of depth I already had established in previous friendships, and continuing to dig deeper with new relationships I had formed throughout my travels.

Mind you, this normal-life social exertion was placed on top of already leaving work completely drained and overstimulated from social exertion with kids (which is a whole new level of socializing), and I knew that eventually no matter how intentional I was about taking care of myself on my weeks off, I would reach a point of burn out.

So, planner me figured it would be a good idea to think about some options so I would be prepared once I reached that point.

Hmm. Options were:

1. Go back to school and finish my bachelor’s degree. Umm nope I have no idea what I want to do with my life, and I’m not going to pay for a piece of paper before I will use it.

2. Move into a tipi in the woods. No Em, solitude is awesome, but humans were not made to live in isolation.

3. Thru-hike the Pacific Crest Trail. Well, it’s always been my dream…Why the hell not?

And somehow, between mid-March and April 28, 2017, option 3 turned into me buying a one-way plane ticket to Christchurch, New Zealand that leaves on New Year’s Eve.  

And THEN,

somehow,

between April 28, 2017 and now, that one-way plane ticket to Christchurch, New Zealand led to the purchasing of  many other one-way plane tickets to other countries, including:

Australia.

Indonesia. 

Laos.

Thailand.

Nepal. 

Then, who knows.

So far, there is no one-way ticket bought that will bring back to the states. There will be eventually, but only time will tell when that ticket will be purchased.

Oh. Another important detail: Danielle and Lucas Kovasckitz, my married best friends/ex-roommates/co-workers that I mentioned earlier, bought all of those one-way plane tickets too.

I told Crossnore at the end of October that my last day was going to be December 12th, to give me a couple weeks to decompress and prepare for the insane amount of unknown that will be wrapped up in 2018. I broke the news to my kids shortly after I told my supervisor, and we have been processing together over the past couple weeks through the transition.

And suddenly, today is December 12, 2017,  which means today was my last day as an employed cottage parent at the Crossnore School and Children’s Home. Today I hugged the necks of my current six kids extra tight, with tears in my eyes, and I bid farewell to the home where I have spent half of my life with the most incredible little humans over the past 18 months.

I leave the country in 19 days, on New Year’s Eve, and I will move out of my car home into my new home which will be that little blue-green backpack on the ground in the picture below, with those boots beside it as my mode of transport.

And like I said, I don’t know when I’m coming back. It will most likely be sometime in July, but who knows.

And friends, with thousands of gaps to fill in and a million unanswered questions still remaining, that is 2017 in a nutshell.

Cheers to space to reflect and fill in the gaps along the way, to tell stories I haven’t told, to uncover revelations in my past experiences that are still hidden, to seek the ones that will be grown in the new soil of my experience abroad next year.

I don’t know where I’m going, but I know that I am here, now, and I am making a commitment to keep showing up.

Bear with me. It’s going to be one hell of a ride. I am not promising that I will always be happy and put together, but I will make a commitment to honesty. I’m sure some of the stories/posts/musings/ideas to come will be lighthearted, and some will be dark. Some will name pain, some will point to healing. Some will ask questions with no answers, some will try to share answers found to questions asked months ago. Some will be rooted in anger and confusion, and some will point to hope and love.

Because that’s the human experience. It’s messy and confusing and all over the place and doesn’t make sense most of the time, 

but man is it a beautiful gift. 

Cheers to the Journey, and may your Spirit always reside in a state of wonder.