Category: Kendra

Consolation, Desolation

posted 17th November 2009    Written by: Kendra    CATEGORY: All Posts, Kendra, Quarterlife Crisis, Season 1

ConsolationI was laying in bed vaguely watching back-to-back-to-back rerun episodes of the canceled television series Joan of Arcadia when the exact language for what I had been trying for weeks to craft into words to describe my own emotional state over the past few months to my friends were beautifully spoken by one of the show’s principal characters.

The character, Helen, a mother who has just learned that her daughter has been rushed to the hospital with a serious illness just a year or so after her eldest son had been permanently paralyzed in a car accident says to her husband, Will, who has just expressed feelings of deep despair over a life that seems to be spiraling into darkness:

Helen: We go through times of consolation and desolation. Consolation is when things are flowing, and everything makes sense, and you feel connected… Desolation is the other thing. When you are scared and confused and alone and out of step, and your cell phone doesn’t work, and your daughter gets sick and the cops come to the door and say there’s been an accident. God retreats, and you’re left with your own thoughts, and those thoughts are dark. There are answers there… And strength.

Will: How long does desolation last?

Helen: As long as it needs to.

I found real comfort in her words.

Sometimes, life knocks us down and we just have to feel sad for awhile. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s not angst, or depression, it’s just sadness. I’m not disregarding depression, which can be debilitating, but I think it’s too often lumped together. Sadness is a natural human state, much like happiness is.

And just like joy is a response to a circumstance, so too is sadness.

Sadness can tell us that we need to look inside ourselves, nurture ourselves, rebuild connections with friends and family, connect with larger community, or otherwise change our life.  It is not a defect or a problem to be sad… sadness is feedback, telling us that something is out of balance and gently nudging us to rebalance our lives.

And that takes action, yes, but also and most importantly time.

It’s something to remember when I’m feeling the social pressure to “just be happy”.

kendra-bio1

photo credit: w00dy

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The Unemployment Blues

posted 10th November 2009    Written by: Kendra    CATEGORY: All Posts, Job/Career/Work, Kendra, Quarterlife Crisis, Season 1

Depression LineI have experienced three periods of unemployment in my adult life. The first was when I first finished undergrad, the second, was when I returned from living in France, and I’m currently into my fourth month of my third period of unemployment.

Having gone through unemployment so many times, one would think I’d be good at it.

And, in some ways I am.

But the truth is no matter how we try to dress it up in terms like “funemployment” being conventionally unemployed… sucks.

Oh sure, it’s great for awhile.

You can sleep all day, party all night and live in your PJ’s. And for a week or so, as you peel off the layer of exhaustion that often comes with trying to juggle full-time work with a full-time life, being unemployed rocks…until it doesn’t.

This is something that most of my friends, who’ve never been unemployed, Do. Not. Get.

They don’t get, for example, how because most of us have spent our lives either in school or at work for someone else we never learned how to structure our own time. Yet, when you’re unemployed all you have is time: a yawning chasm of a day that must somehow be filled. Learning how to fill your unemployed time, without going crazy is a skill that must be learned or else you’ll find yourself awake at midnight wondering where your day went and how you managed to accomplish nothing more than showering, watching bad TV and facebook stalking your exes.

Or so I’ve heard.

I’ve found it helpful to make two lists: a monthly list what I want to accomplish that month (thinking short-term when unemployed is your friend), and a daily list I make every night which lists what I’m going to do the next day to help me accomplish my larger goals for the month, as well as reminding me to do the mundane survival things like pay my student loans. I find it helpful to structure my day into blocks: things I will accomplish between 9:00am and 11:00am, 11:00am and 1:00pm. I even go so far as to put mundane things like eat breakfast on the list, because while most people manage to gain wait while laying around doing nothing I’ve managed to drop almost ten pounds because I simply forget to eat (and I’m realizing as I type this that I’ve been awake for three hours and haven’t eaten anything… the list system, is admittedly not perfect).

Something else the ‘always employed’ don’t recognize is how socially isolating being unemployed is. When you have a job you talk to people – even if it’s the drone the next cubicle over. There’s chitchat around the coffee pot, people you have lunch with, happy hour after work. When you’re unemployed the loose social interaction that happens at the office is nonexistent, unless you count my relationship with Benson & Stabler from Law and Order: SVU.

And I am broke. Really broke. So spending money I don’t have on things such as happy hour just doesn’t make economic sense reinforcing cycle of loneliness.

My solution, however, has been a two tiered prong of stacking my days and volunteering.

Volunteering helps because it puts you into contact with people who can make a career connection – it’s a valid expense. I try and stack my networking/job interviewing events with social ones: if I’m already blowing $4.50 to get into the city for an interview, I can dawdle (for free!) in a bookstore while waiting to meet friends for drinks. I suck back water while they’re imbibing on something stronger (my friends are not scrooges, they are too happy to buy me a round of drinks but a combination of pride and common sense- there is nothing sexy about an unemployed alcoholic- means I try not to take them up on their offers too often).

Volunteering also helps because apart from getting some awesome social interaction, sometimes you get a free meal, a free drink or both out of it.

But I’m not going to lie, the thing that makes unemployment easiest to deal with is the hope, that if you keep plugging away, eventually… it’s going to end.

kendra-bio1

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A Bad Year

posted 3rd November 2009    Written by: Kendra    CATEGORY: All Posts, Kendra, Quarterlife Crisis, Season 1, What I've Learned

LeapingLeap and the Net Will Appear

My twenty-fifth year was the year that I made a not-so-unconscious decision to live a little dangerously.

What, I thought, was the point of a pre-planned life?

So even though the longest I’d ever continuously been away from my family was three months, I took a job teaching English in Bordeaux, France knowing I’d be away from home for at least seven straight months.

Everyone kept asking me if I was scared, but the truth was I was thrilled. Why would I be afraid?

If you’re not living on the edge, you’re taking up too much room.

There is, floating around a hard drive somewhere, a picture my friend Susan snapped of me mere minutes before I leapt out of a plane strapped to the back of a tiny, crazy, Hungarian man. I like to think that I am facing the camera with something akin to steely eyed determination; Susan says that I was terrified. The truth is I didn’t have any of the sensations I associate with fear: my heart wasn’t pounding, my mind wasn’t racing. It was the exact opposite of fear, I had made my decision and I was at peace with it. My mind was clear. In the video footage of my jump the only outward display of emotion is my eyes rolling into the back of my head as my body somersaults from the plane.

I even remembered to pull the cord to open my parachute.

Fear is the mind-killer.

Fear, except for fear of a life half-lived, was never something that shaped my life. I loved the future, I yearned for tomorrow, certain that it would unfold to bring me a largesse today simply did not hold.

This past year I did a whole lot of leaping and the net never seemed to appear.

Nothing dangerous happened, but my esteem took a bit of a pounding: could I have seen these things coming? Should I have seen them coming? Did I bring about these problems? And for awhile, when I was really into self-pity (full disclosure: I’m still prone to wallowing), replaying the tragedies of the past year, I felt justified in my newfound fear of the future.

Never be afraid to try something new. Remember, amateurs built the ark, professionals built the Titanic.

After all, hadn’t I been through a lot?

Actually, no. The funny thing about hindsight is that we’re selective in what we choose to remember.

Yes, my experience living in Washington, DC was my own special circle of hell, but when I decided that I needed to leave the net did appear: in the form of the perfect subletter who fortuitously signed a sublease the day before my next month’s rent was due, and never caused a lick of damage. And even DC wasn’t all bad, my French class was fun, my roommate, a computer science student from Siberia was amazing (we still keep in touch), and Halloween was a uniquely fun day.

When I was determined to go to Dublin for New Years I found a crazy job decorating Christmas tree wreathes (no joke) that gave me enough cash for a plane ticket and beer and allowed me to discover the joys of drinking vodka while doing outdoor work.

And when I was so riddled with loneliness (for the first time ever) while living in Montreal that I thought I might actually die from it, I was given Van and Abi, Jen and even, Andrew and the fortune to discover the wondrous joy of living with guys (J-Y, Christian and Yoshi this is your shout out).

In other words, last year was really not that bad; I just remember it that way.

So I’ve been trying this new thing, when my mind goes to the bad  from the past year (which, when you’re unemployed with an uncertain future & a boring present  you have a lot of time to ruminate over the past), I swing it around to the good, before trying to redirect myself to the now.

And it’s working… kind of.

kendra-bio1

photo credit: artbandito

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Staying the Course Even When the Water Gets Rough

posted 27th October 2009    Written by: Kendra    CATEGORY: All Posts, Kendra, Quarterlife Crisis, Season 1, What I've Learned

StormyWaters_Biarritz

This post is an extension of an e-mail I sent to a friend who is also very much struggling with figuring out how to create a rhythm and a pace for contentment. I know she’d be more than okay with me sharing it with a wider audience.

Profundity escapes me, I have no answers and I’m too tired to ask any questions beyond “Will things get better?”

We of the Quarter Life Crisis have decided or are on the precipice of choosing a less common path. Many of our friends have picked steadier, more well worn paths and now as we sink into the depths of our depression, as happiness withdraws into an ever dwindling glimmer, we reach out to them to pull us towards the light and we’re left to question the wisdom of our decision.

They reach back to pull us up, but they can’t lift us up because they don’t ‘get’ it.  Why we don’t want a ‘normal’ job, why we can’t seem to settle on a city, on a career, on a path. Some of them want to get it, but most of them I think don’t even really want to.

Who leaps willingly into the abyss?

They love us and they want to help us, and in truth they may be no happier than we are, but theirs is a managed unhappiness. A predictable unhappiness, while we feel buffeted about by the winds of chaos, alone in a storm of our own making.

This is not about an ‘us’ or a ‘them’, because really it’s all ‘we’. It’s about figuring out what fits, living a lifestyle that you love. And the most important part in doing that is recognizing what’s real and what isn’t.

It is true you know; we made this mess. This beautiful, blessed thing that is our life is a creature of our own making. And that is a reassuring thing. If we can make such a mess, we also have it in us to make lives of great beauty.

We just have to start doing it.

We have to accept the tempest and nonetheless turn our tiny boats in the direction of our heart’s desires, correcting as we go but ever certain of our direction as our beacon beats within our chest.

kendra-bio1

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Tired of Faking It

posted 20th October 2009    Written by: Kendra    CATEGORY: All Posts, Job/Career/Work, Kendra, Quarterlife Crisis, Season 1

RainbowEveryone, it seems, has an opinion of how I should be feeling and the word that describes how I should be feeling is ‘better’.

On one level it’s my fault, I am expressing my worries, my frustrations, and there is something in our Oprah-Dr.Phil-Tyra culture that when people express a problem, other people want to step in and fix it.

However, as I told my friend Kaylea the other day after I responded honestly to the question of how I was feeling (sad), I didn’t want to feel better.

Not in that moment. I just wanted to be there, in the moment with my sadness. And I wanted for her and for other people to be ok with it.

The past two years have been emotionally difficult. People who I considered friends proved in one way or the other that they weren’t worthy of my friendship. I’ve moved four times (my own choice) and I find myself feeling both lonely and wary of relying too heavily on friends, of allowing people to get too close because of the events of the past year. I thought I knew what I wanted out of career/life/ love and I had a lot of that upended; I’m still sorting through the wreckage.

I need time and space to heal, the beautiful comfort of routine, physical space to breathe and a break from the day-to-day worries of things like impending student loan bills. It’s space I’m not getting because I don’t really have my own space in my parents’ house, and without the structure of a job, I’m finding it really hard to create a routine.

It’s funny, I used to want nothing more than to be self-employed, and now I want nothing more than a job. Unemployment is isolating, both because it means I lack the weak social interactions that most people get at work, and because so much of socializing in New York involves spending money that I don’t have.

And maybe, maybe, I should be handling it ‘better’, maybe if I had the right attitude/religion/spiritual level of enlightenment I could glide through this period of uncertainty with a smile on my face and a song in my heart.

But I’m not that person.

I’m just me, funny, quirky, imperfectly beautiful me. Happy one minute, close to tears the next. And telling me that other people have it ‘worse’ does nothing but add a layer of guilt (and egoism) that I don’t really need right now – I am not a naïf -  I’ve seen starving children with distended bellies, I’ve worked with teenagers who had been so abused by the adults in their life that they found a hug as threatening as a shot gun. And while I have enough clarity to recognize that I have the ability to get myself out of this situation that those people did not, the sort of logic that says one should not feel bad because others have it worse would mean that we wouldn’t take a single step to improving poor performing schools, reducing violent crime rates, or improving nutrition: why does it matter if that person is malnourished when somewhere in the world someone else is starving?

If I had a broken leg people wouldn’t tell me to get up and start dancing; they’d accept that it takes time to heal and even once it healed it would be awhile before I could go for a hike.

Emotionally, this past year I’ve been hurt, and it’s going to be awhile before I can start dancing. I get up, I keep moving, I do what it takes to get me to better, but I’m tired of pretending that I’m there.

Cause I’m not, yet. So please don’t ask me to be.

kendra-bio1

photo credit : zaphgod

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