*This is a post that I started on 4/24/24.. It looks like it had potential, but I was interrupted by an email that sent me puttering around my apartment.
I’ll light the fire
You place the flowers in the vase
You bought today…
When I got divorced in the summer of 2016, I did not expect to spend the next eight years of my life seeking. Seeking jobs, community, geography, companionship, enlightenment, stability. Up until that point, I had lived a typical (white), modest, suburban life. I had been steadily employed. I rose up through the ranks in one career. I went back to school. I switched careers, climbed the ladder again. My wife and I raised a sensible and smart kid who went off to the state university. We had two cats (though they weren’t in the yard). We had a fence though it was neither white nor picketed. What little seeking I did was in my career. Aside from following the expected trajectory, I’m not sure I was intentional in my professional seeking: one does a job, if they do it well, they assume new roles and responsibilities in which they can exercise skill and proficiency, which, in turn leads to newer roles and newer responsibilities… rinse and repeat until you’re either fired, laid off, or dead. There’s a lot of nuance that I’m leaving out, but the point is that I gravitated towards work where I had success, and the success typically became it’s own momentum carving it’s own path through the forests of dutiful employment.
With the divorce, came questions and opportunities. My ex-wife had moved out of state. The kid would, in theory, hop on the same employment treadmill on which the rest of us run – meaning she’d soon be self-sufficient. The house was more than I needed or could afford. I was newly single with a lot of time on my hands. I suddenly realized I could go just about anywhere and maybe do just about anything. But what I wanted, in that moment, what I sought, was companionship. I had the job. I had the house. Life was pretty stable with just this one piece missing.
If life felt less than full, it was because up until that point, I had always been in a relationship. I was with my first girlfriend for seven years and then I was with my wife for seventeen. In the twenty four years since graduating high school, I had never been alone. I didn’t know how to spend my time alone. In this new life, I hiked more, I started going out to bars more, and I started going out to see live music more. And I dated a lot. It wasn’t a mad-dash, spread my oats type of frenzy but dating was frenzied. Society says that normal people my age are married, advancing in their careers, and raising their kids. At the time of my divorce, I was (I think) the only single empty-nester in any of my friend groups. I was also the only single empty-nester in my family. My life didn’t look like the lives of anyone I knew, and as ridiculous as it sounds, I didn’t know how to live it. I hadn’t spent much time thinking about how to live my life.
Over the course of the next two or three years, I went through cycles of seeking, finding, losing, and regrouping. There were advances and retreats. There were relationships and break-ups. There were job applications and interviews. There were a lot of non-starters and one or two could-have-beens. One of the first forays into this new life of “endless possibilities” was a…
*That’s when I was interrupted. I have no idea what came next. I don’t know if I was going to write about some of my first dates in long series of dates or my first job interviews for organizations outside the state of Pennsylvania. A train of thought that I’ve missed and is now in some distant hinterland…