Distortions of the rearview mirror

My nostalgia for the places we have lived rewrites an often troubled past. How can I gently pry myself away from these rosy memories and anchor myself in the present?

The best of times? Tim and I with his team of bodyguards in Yemen, 2008.

I often feel like I only appreciate the places I have lived in retrospect. I am constantly nostalgic for Yemen, London, Bolivia, New York, and Uzbekistan, but when I was actually living in these places, I was struggling for much of the time—medically, financially, psychologically. I forget that even before cancer I was a human rollercoaster. (I want to find a less clichéd word, but nothing else captures the dizzying highs and precipitous plunges of my moods).  

Ever since we bought this house in 2013, I have been looking forward to the day we would be able to live here, in this idyllic village full of kind, talented, and eccentric artists. Every holiday we have spent here has been happy; each time we departed with great reluctance. Now here I am at last, and I find myself unable to feel my previous pleasure in the place.

Granted, I had never imagined that by the time I moved here I would be in the middle of treatment for ovarian cancer. I’m hoping this is the better part of what drags on my heart. I don’t want to feel that we have settled (oh, how I hate that word!) in the wrong place. I miss cities so much I worry we should be living in one.

I conveniently forget that in London I was always taut with anxiety about money, survival. We’re not profligate people, but London kept us teetering on the brink of financial ruin. We needed two incomes, and mine was erratic. I was writing Exile Music at the time, but I still needed to be constantly scrambling to find other jobs.

When we first arrived in the city from Bolivia, I had applied for dozens of creative writing teaching positions, only to find that no university would hire a writer without a PhD. This isn’t the case in the United States, where a writer with an impressive enough publishing track record can get a teaching job not only without a PhD but sometimes, if they are successful enough, without an MFA. I hear this is changing, and degrees are becoming more important. But my experience in the US had not prepared me for the UK job market. I don’t think any of my own writing teachers had PhDs (nor did this make them lesser teachers).

I started going to writing conferences, in search of writing community and work. At my very first conference, of the National Association of Writers in Education, I found writers not only accomplished in their writing and teaching careers, but who were also open and generous. I had worried that people would contemn me for my lack of PhD, worried that they would hear my American accent and start backing away. But that didn’t happen. I was welcomed into the fold. At one evening reception, I met a woman named Emma, who eventually invited me to teach a master class to her graduate students at Bournemouth University. I was delighted. My class went well enough that it encouraged Emma to invite me to teach undergraduate writers, and in my second year, graduate writers as well. So there was a way in to academia without a PhD: Cocktail parties.

(Now that I finally have a PhD, of course, I am too sick to teach at a university, although I hope this will change).

In London I also began taking on some freelance editing work. I found that I not only enjoyed this work tremendously but that I was good at it. It’s easier to edit the work of others than it is to edit my own, because I have distance and perspective. It excites me to be able to help other writers get where they want to go. But this work was then inconsistent, as I hadn’t figured out how to market myself.

At the same time, I finagled myself a job bartending at a local pub. It was across the street from Theadora’s theatre school, and I used to sit inside and work over a cider until her class was over. I got to talking with the manager, who ended up offering me a job purely because he figured that if I was this chatty with him, I could be this chatty with customers.

I had always wanted to bartend, because I love chatting with strangers (clearly) as well as making drinks. During the first trimester of my pregnancy, which I spent stuck in New York (another long story) while Tim was in Yemen, I took a bartending class at Columbia University—so I even had an Ivy League degree in it.

I usually worked what I call the Lonely Old Man shift, from 11 a.m. until 3 p.m. Ninety percent of the people who drank during those hours were men who came in alone. Women never came in alone. If they came in during those hours, it was for lunch with a friend. The men were bemused to find an American behind the bar. “We’re used to Kiwis and Australians,” they said. “But not Americans.” A lawyer who came in every evening for just one pint was astonished to find I wrote books. “A lady writer!” he said. “I don’t think I’ve ever read a lady writer!” Well, I told him, you’re missing out on the thoughts and artistry of half the human race.

Most of the work of bartending, alas, wasn’t making drinks for or chatting with customers. It was carrying heavy racks of glasses to the dishwasher, lifting those racks back to the bar to put away the glasses, carrying bottles up from the cellar, restocking snacks, cleaning the tables and shelves. I had forgotten how much physical labor it was, and that I was no longer in my twenties or thirties. By the time I got home, my entire body hurt and the pain in my feet kept me awake at night. I got special shoes, but they didn’t help.

Still, I persisted. It wasn’t the work that made me eventually quit; it was the fact that I was making minimum wage, seven pounds and change per hour. And in London there is no tipping. In New York, my bartender friends made hundreds of dollars a night in tips. In New York, it’s a much more rewarding job. (Also, New Yorkers are chattier). I eventually realized that I was spending evenings away from my family for a mere 28 pounds. It just wasn’t worth it.

But I thought about money all the time. I hadn’t felt that kind of financial pressure since leaving New York. We were careful. We never went out to eat, never took taxis, and only rarely splurged for a coffee outside of the house. We managed, we always manage. We’re two capable, resourceful adults. But I felt a constant tug of fear. This is at least partly responsible for how little I appreciated being in London at the time. London consumed our meager savings and kept us on edge—as I assume it does for many, if not most.

There were evenings when I walked through a park in Chiswick to pick up Theadora from an activity, and was struck by the gold of the evening light. This is what I will miss when we are gone, I thought. This is what should be making me happy now. I felt the same way about the six green parrots that inexplicably lived in a tree in our neighbors’ garden and the ice skating rinks in December. Yet these things were never enough to dim the constant hum of anxiety or to stop my mind from turning toward the future or the past, toward anywhere but the now.

I appreciate London most deeply in retrospect, but also when I am visiting, staying with friends (even or perhaps especially when going through chemo, when I had the luxury of free housing and friends looking after me), when I have open days to spend walking the streets for hours, writing, and wandering galleries. I used to tell friends that London was a wonderful place to be a tourist, but a terrible place to live. I have revised this opinion since living there for eighteen months of cancer treatment. I now think I could be happy living there, assuming an income. I have had many memorable moments there, even if I didn’t appreciate them while I was living them.

In Bolivia, I had different reasons for not fully being present. During our years there, an injury to my cervical spine kept me in such constant pain I often had to leave official events in tears. A catastrophic car accident left me with a concussion and permanent tinnitus. Writing became excruciating. After a year, I had spinal surgery, but recovery was long. We met the best of people and had spectacular adventures in Bolivia, but my medical state reduced my ability to savor them at the time. There were so many quotidian joys that I failed to experience as such: meeting a Bolivian friend for coffee, walking past the tea shops and wool shops of Calle Sagàrnaga, watching the morning light in La Paz turning the cliffs around us red, lighting up the dew on our grass.

Some experiences, however, jolted me into the present moment with a surge of adrenaline: cycling down the Camino de la Muerte with friends, skimming across the frigid surface of Lake Titkaka clinging to the back of a friend’s jetski, traveling in small boats for hours up rivers through the Amazon rainforest. These activities pinned my mind to the present so that it was unable to race ahead or glance behind. But it’s impossible to live all of life at this level of total cellular arousal.

Our years in Yemen were perhaps the happiest years of our lives, not coincidentally the years in which I also felt the most present. When running the Yemen Observer, I was focused on editing the current issue, juggling the problems of my reporters, finding my way around the country. The present kept me busy. Later, I was writing my first book and being paid well to do it. I had found my great love. I gave birth to my daughter. Why would I want to live in the future or the past with a present like that?

While we only recently left Uzbekistan, I already long for the restaurant where Theo and I had mother-daughter lunches after her long runs on Sundays, the cherries and apricots we picked in our garden, and the galleries of the Savitsky museum. I was grateful for these experiences, but was unable to inhabit them as fully as I wanted. Perhaps it was the continuing nerve pain, or my ineptitude with Russian.

Did I not try hard enough to find pleasure or do I just lack a talent for happiness? I want to get better at appreciating things in the moment. I have not been appreciating living here in France, and have perhaps been too focused on pining for cities. We are here now. I need to find reasons to be glad to be here. Ways to tie myself to this village. I want to give up complaining.

It’s not just missing cities, of course. It’s finding new ways to live with the sword of Damocles dangling over my head. I can’t live in a future I might not have. My present feels untenable. So the past is the only direction in which it is safe to travel.

So I assign myself tasks: Make the present better. Make dates with friends in the village, deepen those connections. Ring the people who nurture me more often. Notice the new wildflowers popping up along paths in the woods. Write a letter of gratitude to someone every morning.

Maybe daily happiness with life is a muscle that needs constant exercise with intent. If so, maybe I can build up some relevant muscle.

If you have practices that help draw you into the current moment, anchor you to your current life, to live it fully, I would love to hear them.