I have always encouraged Amber's dilettantism, because then at least one of us is exploring the world and finding their bliss. She pursues avenues as they occur to her, no matter how many disappoint. I have no right to tie her down, to tell her not to do something that will not harm me. Let her be rootless, but able to find a home in me. I don't care to calcify -- if anything, I would hope my interest in therapy is demonstrative of this -- but I can't deny that I am 90% staid these days. She doesn't have to worry where I am. She knows I will likely be where she needs, that I will support her decision to take in a stray kitten rather than let it be stolen from us, even though I am allergic (I am also slightly in love with anything that immediately and foolishly loves and trusts me on sight, the dumb bastard).

I've always felt like I ought to be mobile, ready to pack up at a moment's notice, but I've rarely left my comfort for long, even though I've cherished several of these excursions. When I resisted buying a house, it was because I could not convince myself that my job would provide lasting financial security; Red Hook didn't feel like a place I would remain, merely the same caliber of stepping stone I'd found in five other towns, and I didn't want the attachment when I left. If I had a house, I had a deep financial obligation anchoring me. If I had to get another job hours away, I couldn't move where I wanted to be.

I felt -- I feel -- the same about pets. I don't want another living thing depending on me if I can help it. Should I need to vanish for a weekend, I do not want to consider the needs of something small and helpless. Amber is not of this opinion, packing our house with thirteen creatures -- her coven of animals, as she puts it -- in five species, not counting the colony of sow bugs she fosters to serve as custodians of the hermit crab enclosure and occasional treats for the betta fish. This doesn't factor in the plants people continue to gift her, because she was once demonstrated a green thumb and plants are an easy gift. She wants to explore, but with a heavy pack on her back.

I do not behave as though I am rootless, only temporary. I remain entrenched in places, people, things. I am trying now to detach from some, but I have no intentions of leaving and Amber is geographically tied here until she has a new bachelor's degree, though I expect she will find occasion to stay after. Aside from her four years at college and her seven years with me, she had lived in Hyde Park all her life, which is only a half hour drive from our apartment if the traffic favors us.

I have tied myself to wanderers and faintly admired them for it, even as I didn't always have the resources to follow. They nestled into nooks in the world I have only ever seen in pictures. Even now, mothers to a collective three children, they go on international trips with some regularity, for business and pleasure. I have made a few dots on a map of the United States, a line in northern California, and a scribble in Nova Scotia twenty years ago. I have stayed put with envy and regret.

As with so much in the realm of the psychological, it is a matter of personal gnosis and revelation. Which is to say I feel like a drooling moron for having missed something obvious for so long, even though I had been searching everywhere except in front of me.

One of the happiest moments of my life was looking out a bathroom window when I attended a two-week summer program at Bard College for gifted kids, seeing a lawn full of my beautiful peers playing guitar, playing sports, and talking in depth. I knew I was independent, surrounded by love, purposeful, able to engage in fun activities or sit alone and read if I wished. Unlike now when I am... all those things. So why am I stressed?

I don't have to work in my free time if I don't want to. No one forces me. I can do what the day calls me to do, not trapped by a routine. What I want to get done still happens at its own pace and may be of better quality because there is nothing compulsory in its creation.

It is a matter of reframing the life before me to my exemplar for happiness, something I experienced only a moment in my life. Though I have accrued three degrees, I barely had what might constitute a college experience, a fact I have at times openly resented. It felt as though I were deprived of a formative experience my more privileged peers had in abundance, so much so that they take it for granted. It is a matter of distilling from that what I needed and decoupling that from the unrepeatable situation in which I originally found it:

1. freedom to do as I pleased with respect to my autonomy
2. a community of people I liked and wished to be around
3. Activities to do or not do as I wished
4. a purpose to the work I did

I attach myself too rigorously to numbers and schedules in my daily life. I sit in front of my laptop when I am not using it constructively and wonder why I feel disconnected from the world and my existence seems to be passing by. Without the pull of my computer, I find far more time to use to pursue goals and people whom I need. I live in a cozy little town where something is usually happening a cafe or on Bard campus. I should exploit this more rather than aspirationally RSVPing to public events I then ignore.

I see that, as with so much, I am the one who needs to desired affect change. I am the one holding myself back, which means I am the one who can let myself bloom. I claim to have Taoism running through my blood, but I stand in front of supposedly insurmountable barriers the size of end tables.

Once I exercise my frame, the color turns up a notch when I look at the world. I use a few frames, such as reminding myself that I am in this moment (so I don't have to focus on the past and the future, but can step back and admire what is in front of me as though it is a photograph) or that the universe is doomed and none of this matters so why waste my tiny life worrying? This new frame, that I am living the fruition of that long-ago moment, synergizes with the others. I can also consciously not think, which is more appropriate when my thoughts are racing uselessly; it is not a frame as much as an escape button. Once thoughts stop cycling, I am better able to find the filter that will bring joy to me (or a surfeit of angst, at least).

I labor under this sense that I must labor. Each day, if I am not writing, I am falling behind. However, my art is not that of the beginner, who needs concrete daily practice. I am never not writing, but I don't need to avoid the rest of my life. I do not need to let one of my greatest pleasures and more reassuring outlets hold me back. I need not feel a pressure. I need to remember that my work is also for my enjoyment and I discover more of my stories by living, by reading other books that catch my interest. I can't work myself to death, particularly literally. I need to better enjoy the living of it to make the work easier and more fruitful. I need to give myself the same liberty I heap upon Amber.

This protestant work ethic is toxic to me. It gives no room for breath until the dark closes in and I want to die. I don't have the statistics in hand, but I wonder if cultures more indoctrinated to the necessity of naps experience fewer cases of depression and anxiety. I'm sure there are no lack of correlated, if not directly causative, factors that affect one's quality of life in this regard. I cannot speak to the whole of society, but this summer has begun to show me that working without break exacerbates, if not causes, several problems I bemoan. I shrug off social invitations because I need to surpass my eleven thousandth step of the day, I try to slap the fraudulence from my head when I cannot return two pages of stunning prose a day. I am someone in whom depression and anxiety have made a nest, but I do not relax my muscles while complaining how they hurt. I do myself no favors. I ignore the silence, both figurative and literal.

Amber tells a story of when she was in school and complained to her mother that no one liked her. Her mother then witnessed Amber walk down the hall, greeted by a dozen people she ignored, to come to her mother and say, "See, no one likes me!"

I wonder how similar I am to this child.

It isn't that I am socially averse to putting myself out there. Particularly when my humors are in balance, I can talk to most anyone. When I walk through my town and do not have my ears busy with a podcast, strangers will try to engage me in long conversations; I must have a face for it. (This is a factor in why I might keep my earphones in, as I often have business to which I am attending and cannot engage someone in the benefits of smart phones over flip phones.)

I do not often let myself be at rest, let myself be bored long enough to remember who I am. I need leisure to survive. I need to let the hours be long rather than killed by distraction. I need to wander without destination, from time to time, and let myself have the room to be surprised.

Now that Amber works as a vet tech, there are days when I only see her at 9pm, though I do not have to countenance that in the summer. Rather than decrying this, I choose to see it as an excuse to discover myself without the presence of another person, even one I adore.

What are my attempts at socially planning for the indecisive other than ways to force the moments of memory that will make this all seem justified? When I gather people, it is my communion, done in remembrance of a singular occasion to which no one else was present.

It was all a matter of putting together these niggling parts into a more satisfying whole.

There is research to the effect that the increase in the necessity for eyeglasses is not directly that children focus on screens eighteen inches from their faces, but that we use this technology indoors. We need around three hours a day of sunlight for our eyes to keep their acuity into adulthood. My body is irrevocably hobbled by a lifestyle that doesn't fully serve me, but I do not need to let the rest be crippled by the hooks of modernity.

Barring a personal tragedy, I have the means to give myself the experience I needed when I was younger and felt I lacked, even if it is another layer on the life I already lead, the essence of that college experience without its inconvenient trappings. However much Amber would doubtlessly hope we weren't adults, it is an unavoidable fact we are. I can find a community, bumming around on the quad in spirit, though it cannot be as simple as walking out my door now. I do not mind my bedtime being barely double digits. I will not be getting wasted. Otherwise, though, I am liberated to make my life what I would like it.

Soon in Xenology: Lake George. The loft-party.

last watched: iZombie
reading: Vellum
listening: Ylvis