Among the Wildflowers
A journey through societal expectations and how I found happiness in today’s world
If there is anything you can say about Winnetka, Illinois it is that it is a town full of opportunity and privilege. It is a town where children are born expecting to later become the power players in life — the CEOs, the senators, the bankers, the doctors. Sure, you can love art, you can love to hike, to ski, even surf, but those are things you do not become. You do not become the mechanic, the plumber, the cocktail server. You do not go wander into the mountains bouncing from job to job, living on the edge of poverty, searching for purpose in things other than what you are to become.
Winnetka is situated 16 miles north of Chicago and is considered one of the wealthiest towns in the United States. It is the beacon of the North Shore. Mansions and nice homes line leafy streets, and pristine public and private beaches stretch along the shores of Lake Michigan. An integral feature of town is its public high school, New Trier, which is consistently ranked as one of the best schools in the country. In many ways, it represents what you would want in public education: a rigorous and robust academic program; high spending per student; a wide array of activities and sports; and a feeling that every student matters. It is also a school that is predominantly white, as is the town; despite this, the school as a whole is largely progressive and inclusive. It tries to teach a curriculum that is broad, that reaches beyond the affluent suburb in which it sits. As an alumna, I can attest to all of this.
Despite its large student population, I never felt left behind. I never felt as if my interests were not important. I always felt that I was a vital piece of who we Trevians were meant to become.
And yet, this is where my story diverges — albeit I did not know it at the time. I have always loved art, especially photography, and I have always loved family trips to the mountains of Colorado. I instinctively felt there was truth to be found in the mountains and that I could truly be myself. However, in keeping with the school’s drive for excellence, I safely boxed those feelings away in place for what I thought I was meant to become.
Early on, I focused in on the Foreign Service, the United States’ diplomatic corps. It was full of prestige and swagger. It was something I could present at high school reunions and say: “Look what I became.”
I felt it was incumbent upon me, therefore, to get good grades, get good test scores, get admitted into the right clubs and into the right schools. I felt I wanted this, needed this. After all, doing all of those things would lead me to my own special place of destiny and excellence. I would go to Washington D.C., or perhaps New York City, and represent what it meant to be a Trevian, what it meant to be born and raised on the North Shore of Chicago.
Through all of this striving, however, there were clues that I might be trying to swim upstream.
Neither I nor my parents and my brother, Nik, ever quite fit into the North Shore mold; my dad investigated fires in semi trucks, traveling widely, and my mom was an accomplished artist. They ended up there by chance — through a realtor — and decided to stay because of the schools. Toward this end my parents always cultivated my and my brother’s interests and always encouraged us to do our best.
My brother was smart, but his behavioral and mental health issues meant frequent calls home to my mother. Academics were not really his speed. Racing and working on cars was. Before he even had his driver’s license, at 16, he was driving Formula V race cars. At age 17, he became rookie of the year in the Chicago region of the Sports Car Club of America and won regional and national races in his car class.
But when it came to college, Nik’s teachers and our parents were at a loss. How could they get his academics up so he could get into a good school? In the end, he went to a local community college for a year before being accepted into a state university. In college, my brother struggled to pick a major, although this is hardly a unique burden among young adults. Ultimately, he settled for law enforcement and would make dean’s list a few semesters before graduating and then deciding there was too much math involved in becoming a cop.
Following graduation, he bounced around various hands-on jobs, but it was clear he was miserable. Car racing, and all that it entailed, became one of the few bright spots in his life. By the time it dawned on my parents and my brother himself that maybe he should have gone to a trade school instead of college, it was too late. My parents were out of college money and his mental health problems were so entrenched, there did not seem to be a way forward. His story would ultimately end in tragedy.
I cannot say, nor anyone else, that had he gone to a trade school right out of high school if his life would have turned out differently. It’s also not the fault of the North Shore’s push for college and a certain type of ‘accepted’ excellence that caused his suicide. My whole family, myself and my brother included, believed without question that college was the answer to a successful life. But, sometimes you wonder, what if? What if he had gone on to trade school after graduating from high school instead of college? Would he still be alive?
And then, there was me.
High school was a fairly mundane exercise. It was important to get good grades because I wanted to become a diplomat, but I also had a laissez faire attitude of Que sera, sera, whatever will be, will be.. Sure, I wanted to do well and generally did, especially in the humanities, but it all felt so formulaic. Looking back, I really felt only deeply for history and photography, but both were eschewed as something you do. How could you make money — or a living — as a photographer? I remember feeling astounded by a fellow student’s acceptance into an art school. She was gutsy, albeit reckless, I thought. I admired her, but still I was consumed that you had to have presentable goals in order to succeed.
Instead, I focused on being a people pleaser and not doing anything to cause trouble (my brother’s reputation preceded me).
I knew early on that I was not elite college material and I was okay with that. When I became an upperclassman, I had other priorities in mind when it came time to choose a college, although I didn’t fully understand my priorities then. While it barely crossed my mind that art school could be an option, I still did not exactly choose an ‘appropriate’ or ‘acceptable’ school according to the ethos of the North Shore.
If you went to New Trier and were getting ready to go to college, the most prestigious schools you could pick were in the Ivy League and Big Ten. There were a handful of other schools outside of those that were popular, but the University of Montana certainly was not one. I remember one student snickering: “The University of Montana? What’s out there?” I remember thinking at the time, but dare not saying, “Well, first of all, not you.”
I had chosen to study Russian as my major, but the real reason I wanted to go to the University of Montana? It was in the mountains of my beloved West.
But there, still, I was on track. It was before Vladimir Putin had really displayed his nefarious mark on the world, but the Russian language was still coveted by the State Department and top NGOs and think tanks. I picked up Middle Eastern studies as a minor and excelled in both programs. My professors infused a love of literature that I had only before casually possessed. My time in Montana emboldened my path towards excellence, culminating in winning a national Fulbright Scholarship to live and teach in the Republic of Georgia.
In my personal life, winning a Fulbright Scholarship was a coup d’état. It had the prestige I was seeking for years. I had made it into the big leagues.
Despite my academic success in college, school had not always come easily. I was held back in first grade; took special education math in middle school; and took a class devoted toward giving me the time to understand the material in junior high. Thus, by high school, I was ready to take regular classes.
This was an aspect of the North Shore that was amazing — they were able to recognize that with a little help, I could blossom. What could I do but jump headlong into the fray and to study and work towards becoming a diplomat? I was barely aware of the twist in my gut calling for a slower, more serene existence. I remember instead thinking that would come later, that was retirement, that to slow down was not something you do when you have your whole life ahead of you.
College for me was an immensely beneficial experience, although not in the ways I had anticipated. It’s hard to look back now and think I had maybe chosen the wrong field because my college years had been so good. I liked what I studied. Literature brought humanity to politics and history. I was excited about the future.
The Fulbright Scholarship was one of the best things to happen to me and my time in the Republic of Georgia was incredibly enriching. I first learned about the Caucasus region, which stretches between the Black Sea and Caspian, through history and literature. Georgia was where Joseph Stalin was born. When I first looked this area up, however, I was instantly captivated by its stunning mountains. Jagged and wild, few people in the United States knew about this region and that allured me further. It had a fabled, intricate history and I felt lucky that I experienced this place.
The next logical step was graduate school. I got accepted to the University of Washington in Seattle on a full scholarship to study Russia and the Former Soviet Union. My specialty would focus on Georgia and the Caucasus and while I found what I studied interesting, the twist in my gut could not be ignored anymore. It was not enough to read and write about this region, I longed to be in its mountains.
That first year of my Master’s degree, with my physical pain spiraling out of control and after being diagnosed with Fibromyalgia, a chronic pain condition, I called my mom in tears: “I don’t want to do this anymore! I just want to quit.”
My mom convinced me to stay the course, saying an unfinished degree would look terrible on my resume and could really hinder my plans to get a job in the international relations field. I reluctantly agreed with her and that summer, I was accepted into a State Department internship at the U.S. Embassy in Georgia. It refueled my career interests and so I went into my second year fully determined to make it.
As I edged closer to graduation, however, my unease once again began to grow. Sure, I found what I was studying interesting, but I was also doing the bare minimum needed to pass. The pain caused by my fibromyalgia was getting more intense and it was all I could do to get out of bed. Then, one day while running errands in downtown Seattle, I had a panic attack. I was overcome by all the congestion, by the noise and people. I knew then that city living was not for me. I instead took solace in the parks by my apartment, by running to the roof to watch the sun set over the Olympic Mountains, and by the quiet of wandering the weekly farmer’s market on my block.
More than that, the cutthroat culture of the international field and Washington D.C. was not for me. I had worked for so long to build my resume and curriculum vitae and none of it seemed to matter. Entering a career had become about tests and Russian language skills, the former of which I had struggled with all of my life and the latter had a dividing line I just could not seem to cross. I did not have the stamina to keep trying and failing.
It was after a spring break trip to Colorado that I remarked to an administrator in my program: “I think I need a break. Maybe I can be a ski bum for awhile?”
“Your ski bumming days are behind you,” he told me matter-of-factly. Was he right? I was taught early on that long, ‘unproductive’ breaks would look bad on a resume. There was an order to things. That summer after graduation, I bought plane tickets and signed a lease for an apartment in Washington D.C. despite not yet having a job.
As one last hurrah before I moved to the East Coast, I spent a month in Crested Butte, Colorado hiking and biking. I felt the most at peace I had in years. The people here got it, they got me. They understood what it felt like to have your soul reawakened in a quaking aspen forest and what it was like to have your breath taken away standing below the towering peaks of the Maroon Bells. I did not need to explain anything to them about the magic of seeing fields upon fields of wildflowers.
In this state of mind I returned to Winnetka three weeks before I was due to move to D.C. and it was then that I knew. It was then that I knew I belonged to that over-educated bunch of misfits that call Crested Butte home.
I knew I would be leaving behind a certain sense of job security, and that of a greater income, and that of a so-called stature I had been working for nearly all my life, but that was perfectly all right with me. Life was so much more than status or making money, it was more than just being a cog in the system. Life was meant to be enjoyed. If a career could do that for you, then great; however, for me it was feeling the vastness of Mother Earth envelop me. Going out into nature, feeling its goodness wash over me, was what made me more happy than anything else I had ever experienced.
I wanted to photograph these mountains, to capture these incredible moments of peace and tranquility that I experienced being in them. It did not matter to me whether or not I made money from it. All I cared about was that photography made me happy.
I think I could have been good in the international field; I think I would have done just fine if that’s all it was. I knew there would be people who were going to be disappointed with my decision to leave all I had worked for behind. I had to have one of the toughest conversations of my life telling a friend I was not going to room with him in D.C. I lost the friendship because of it and I can’t blame him for that, but I knew I was absolutely doing what was right for me.
You cannot live life trying constantly to please others. You do that, and you will never end up pleasing yourself. You will never live your truth.
In the four years since I moved to Colorado, I have gained far more than I could have ever hoped or imagined. I have bounced between several jobs and I don’t make a lot of money, and there is not a lot of job security. Instead, I find an incredible amount of security just being in the mountains, hiking in the summer and skiing in the winter. In particular, the sport of skiing has taught me and endowed me with more self-confidence than all my years of schooling. Skiing has taught me that I am fearless and powerful and that I am so much more capable than I ever believed. Sharing hikes with my dog, River, has allowed me to really and truly understand and appreciate the connections I have with this world. I understand now that I lead a life rich in intimacy and in personal growth. I live a life of love.
Has it always been easy? No. Do I still live with chronic pain? Unfortunately, yes. Do I ever wonder if I had chosen to stay the course, what my life would be like? Naturally. And as I reflect on my life to this point, I wish there had been more emphasis placed on the fact that there is not just one road to success in life. I am a cocktail server, not a diplomat. My photography has been featured in galleries and publications. I don’t make money from any of those and that is fine. I am okay with that.
My brother would have benefited more going to trade school and would have made a fine mechanic, and we need those. We need the plumber, the electrician, the shopkeeper. We need the artist. We need the person who thinks more about where they are going to hike next than necessarily their next promotion.
I am not a failure just because I do not fit the North Shore’s idea of excellence. I also realize there are more people from the North Shore that are like me, more drawn to nature than a hectic career.
I am also well aware that the North Shore is a big reason I am who I am today: the best thing they have done is nurture my potential. I am in no way saying gaining an education is not important. In fact, college helped me develop a more nuanced, poetic view of the world. It is through this lens that I live my life.
I close by saying this: aid the next generation in understanding there is more than one way to be prosperous and that one job is not necessarily more important than the other. You do not have to have a lot of money to be rich. You do not have to become a senator or doctor or CEO to be successful. You can be a cocktail server and photographer in the mountains you love and find your soul.
