Last March, I lost a favorite reusable water bottle because I had forgotten, in my rush to the airport, to make sure it was empty when I went through security. The TSA agent relished the chance to tell me that the water bottle had to be confiscated, especially when I begged to drink it all in line right now. That couldn’t be done, said the agent. I’d have to go through security again, starting from the back of the absurdly long line, and I’d risk missing my plane if I did that. “Why would I offer to drink something dangerous?” I wailed to everyone I spoke to for the next two weeks. But I had no reason to lament the way I did. While waiting for my fellow passengers to board, I ordered a superior water bottle from my seat in an ironic move best summed up by this text-response from Ian:
The water bottle I then purchased was superior: electric red-orange and gigantic, the kind you only need to refill once even if you’re working out with everything you’ve got, and yet not cumbersome to carry around. It’s perfect. And for several days this week, I thought I lost it. But I didn’t, I left it at the library, and now I have it back. I was so relieved by this unexpected development that it’s buoyed me during a stressful period for days. On Friday, I announced my good news to my early-arrival students, then asked, dutifully seated as they were, if anyone else had had similar uplifting happenings they wanted to share.
I was surprised how many students could sympathize with my water-bottle situation, and heartened that several of them shared good news from their week: a test that had gone exceptionally well, a week of solid night’s sleep owed to a new tea discovery. Hard to think of a segue that doesn’t fall into cliches: “There’s always something to be grateful for” or that sentence that’s always grated on me, “It’s the little things.” A lot of Big Things have occurred since the semester began and they continue to either surge up or shimmer on the horizon, but in the absence of being able to write publicly about them I’ve gone micro. Much of it may make it into the essay collection that will become my MFA thesis, an outcome that somehow felt much more tangible when I was daydreaming in San Francisco than it does now that I’m required to turn in pages every two weeks.
The reality of my San Francisco life was one of amorphous uncertainty, but in memory now it’s flushed with all the vivid confidence of youth: We’ll do this and this and this and this and this and this and this! And that, that will be life. It was a certainty unencumbered by a lot of reality checks or much interference by executive functioning, but it registers to me now as a period of extreme focus, one that certainly couldn’t have come to an end so recently as not-quite-two-years ago. Actual focus, the kind that gets things done, bears little resemblance to what drove most of my days there; I know the contrast now. But I was convinced of something then that I’ve since so fully let go of that I can’t remember what it was. Still, I feel a mentally itchy space where it used to be.
Irritating as these abstracts are, it makes sense to think in concrete terms: I have my favorite water bottle back. I want to tie that back to a larger lesson, but no symbolic interpretation is more useful than, “Check and make sure you’ve got all your shit before you leave a place.” I doubt you need me to tell you that.
I’m now confronted in a way I’ve never been with the question of what we do need essayists for. Is it to pass on cultural knowledge, like, for example, that CFA is an acronym for Chick-fil-A? Is it to make meaning of anecdotes in order to feel the full weight, or the full lightness, of how different or how similar we all are? Ever since I’ve expanded this Substack beyond Disability Talk, I’ve had to contend with uncharacteristic doubt that my opinions matter, when I’ve gotten this far by being unshakably sure that you should listen to me.
I’ve been shaken, hard to pinpoint by what, but seeing as I’m no baby, this is likely a good thing. It’s that definition of good that comes later, though, when in hindsight you see how you were limiting yourself by notions of comfort that were actually limitations and psychobabble psychobabble personal growth. It’s not that satisfying gratifying instant-jolt good like when you’re just about to lament having lost a necessary and aesthetically-pleasing object forever and just as you were about to give up hope, there it is.