Journals. No. 1

Early August 2014

The cursor blinked on screen. My mouse pointer hovered over the Send button. Never before in my life had so much weight rested on a group of pixels. It felt similar to those dreams when, compelled to run, one’s legs won’t work. My finger wouldn’t move. I just sat there, staring at the screen, wide-eyed.

Earlier that week I was under a tree, nearly motionless, transfixed by an article in Outside about unschooling. Two boys being raised on their own terms, with a classroom that was the forest behind their homes, and a schedule entirely of their own choosing. Their father, the writer of the article, told how the school bus went by each morning while his children sat eating breakfast, and how the boys filled their days creating their own world, learning to move through and live in the complex and beautiful forest behind their clapboard house.

It transported me back, violently, to my own long days spent in classrooms, staring out windows. I remembered how bored I was then, and in subsequent years, when I had to spend most of my time being talked to or told what to do by teachers, and set on a fixed schedule run by bells, surrounded by people who were, for the most part, dissimilar to me. Many of them seemed OK with it, but for some reason I wasn't, and even through college I only did the bare minimum in all of my coursework. However, long before this, I had an incredible stroke of luck that came, paradoxically, during school.

In first grade we were given small notebooks. The teacher said "make a journal about what you do every day," and so we began. I first wrote about everyday life, but then something strange happened. I can't say where it came from, but I began to write a story: about a little cabin in the woods where my family lived, though we had never lived in one. The story was full of snow ball fights, forts, skiing, sledding, and hot chocolate after long days outside. I had so many ideas about this life that my rudimentary coordination could not keep up: before I knew it, the writing period had ended. So entranced was I by this idea that I began to write about it every day, even when my teacher told me to stop. And so it was that, at an incredibly young age, I defined what felt good and beautiful to me.

As the school years progressed, I kept telling myself that same story, again and again: to live in the forest, in a cabin, is what I wanted. Graduation from high school came and went, and then college as well, as slow and wandering as I could make it. And then one summer on break from college I took a trip all alone to the west coast, and on the first night of the drive I found I had no place to sleep. I drove up a logging road and put my tent in a clearing. And I found, after all these years, that it was actually terrifying to be in the woods at night, in the darkness, alone. Where had that child gone, who wrote so beautifully about the forest and his time there? Had he finally been beaten into submission? Had I lost sight of my goal? And I realized, in a flash, that I truly had, and I had been walking in the wrong direction for a long time.

The cursor still sat there, almost as if clicking were beyond my power. I stared at the screen, and branching paths of the future stared back. To send the email would mean to quit the job I had held for five years. It would mean another drive across country, the second this year, just as the leaves were turning and winter was getting ready in the north. It would also mean not having a clear place to live, or any income.

All of these thoughts went by like a raging storm, and so I sat there, unable to do anything. And then it hit me: the one thing that was keeping me from quitting. It was the same thing I had experienced in that dark night, alone in the forest, and it was the same thing that set me to physically shaking weeks later on the same trip when, in the middle of the night, a bear came right up to my tent. Fear. "Fuck you," I thought, and clicked.