My name is Emily Womelsduff. I’m nineteen years old, a sophomore come fall at Azusa Pacific University in southern California. I’m home, for the summer, in Seattle, although once upon a time, I would vehemently denied it, claiming instead that my birthplace, my Arizona sky and desert sun was and always would be home. It’s been a long time since then, and I love the water as much I love the red, dry, blistered earth where I was born. It should be a conflict of interests, but it’s not; it’s like two sides of me, completing each other. I need the beauty, the extremes, of both, to feel home, as if I sent roots deep into the soul of both the top and bottom of the country. I am a desert girl. I am a rain girl. A monsoon girl. A fog and city girl. A bare, empty vastness with a setting sun.
I know it doesn’t really make sense. But I am what my environments shaped me to be. And I’m perfectly content with that.
However, I am also bored out of my mind, to use an incredibly over-used and, in this instance, very misleading, phrase. I am a person of action and stress—I work best with deadlines, with being overwhelmed, with being forced to make decisions. Free time, no restrictions, no responsibilities…I stagnate. It’s not a pretty thing.
It’s been a weird Bermuda-triangle-esque pocket of time. Normally, I would be buried in at least two jobs or an internship. But, due to the lovely state of the economy, I have been completely work-and-internship-free since I have returned home. And, normally, I would find time to be with friends, but, due to the fact that 95% of said friends are on the college quarter system while I am on the semester schedule means that until approximately two days ago, all of them were still in school, up to their necks in finals and papers and moving.
Fine, fine, no job, no friends. Like I mentioned previously, this was a month of books, and I am currently sixteen books, thousands and thousands of pages, into a vampire series by Laurell K. Hamilton. But I’ve run out of books. A sad thing, indeed. I could always turn to what I normally do when I’m out of books, out of friends, out of school, out of work: I could write. Oh, but wait, my laptop—the beautiful piece of machinery that I compose on—has decided to catch a variety of technological diseases and fail me in almost every way, from a sporadic loss of internet access to viruses and corruption, to not allowing me to open anything more complicated than a Notepad application. A friend of mine finally got around to helping me remove all my pictures and documents to an external hard-drive, but surprise surprise, my baby, the Laptop of Lucifer, won’t allow Windows, or anything else, to be reinstalled. Technology tends to shrivel and die on me, from laptops to printers to radios to CDs. It’s a gift.
So. No job, no friends, no books, no laptop. I have done some painting, but I don’t even have proper canvasses, and all the tattoos I was supposed to design for friends are currently residing in a storage facility in Azusa, California. Add “no creativity of any kind” to the list. I’ve even tried helping some friends out doing small film projects, but guess what? My camcorder is with a friend back in California.
Like I said, this month has been a month of many things, but the top of the list has got to be frustration. Because everything is within my power to accomplish, but hindered by things juuuust outside of my control. Perhaps God is trying to tell me something by stripping away everything I find purpose in and leaving me with nothing but caffeinated beverages and cable TV, but I am clearly not getting the picture.
There is a sort of grand irony, I suppose. For most of the past couple of years, I’ve been running on a sort of desperate full-steam ahead approach. I told myself that the overwhelming time-commitments to the various aspects of my life were not only necessary, but out of my control. I realize now that when I convince myself that something is not my fault, even how busy I am, then I am free of feeling responsible for it. For the most part, the things I have excused myself responsibility from haven’t been all that bad in terms of morality or law—mostly just a sort of crazed rush to fill every moment of time with the pursuit of something, generally running towards knowledge or money, and I’ve always equated knowledge, aka education, with money, because the more you know, the better qualified you are, the more money you can make. At least, that’s the way it goes in my head.
I think I’m a little bit obsessed with money, actually. I hate being indebted to someone, financially or otherwise. I owe my sister money at this very moment, and every time I see her, my stomach hurts just a little bit because I know if she demanded I pay her right then and there, I wouldn’t be able to. She’d never demand, but it doesn’t matter. I cannot pay her. I am in her debt. And I hate it. I don’t even like people buying me a soda or opening doors for me, and I’m not sure if that’s because I’m a modern woman or because I’m a control-freak. Or maybe I’m just scared shitless that anyone have the upper hand with me, a hold on me, a claim. The one boyfriend I’ve ever had lived halfway around the world, and it wasn’t far enough because every time he called I felt claustrophobic and resentful.
Well, this is just a night of freaking self-discovery.
Anyway. I hate owing people. I love having every moment of my life filled with responsibilities that I “have” to fulfill. In high school, I was a cheerleader, a volleyball player, class president, a member of National Honors Society, jazz band, vocal ensemble, Student Council President, I sang for chapel, I acted in and wrote and directed school plays, I took Arabic for goodness’ sake, and part of the reason was just because I knew it would be freaking hard and it would drain me and I wanted to be able to have one more excuse to be exhausted. I am a nutcase.
This past school year, my freshman year of college, I only took 16 units a semester, one less than freshman are allowed to take, but I filled up the rest of my time with two jobs, writing a full-fledged novel between classes, volunteering as crew and cast on student films, and obsessing about my own film project which was premiered along with upper-classmen’s work at the end of the year. I spent time ingratiating myself with students above me, smarter than me, who could show me the ropes and give me an edge. I booked meetings with professors outside of class to show my ambition in a sort of instinctive academic reflex. I truly like these people, peers and teachers alike, but in the back of my head I know that they are the people that can help boost me on to bigger things, to an eventual better life. They are the keys to my success, the middle rungs in the ladder towards independence. Because once I’ve established myself as a filmmaker, as a writer, as a success, then I will make money. When I make enough money to live on, to save on, then I will be free from everything. I won’t need anybody. At least, not in the way a child needs a parent, a protector.
Ambitious. That’s what a prospective employer called me a few days ago. Ambitious with good eye-contact. Eye on the prize, on the ball, on the paycheck, on the next rung in the ladder to freedom.
There’s a reason I’m single. When you date someone, you owe them. Your heart, your time, your attention. A very select number of people have access to even one of those things, and fewer still to all three. I have no idea how I got to be this way. The biggest tragedy in my life was my parents’ divorce when I was about sixteen, and even that cannot explain my extreme sense of self-preservation. Yet here I stand, and no amount of rational thinking, by friends, strangers, or counselors—and yes, I’ve been to one—will change my methods, actions, behaviors. I’m Christian, and Christians are supposed to be open, compassionate, tender. I am closed. And compassionate, well…it’s odd, because I have an empathy for people so deep that it sometimes physically hurts, hence the lack of openness—I simply can’t be that vulnerable around everyone. I try to save people when I can, in my own way—my sister and my best friend can tell you stories about my little lost lambs—but it costs every time, and the payment is steep and on-going because when I empathize, I give up a part of myself to that person. My best friend and my sister have the biggest pieces of me that I’ve ever given to anyone, and if something happened to either of them, I’m not sure I could continue to function. You start giving out too many of those really big pieces of yourself, and sooner or later someone is going to destroy that piece, and it’s not going to be something you can recover from.
I carry a knife, I carry pepper spray, and I know how to shoot a gun. Someone attacks you, pinch the soft skin of their underarm or between their thumb and forefinger, bash your head back to break their nose, gouge out their eyes, kick ‘em in the balls if they have any. But beyond the physical attack, the only thing you can do is not give pieces of yourself away, and if you have to, keep them as small as you can.
My counselor told me that if I allowed myself to love someone, it would be worth the pain they might cause me. I told her to prove it. Let’s just say that, although I respect her, I don’t go to counseling anymore.
My name is Emily Womelsduff. I’m nineteen years old. I’ve unwillingly wasted the past month of my life. Ask the friends I have and they’ll tell you what I told them—I feel old. I feel past my prime. At nineteen, I have lost the opportunity to be a prodigy, the opportunity for greatness. And you want to know one of the prime reasons I don’t want to have kids? I don’t want them to be better than me.
On an intellectual level, I know my conclusions about my life, about life in general, don’t quite have a logical basis. I know. And the knowing changes nothing.
The summer is waning on, the economy remains caved like the bad half of a rotting watermelon, and here I sit, with House muted on the TV, drinking chocolate milk, two baskets of clean clothes I have no intention of folding and putting away sitting on my bed. There is no worse punishment for me than inaction. Put me in prison for twenty years and I’d be fine as long as I had pen and paper. But this…this uncertain waiting, this hopeless Craig’s List hunting is eating at my sanity, just a bit.
So, to fill the empty time, I will write what is real. My story, as erratic and illogical as I have made it. Real life isn’t lived in three acts with an inciting incident and rising action and climax and conclusion. Real life is just confusing. There are no absolutes, no certain knowledge, no ever afters, happily or otherwise. There is momentum, an inevitable swim towards death, but there aren’t story arcs that make sense. It’s interesting, to live. But so, so frustrating. Because not only is there no end of the novel, there are no chapter headings, no prologues. Hell, there aren’t even commas, just a continuous, live-action stream-of-consciousness punctuated by epiphanies, followed by long stretches of silence.
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