Growing up

Freedom. I have had it. More of it than most people ever will, more than I deserve, maybe more than I should have had.

I graduated high school, got on my piece of shit motorcycle, and rode west into the blacktop red-rock madness of being free to do whatever I damn well pleased. I claimed my god- and government-given American right to be a lone wolf, to go double-triple the speed limit on every back road I could find, to be so lonely I was scared shitless by my own longing, to ride and ride and ride and sweat and freeze and laugh at my own fear of death and scream into the wind in my helmet when fury at my inadequacy overpowered me.

My first year of freedom ended. It was a year of going to places few other college-bound 18-year-olds go: Alaska and Indonesia and the tallest mountain in Austria and 20 of the lower 48 states on two wheels. A year where I got a job at a startup and realized I didn’t need an institution’s blessing to work as long as I was really fucking good. A year that should have taught me I could be lonely anywhere, but all I learned was that I could be anywhere. When that year ended I found myself in college for an education I didn’t care about, doing homework that was busywork as far as I could tell. I was deeply unhappy. I had tasted freedom and it tasted like self-determination, like no one ever telling me what to do ever again, like doing whatever I wanted as long as I could find a way to make it happen.

So I left college after a year and headed back out across the country on my bike, headed for desperate lonely freedom once again. I found it. I won a second pyrrhic victory when I made it to the west coast after blasting through the last quarter of the trip because I couldn’t bear to be alone any longer. I couldn’t deny my loneliness anymore, and in trying to escape it, I began to seek another sort of freedom: money. The money to travel wherever I want to go, wherever my friends are going, anywhere but by myself.

Less than a year later I drove through Winslow in the passenger seat of a van full of friends, singing along to Take It Easy (“sittin’ on a corner in Winslow Arizona, such a fine sight to see”), working on my laptop and laughing at the idea that I might have stayed in school. And in the 6 years since then, I’ve done basically whatever I wanted. I traveled all over the world, went to infinite concerts, worked my ass off, rode a motorcycle to South America, built a community space and fell in love and had my heart broken and my world turned upside down.

Heartbreak drilled the first hole into the bedrock of my assurance that all I needed was freedom. Real love showed me what it felt like to have purpose and then lose it. Purpose was something that freedom alone never brought me. I had often felt like I was born to fight a war that never came, and my sense that destiny had forsaken me loosened its grip for the first time when I fell in love. When love left and the feeling of being deserted by fate came back, it came back stronger. I needed meaning, and I set out to find it.

I dropped out of making money and met a new crowd. I tried to figure out what I could do for work that I enjoyed, and didn’t feel like I was helping grind the world into dust, and could financially support me. I lost myself in the hopelessness and self-flagellation of confronting the climate crisis for the second time in my life, and eventually realized agonizing over the environmental impact of every move was not going to bring me meaning. I realized that the framework of analysis and optimization that my self-training as a programmer had given me would not get me where I was trying to go, and did my best to let that go, too (I’m still working on that). I gave up the community space I’d built – the only place that had ever felt like home since I was a kid – and set out to find people who had purpose and see how they had found it.

I went out on my own again, but this time, I could feel what I was looking for.

During a few days alone at a music festival this summer, I was hit with a feeling I’d never felt before: an overwhelming sense that it was time to grow up. I was there to have a good time, but it didn’t feel like a good time…it felt like nothing. I realized I’ve had so much fun that fun has stopped being quite so fun, and become routine instead. And for the first time in my adult life, that’s what I’m beginning to want: some semblance of a routine. To take care of myself in the basic ways that I know I should but have never quite managed. To have a partner to share joy and pain and the banalities of daily life with. To take on a project that might take many years but whose outcome I care about so much that I am willing to try for that long. To commit to something beyond myself.

In the past several months, I finally found something. I love repairing the objects around me, I love keeping our human artifacts out of the landfill, and I see beauty in signs of use and repair. I wish our surroundings better reflected a respect for the resources of the natural world that we built them from. I wish we spent more time and energy making it that way, instead of building it whichever way costs the least and makes the most profit. And I know that it’s possible to change those things, if enough of us really want to. I also want more people to experience the joy of bringing an old building or machine or object back to life with nothing more than their hands and a few tools, and to experience the sense of agency that comes from the knowledge that our world was built by people with skills that we can learn and direct towards a more beautiful, human, and sustainable built environment.

I now know what work is mine to do: building on the grassroots repair movements that already exist, building resilience and community independence through the ability to make and fix the things we need. Saving anything and everything I can from being thrown away. Playing whatever little part I can in making our surroundings more human.

(Sammie, thanks for helping me edit this together :)