A week before we left on vacation I was (kindly) rejected from the permanent full-time position I have applied and interviewed for three times. It’s ok. I’m ok, I said to Jeff and my mom and my friends— and I meant it. I am ok. But when I couldn’t fall asleep on a hot night in a hotel in Munich I spent an hour worrying and feeling embarrassed at the failure of it, ashamed of the trying and the wanting and the working that once again wasn’t good enough.
It’s my newsletter and I’ll throw a pity party if I want to. But it’s a half-hearted party, with slightly-inflated balloons and warm punch, because adjuncting is an odd gig. I still have my classes, I still have the work, I still have paychecks. I’m not crying in a public bathroom so as far as job rejections go, this one doesn’t exactly rank.
When I woke up again it was morning in a different country and I was in a giant bed and I could hear the baby rustling in a European Pack n’ Play and I was ok. Taking your disappointments on the road won’t solve anything, but I always vote to go. Let different lives and different languages and different types of chocolate bars take the edge off.
I loved Munich. We chose Germany because it was a place neither of us had ever been, because it seemed like an easy place to take a baby, and because it was Jeff’s dad’s favorite country in the world. This month is has been four years since we lost Steve.
Munich felt like a very livable city, with wide cobblestone sidewalks and paved bike lanes and trains and trams and buses and Doner Kababs always just around the corner. For the first couple of days we wandered around and I kept thinking, oh, this is how it would feel to live in a real city.
“America is the worst,” I’d say to Jeff.
“I guess we should live here,” Jeff would say.
It struck me that I might never live anywhere except Minneapolis, again. I may never know what it’s like to fall in love with a new place, may never learn new streets, may never get to be that new-city version of myself. When I said that to Jeff he said, '“I wouldn’t say never. But not for a while.” Which is the right thing to say, of course. We browse Zillow and save each month for a down payment and I know the truth is that I wouldn’t want to leave Minneapolis, wouldn’t want to leave our families and friends, not really, but I also don’t want that door to be closed. I often think about how some of the great pleasures of being 30-something are the closed doors, the lifting of that 20-something what will my life look like? anxiety. But I’ll always need a door that says Go.
There will be future disappointments that will need to be blunted by tree-lined streets or new horizons or local beers that read foreign to me.
Some Recommended Listening from July:
Kids splashing in pools
Your heart/gut/small steady voice inside
Marco Polos from your besties