When I was in my early twenties, I was worried, generally, about everything. For a time, this worry coalesced into a very specific concern that someday soon, gravity would stop working, and then where would we be? I said this to my older brother once at a cafe. He—mathematical, logical, never tempted by hyperbole—lifted my pack of cigarettes off the table and let it fall. “Gravity,” he said, deadpan. “Still with us.”
Were there concrete things I should have been worried about? That pack of cigarettes I smoked each day, for instance? For sure. Was the gravity thing kind of an absurd comedy bit I was doing back then? In many ways, yes. But when I look back across the decades at that earlier version of me, I see someone who was struggling to trust the reality of her own experience—struggling, in fact, to know how or what or who to trust at all.
I had been shot out of the cannon of a 1970s suburban childhood and was caroming wildly through my early adulthood, suddenly left to my own devices, with no idea what was best for me. No wonder I became fixated on gravity. Fixated too on my thoughts, my narratives, and the incontrovertible rightness of them. It was a tight and rigid orientation, and so when I failed—as I often did, as I often do—my failures got knitted into the larger narrative about me, my life, my habits, my prospects. Looking back, I’m not surprised that the idea of trusting myself was foreign to me. There wasn’t a single voice in any of my communities—religious, academic, social—that believed someone like me—young, female, poor, an artist—was worthy of trust.
Instead of myself, I put my trust in tarot cards. In the idea that hard work and perfectionism would lead to some kind of reward. In the universe, though I’m not sure I’d thought through what that even meant. I put my trust in relationships that were bad for me, employers who took advantage of my ability to work beyond my limits, and the notion that there was little that couldn’t be fixed by an alcoholic beverage or a greasy diner breakfast. My head was forever in the clouds, my feet rarely touched the ground.
