I am an intelligent woman but I have acted like a jackass for almost 6 years.

There is ice in my red wine tonight. This is unrelated, I just want y’all to picture me in hand-me-down-pajamas, drinking cheap cab sav out of a secondhand glass, listening to Andrew Bird’s new album (*incoherent joy noises*) (that’s not true actually I’m shuffling my 15K song library because IT’S WHO I AM but Mr. Bird’s finest work yet is in there) & going off @ the keyboard about what a complete tool I am actively trying to stop being henceforth.

I get my car back tomorrow. It’s been since December 8th – three months, 16 days of deeply begrudging public transportation. I couldn’t be angry @ the buses themselves, @ the trains that have kept me largely on-time to work & free to go downtown w/ minimal hurdle-jumping. They have afforded me time to read books (They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us by Hanif Abdurraqib – read it); they have afforded me time to listen to new music (did you know lots of female-fronted bands are better than I have ever been able to give them credit for? Did you know I’m a hypocrite? Did you know the blog title is from a song by a woman called Haley Heynderickx? Did you know THAT’S A LOT OF CONSONANTS?); they have given me no excuse not to download Duolingo & start studying German again (& Spanish because fucking why not I deserve to be useful DEAR GOD MAKE ME SOMETHING SOMEBODY CAN USE). But I have been mad. I have been bottling it up like a molotov cocktail I swear, & somewhere hereafter is where I necessarily explain the difference between the jackass who I am & the person I wanna be.

My commute to work, in a car, is 15/20 mins there, 15/20 mins back. My commute to work on the train & bus has not been less than an hr each way, but sometimes due to buses near my work being early, then late, somehow contingent upon my clock-out time, it’s closer to an hr & a half for the return journey home. (Usually as I approach the stop I can see the bus I am going to miss because of having to finish my shift, arriving rather early, & then even though the next bus is scheduled to be there in 11 minutes it’s often closer to 20 or 30 before it arrives). I wish this didn’t make me miserable, but it’s been winter & I have been miserable, because out of those 90 minutes I usually only spend 30/40 mins on a heated vehicle. The rest is just out in the elements, looking down @ my clothing – always too little for the elements & too much for the climate control – wishing my hypothalamus did a better job @ regulating my body temperature – wishing I could wear heels & walk shorter distances – wishing I could wear a low-cut blouse w/o worrying about precipitation soaking my bosom – feeling deeply, deeply unfeminine because really warm winter coats don’t allow for a waistline – feeling ugly, really ugly – feeling annoyed that the sun has gone down & the streetlamps aren’t bright enough to read a book by – feeling compelled to smoke a cigarette because I seemingly can’t control anything except the axis between my forearm & bicep – feeling trepidation toward every man (MEN ALWAYS MEN) who talks to me for no reason apparent to anyone other than himself.

It’s worth noting that my car costs as much to gas up for a whole month as 3 days of RTD passes do. These have been expensive months. It’s also worth noting that I am a woman driven by the mania to get things done outside of my home, to run errands, to go to people, to eat w/ them, to make & keep appointments, to buy materials for projects that may never be completed, to pick things up & put them back down. All of that has been essentially on hold since December 8th. The amount of recycling I have produced & then just…hung onto…is distressing.

But I did learn & gain something from my season-long experiment w/ vehiclelessness. I learned that my impulse to get things done outside of myself was largely a performative instinct. The desire to go to the grocery dressed to the 9s? The desire to go to Lowe’s also dressed to the 9s? The overwhelming ambition to cross off more than 50% of a to-do list in a couple of hrs even though I’m the only person who ever sees it? None of that ever really elevated the opinion that I have of myself. Even if I was wearing a dress I sewed down from a size 14 or a necklace I made out of literal garbage, my self-image didn’t really budge upward or downward based on the fact that folks saw something in me they didn’t understand. If that were where I got my self-esteem, I would have deeply enjoyed the past few months of strange men saying things to me uninvited. My self-esteem really took a dive the past few months because I didn’t feel pretty, but I already knew going into this unfortunate involuntary experiment that I rely on feeling pretty & I feel pretty because of the clothes I put together, not the face & hair I sport (the only things people saw for the last 3 mos).

Not being able to drive made me question my identity & come up w/ some onerous conclusions about what I’m so proud of. I never ceased to feel pride. Recent weeks @ work have made it clear that I should not be proud of my customer-service skills, my personality, or my patience. Wearing a uniform also removes me from pride in being able to get dressed each day, unless we take dressing oneself as a physical feat in which case, applause; I can tie my shoes. It turns out I’m proud of myself for something else that I haven’t actively exercised since I was being graded during my bachelor’s degree. I’m proud because, plainly, I think that I’m pretty smart.

Not that I’m creative.

Not that I’m attractive.

Not even that I’m strong.

I’ve always experienced more pride for my ability to retain & regurgitate words & information than for anything else. I am an excellent test-taker. I am intimidating to some drunk strangers. I am an annoying armchair-Jeopardy-contestant. I have a partner who occasionally expresses fear about who is more intelligent. So whatever I’m hanging my hat on, it really ought to be the fact that I am curious & I actively consume information.

But for years, since graduating, I can’t say I’ve really done that.

Sure, I’ve read a few books. Mostly determined by a book club, so they had as much potential to teach me adjectives as they did to put me in the mind of a nervous, hormonal 13-yr-old. A thing, ace as I am, I nevertheless do not need to re-learn.

The desire to read more nonfiction, to write more fiction, to study languages, to challenge my worldview – hell – to download a few apps that would just actively send me world news – was the fruit of a few months of not being able to drive. Had I been driving since December 8th, 2018, I’d probably still be mindlessly singing along to the same Motion City Soundtrack songs I have known for 13 years. But I was forced out of my physicality, & into my brain. by the system of public transit. & inside my brain I found a real deficit of new information.

I am not a new year’s resolution person. But I do have 5 simple goals for every day, for the rest of time immemorial, if I can hack it:

I want to always be reading a book. Every day, I want to finish a chapter.

I want to study another language, every day, even if for only 5 minutes.

I want to chant to my Gohonzon – I want to do gongyo & actively practice meditative, Nichiren Buddhism – twice a day.

I want to work on a piece of writing every day. Script, blog, song. Sometimes I’ll let myself just tweet. So long as it’s a new line, it’s work.

I want to do work that I find difficult, every day, for the rest of my life. (Lately this has primarily meant talking on the phone for PRiMO…but that is still valid.) If I think I’m so fucking smart, the only thing I can do to not turn into a conservative pundit is to keep getting into an unpleasant, intellectually new, nuanced mire – every day – & then determinedly saying, “I can overcome this.”