let that sh*t go

I smelled crack for the first time in the summer of 2000. I was 27. I lived with a roommate, a fellow waitress, in an under-furnished apartment in a leafy (then-)sleepy Boston neighborhood called Jamaica Plain. The space was a massive three-bedroom on the second floor of an old Victorian house, a few steps from a sprawling city cemetery, a close enough walk to the T that a person like me with no car (and really, not much more to my name than a box of books and a wood dresser I’d painted lime green), could make their way to the center of town without a driver’s license, which I also no longer had.

By that point in my 20s, I’d struggled through more than my fair share bad breakups — a first husband, an ill-conceived rebound from said husband — and was into a third absolute relationship apocalypse with a pedantic poet/failed folk singer who, as our union fractured, began sending me Xerox copies of his middle finger and writing songs about me with titles like “Hiroshima.”

My roommate, let’s call her Maya, was a hippie-seamstress from New Hampshire who lit copious incense, made patchwork bags she occasionally sold at local markets, and waxed her legs — and, occasionally, her bikini line — on our kitchen floor with natural wax she heated on the stove.

Maya was casually dating Petey1, a cook from the restaurant where we both worked. Petey was a big bear of a man, the kind of guy you’d initially write off as dumb and a lug, but who was actually thoughtful and kind, a man who’d seen some shit and who also — as I’d discover one balmy pre-dawn morning — liked to smoke crack on our balcony.

It was hot that August, even at night, and we didn’t have air conditioning. The one window in my bedroom opened up to our balcony/porch, so whenever Petey lit up, acrid-chemical crack smoke wafted in and right through to my bed, waking me up.

I don’t know why I didn’t get mad. I was far from drug averse, but I’d never been around someone on crack. I think at first I was scared. Petey wasn’t the type of man you could imagine telling what to do. He was closer to 40 than I was, an elder; he had a daughter somewhere and was trying to turn his life around. You got the sense that these early-morning sessions were a lot better than whatever had happened before. Instead of getting angry, and since I was awake anyway, I joined him on the porch and lit a cigarette. We sat there staring out over the houses and porches and rooftops in silence until the sun came up.

It was just a few weeks before I’d leave Boston for good and make my way down to New York. In that time, Petey and I became something like friends. I was a neurotic bag of ego; a chatty, walking-around open wound, a (not-so) young drunk spinning out enough that it was hard to see my way straight. The folk singer ex owed me money, close to $1,000, and I needed it. I was fixated on getting it back. It was nearly all I talked and thought about.

One morning, I told Petey about a new scheme I’d concocted to extract the money from the folk singer. The plan was elaborate and far-fetched, particularly considering all of my previous attempts had ended with some version of “I hate you, you cunt.”

Upon hearing these plans, he stared me in the eye, and said,

“You gotta let that shit go. That’s the fucking tax you paid for getting yourself into and out of this shit. That’s the way you get to move on, by letting this shit go.”

This conversation happened more than 20 years ago. I don’t know that I’d thought about it since. But last week, logging on to lead the No Country for Old Women writing hour, on an unusually humid pre-dawn Los Angeles morning with a window open in front of me, the memory of Petey on our back porch rushed back with Proustian force. I remembered how lost I felt then, and how scared. I remembered the precise panic over not knowing how it would all work out and not trusting I could handle it if it did.

Transitions can feel intolerably destabilizing, no matter how necessary. In the hustle of big-swing goal-achieving, going-for-broke happiness-seeking (and even mere survival), we never talk about them enough. We don’t mention the wobbly-murky middle moments. How, in the hallways of our lives, we haunt ourselves like ghosts.

The tax we pay for change is letting go — of relationships beyond repair, of self-definitions we’ve outgrown, jobs and spaces and behaviors that no longer serve us, sure; but also, at least temporarily, of comfort, money, security, a sturdiness in our station, feeling like we “know.” It’s hard enough to slough off skin you’ve grown attached to; even more so when you’re old enough to know how much it will hurt.

Over the past few weeks, I’d done little more than ruminate over losing a job I didn't want. I spent billable hours scheming for some kind of retribution, clinging to the toxic sturdiness of the recent past, afraid to move on and open to whatever might come next.

Then, somewhere in all this, all these years later, I remembered the lesson I apparently had to learn again: you gotta let that shit go.

I signed my final termination paperwork last week. And I started the hard, methodical, annoying work of re-outlining and deep-thinking (not just talking) about my new book right after.

Feeling in the dark and reaching for what you might want next will always be terrifying. But the alternative — holding onto grievance, low-hum bitterness, slothy-security-seeking — always feels worse.

If you want to join me — and fight out your ego to move forward with a new project —I’ll be holding writing hours — at a variety of times — almost every day from here out.