Letter to Elizabeth

Instead of posting a comment to your blog, Elizabeth (elizabethtannen.com/blog), I decided to write you a letter via my blog. In the olden days I would have written you on paper and put it in the mailbox, but in those olden days I wouldn’t have read what you wrote because there were no blogs. So round and round it goes, but as long as we’re still talking, it’s OK with me.

I was 28 a long time ago but I remember it well. It was a time of angst and instability, largely precipitated by the pattern set at Antioch College, which I attended for a short but intense time. We went to school for half the year and spent the other half on co-op jobs around the country, in three or six month rotations: rural New Hampshire, Berkeley, and Santa Fe for me. Even after I left, the pattern continued: Colorado Springs (where I was raised and went back to briefly); Cloudcroft, New Mexico; Bend, Oregon; Albuquerque’s South Valley; and finally (but not lastly) Placitas. My friends from Antioch were all over the place, set in motion just like me. I had several relationships, both going nowhere from the get go, and many flings. These were the days when Okies (corner of University and Central), Rosa’s Cantina (Algodones), and The Golden Inn (on the east side of the Sandias) provided a community of sorts, if drinking, dancing, and having a good old time with a bunch of other students, hippies, and assorted misfits counted as a cohort (I never used that word until Jakob started referring to his PhD class as one).

None of it assuaged my anxiety, which we all seem to share at that age regardless of the time and place. But what I want to say in this letter to you and many others your age who feel disconnected, unsure of where they want to be and with whom, things will settle into place eventually. It may take longer than you’d like it to, particularly now, in the midst of a depression, which our politicians euphemistically call a recession. It’s going to be harder for your generation than it was for mine—fewer ways to slip through the cracks with cheap rents, cheap gas, and an appreciation of the second-hand (it’s all boutique now).

You may end up someplace you never thought you would, and with “someones” instead of someone. A lot of it will be determined by you—what work you end up doing, where you do that work, or where you to want to be instead of where you find work—but a lot of it will be serendipitous (which is a more elegant way of saying a crap shoot). When I think back on how I ended up where I am, in northern New Mexico, in El Valle, I’m amazed. At 28 I’d never heard of the place. And it happened just like I said: some of it willed, choosing time over money (living in rural New Mexico), bad luck (leaving my home in Placitas because of gentrification), and good luck (knowing someone who lived in El Valle). I ended up with the same partner for 34 years, but he had already been married to his high school sweetheart, divorced, and had somehow found his way from Buffalo to Placitas, a route full of serendipity and dumb luck (finding me). You never know where they’ll come from or who they’ll turn out to be, these people you’ll have relationships with. But it will be VERY interesting.

So, it sounds like you’ve had a love-hate relationship with the crazy twenties and are ready to leave them behind and make your life a little more stable, which will hopefully make it a lot less anxious. You’re right that we tend to think of ourselves “on some sort of ascending path” but that the “better future” may indeed be false, particularly now. But I think, relatively speaking, that it will be better, at least on the personal level. Dan Savage founded the It Gets Better web site to let gays know that the social ostracism they suffer in high school or their early twenties will subside, that they will find the homes and relationships and work that most twenty somethings segue into in their thirties.

There will always be something to worry about, regardless of where you live, what you do, and who your family and/or friends may be (and for many folks friends are family). But you are not going to “revert to an older, lesser version of yourself”, regardless of the circumstances (even if it’s where you started out). It’s what you will be doing, who you choose to do it with, both personally and professionally, and how you go about making a home that determine who you are—even if in the end, none of us quite have a handle on exactly who that is. I often think back on all the stuff I did, the people I did it with, what I built and grew and wrote and thought. Someday you will, too. And it will have been a great ride.