Choice

“I looked up, suddenly feeling smaller and very alone. There was no one near me. No hand was touching mine. No one stood close by. … [T]he only one I had to help me was myself.”

-- from Storm Front by Jim Butcher

Sometimes, I hate being a grown-up.

There are some advantages, of course, to being an adult rather than a child. You get to stay up later. You have beverage choices that expand beyond fruit juice and milk. You don’t have to take as many tests or ask permission to go to a friend’s house. Generally speaking, you get to run your own life. That’s the good thing about being an adult.

But here’s the bad thing about being an adult: You have to run your own life. And sometimes, I just can’t take the pressure.

This week, I was faced with a grown-up decision at work. Deep down, I knew that it was a good situation to be in. It was a choice between two new positions, both of which would be a step up from the one I am currently in. Both seemed to have similar potential for producing interesting work and valuable learning opportunities. Both offers represented someone in the organization having strong beliefs in my potential – which is something I had felt was slipping away in the last month or so.

To sum up the situation, I’ll say that there really wasn’t a wrong choice. Thus, this didn’t even really qualify as a problem. It was a non-problem.

Still, I hated to choose, because each choice would have its set of repercussions. Taking advantage of either opportunity would mean giving up the other. It was a matter of choosing which opportunity I would rather let go. I found this agonizing. As I usually do, I stalled as long as I could in making a choice, as if I hoped that some clear “right” choice would appear or I’d find a way out of making the choice at all.

Honestly, Katie, I thought to myself. What do you really want to happen? Would you rather someone came along and made the choice for you? Told you what you had to do? (Actually, if it were the right person, I don’t think I would mind that. I tried to hire my friend Carla to make all my grown-up decisions for me. She said no.)

After I had run out of stalling techniques, I did finally make a choice. Although I found a way to get a little bit of both choices in the final arrangement, I did turn something down. I found the whole process utterly exhausting.

I’ve done a lot of thinking this weekend about why I hate these situations so much. Situations like this one should not be such difficult choices. No one’s life hangs in the balance. There isn’t even much potential for regret. So why do grown-up choices scare me so much?

After all my pondering, I’ve realized that the thing I don’t like about big choices is how utterly alone they make me feel. Someone asks me a question, and it feels like the whole world goes away as soon as I recognize that I’m the only person who can answer it. It’s just me, making a decision that will affect my life. It will be just me living with the consequences later. I’ll have no one to point to and no one to lean on if this goes badly. The buck stops here. And that thought makes me want to pull the covers up over my head and hide.

I hated choosing a concentration at the arts and sciences center I attended during middle and high school. I hated choosing the colleges to which I would apply. (I didn't mind choosing which college to attend, as a full ride to one and almost nothing from the others made it a non-choice.) I hated choosing a major. I hated choosing between the two jobs I was offered when I graduated. I hated choosing my first apartment in Chicago. And I hated choosing which opportunity I wanted to pursue at work this year.

Now, as I am looking at this issue objectively from the outside, it seems like a pretty ridiculous way to go through life. I’ve been struggling to find a way to change my perspective about making choices. In my musing, I remembered the end of my senior year in high school. It was a time full of these choices, all of which made me crazy because they felt like they would determine the course of the rest of my natural life. I was struggling with this exact same issue as I wrote my graduation speech. Outwardly, I was trying to act like a self-assured senior, excited about going to college. Inwardly, I was thinking, I know this is the way things have to go, but I wish things could just stay the way they are. I was afraid to move on, because whatever path I chose would be mine to deal with.

During my senior year, I was in the school play. At the end of the show, my character faced a choice between staying somewhere where she was protected and cared for, and going out into the world on her own. She knew she had to leave her haven, but was still reluctant to do it. Seeing her struggle, another character looked her in the eye and said, “The door is open for you, Mrs. Savage. Make your peace with loneliness.”

I put the line into my graduation speech. I talked about how scary it was to walk through that door, but how it was important to have the courage to do it. When I was 18, my focus was on the door.

Now, ten years later, I’m coming back to that same line, but a different piece speaks to me this time: Make your peace with loneliness. That part of the line means more to me now than it did then.

The fact of the matter is that being an adult can be a lonely business. I am not really as all-alone as I make myself feel sometimes. There are plenty of people in my life that would be more than happy to talk my choices through with me. But in the end, I am in control of my own life, and I do have to handle the consequences of the choices I make.

But the privilege of making my own choices is a freedom that I would sorely miss, if it were gone. Keeping that in mind, perhaps, is my way of making peace with the loneliness that comes with being an adult.

Snack

“They give you more snacks when you’re nine.”

--from Feed by Mira Grant

Now that many of my friends have children, I have noticed that there are certain things that all parents seem to carry with them at all times. A change of clothes, or at least an extra shirt, for when the one the child is wearing inevitably gets wet. A toy of some sort, be it some sort of electronic device or a stuffed animal or some other source of distraction. And always, always, always, parents carry snacks.

Children seem to be offered snacks a dozen times a day. I am usually jealous. I love food, and if someone offered me snacks all day long, I can pretty much guarantee that I would eat all of them. But the really fascinating part of this is that children often turn the snacks down. (I try to refrain from asking if I can eat the snacks they don’t want.)

I read an article once that claimed that we should all try to eat like young children. A two-year-old, claimed the article, only eats when s/he is hungry, pushes away the parts that don’t taste as good, and stops eating once s/he feels full. We should all relearn how to eat intuitively. Eat when you’re hungry, and stop when you are full. That makes sense, right?

There are parts of this philosophy that I agree with. I absolutely believe in the idea of only eating when you are hungry. While I am not much of a stress eater, I am very much a boredom eater. I’ve been working lately on not using food as a method of procrastination. I have been surprised to find out that simply asking myself if I am hungry really helps me manage my food intake.

On the other hand, I think that the dieters of the world often miss the flip side of this. Yes, you should only eat when you are hungry, but that also means that there is no reason to feel guilty about eating when you are hungry. Even if you get hungry many times each day.

When I was in middle and school, I often gave up eating between meals during Lent. Snacking felt like an indulgence that I could and should give up. And perhaps, at the time, it was. I don’t remember feeling hungry or anxiously waiting for meals to come around. I only remember having to turn down $1 candy bars or handfuls of fruit snacks that would have tasted good. I sometimes would go to school without breakfast, eat nothing until lunch, then go to the rest of my classes, play practice, and drumline rehearsal. I wouldn’t get home to eat dinner until 9 pm.

I think back on that schedule, and it seems unhealthy. Yet, I don’t remember feeling hungry all the time. So perhaps it was an okay schedule for me. I had no time to boredom eat.

Now, however, I can’t imagine eating so little in a day. I wake up in the morning, and though I usually force myself to work out before my mind realizes what I am doing to my body, I am usually hungry immediately afterward. I eat a bowl of oatmeal with peanut butter mixed in, a piece of fruit, a yogurt cup, and a cup of coffee at around 6 am. By the time I get to work at 8 am, I am so hungry that I will eat a granola bar. By 10 am, I am hungry again and will usually eat an apple. At that point, I usually make it to 11:30 am, when I eat a salad or sandwich for lunch.

So, on a typical day now, I am eating as much food before noon as I did in an entire day in high school. This really bothered me, at first. I tried to eat less for breakfast, or cut one of the morning snacks, thinking it couldn’t be right to eat so much in the morning. But when I did that, I was so hungry at work that it was affecting my concentration. My conscious brain was telling me not to eat. But eventually, I gave in to my grumbling stomach and ate the snacks.

Once I learned to embrace morning snacks, the rest of my eating schedule changed too. After my early lunch, I am usually good until I eat dinner around 5 pm. Then, I usually don’t get hungry for the rest of the day. The bedtime snack, which was a fixture of my childhood and adolescence, became the one I had to learn to skip. I would always think I wanted one, out of routine or boredom, but the fact is that I am rarely hungry then.

There are many reasons why it makes sense that my food needs changed, the most obvious being that I have become a morning runner in my adulthood. But the point I am trying to make is not in the physiology of the matter.

My point is this: Snacks are often thought of as being appropriate for children and not adults. I don’t agree with that. Snacks are important and even helpful. There are just two, equally important things to keep in mind. The one that everyone talks about is that you shouldn’t snack if you aren’t hungry. Kids turn snacks down when they don’t feel hungry for them, and adults should, in most instances, do the same.

The equally important flip side, though, is that there are plenty of occasions when adults do get hungry between meals and therefore shouldn’t feel guilty about snacking. Eating more in the morning, in the end, led me to eat much less in the afternoons and evenings. I’d be willing to bet that similar patterns would happen for others.

Snacking is not the devil. Still, it is harder than it sounds to only eat snacks when you are hungry. Like I said before, if I had someone offering me snacks a dozen times a day, I would probably eat them all. Lucky, I guess, that my mom is no longer constantly around with her parent survival kit.

Scotland

"He was so promising as a student that the priests whose school he attended sent him to Spain with a nobleman whom they knew, so that he might learn still more from travel."

--from Number Stories of Long Ago by David Eugene Smith

Some years ago, I read about the battle of Culloden in a book called Dragonfly in Amber by Diana Gabaldon. I knew that Bonnie Prince Charlie gathered an army of Scottish highlanders and tried to reclaim the crown of Scotland for the Stuart dynasty. I knew that he had a great many successes in his campaign, leading up to the battle of Culloden. I knew he made some foolish choices on the eve of that battle, and that in the end, the highlanders suffered a bitter defeat that changed the course of history in Scotland. I knew all that.

But then again, I didn’t know.

Last week, I spent seven days on a tour of Scotland that took me into the Scottish highlands and to the Culloden battlefield. I can say without a doubt that my understanding and appreciation of the story of the story of the Jacobite rebellion of 1746 has changed and deepened in ways I could not have imagined.

We arrived in the highlands on a misty morning. We got off the bus and looked out on the beautiful shores of Loch Lomond. The sight was breathtaking. Light fog hung over the mountains. A light rain fell occasionally, making all the vegetation lush and green. The water was still and blue from afar, yet dark and brooding up close. The whole place had an air of mystery and majesty that I can hardly explain.

That was only the beginning of our trip through the highlands. For the next four days, we drove through amazing scenery, through narrow passes, down winding mountain roads, and by misty, glistening lochs. We listened to our tour guide tell us dozens of stories of the legends and history of the region. And I must confess that I completely lost my heart to the Scottish highlands.

I can’t claim to know Prince Charles Edward Stuart’s full motivation for launching his campaign to take back Scotland from the English. But I understand now why so many highlanders chose to follow him. If the Scottish highlands were my home, I would fight to get them back, too. I felt a deep connection to the land after a few days of seeing it through a bus window. These men not only lived there, but also depended on the land for their livelihood. How could they do anything else but try to keep it?

Yet having that new appreciation of the highlanders’ connection to their home made the story of Culloden all that more heartbreaking. We walked out onto Culloden Moor and stood at the location of the front lines of the highland forces. I gazed out across the field and saw in the distance the mountains that had already so captured my heart and imagination. These men stood there looking out on their home.

Then came the order to attack. The battle was lost in less than an hour. A great many highlanders died that day on the field. The rest were hunted down, imprisoned, and massacred for years to come. The ones that survived were not allowed to wear their clan tartans, which were a proud symbol of their heritage.

The entirety of their lives changed that day. I thought I understood that before I went to Scotland. But it wasn’t until I stood on that front line that I really understood.

If I had stood on Culloden Moor without knowing everything I did about the Jacobite rebellion and the highlanders, I don’t think I would have appreciated the magnitude of what happened there that fateful day in 1746. If I had only read about the battle but never seen what the highlanders saw when they stood on the front lines, I never would have been able to really imagine what it was like for them. But the two experiences together made for a heartbreaking, soul-changing moment that will stay with me for a long time.

Nine months ago, when I sat in a piano bar discussing a possible trip abroad with my mother, I started throwing out random destinations – anywhere I had not yet been. Poland, Spain, Australia, Belgium, Turkey. I was willing to go anywhere, sight unseen. But I’m so glad that, in the end, we settled on going to Scotland. Not only did the stories of Outlander come alive for me, but the history behind the stories became real.

At the end of our trip, half of our tour group continued on to do a weeklong tour of Ireland. While a piece of me envied them, another piece of me knew that I would not appreciate Ireland the way I appreciated Scotland. I cried when we left the highlands, and I cried again when we left the country altogether. I had seen what I had come to see, but it was still hard to say goodbye. And I think it would have been, no matter where I had been going next.

I hope I take many trips in my lifetime that give me the kind of experience that Scotland did. There are so many places in the world to go, and who knows which others I will feel compelled to see as my life goes on. For now, I plan to continue to read historical fiction until I feel inspired to go somewhere else. There is much to be learned from travel. But like any teacher, travel will teach you more when you come prepared. 

But no matter where else I go, I hope that someday I return to bonnie, bonnie Scotland.

Pretty

** I am posting one day early to make up for the post being one day late last week. Enjoy. **

“Not for nothing, it also helps to know that feeling bad about your looks is apparently such a universal thing that even little girls who live in isolated Wisconsin cabins (as far as one can get from fashion magazines) can experience it.”

--from The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie by Wendy McClure

I was lucky enough to grow up in a magnet-school bubble that protected me from adolescent-girl meanness. I never wore fancy clothes or carried name-brand accessories, and for the most part, I wasn’t picked on for it. I may have been jealous of my friend’s Trapper-Keeper or slap bracelet, but I was never made to feel like less of a person for not having one. I never felt ashamed of my clothes or general appearance – at least not as a result of what my peers have said to me.

That being said, I would be blatantly lying if I said that I never struggle with my looks. It’s a rare day when I look in the mirror and I feel more confident for it.

My hair is flat, boring color so nondescript that I’m never sure whether to list my hair color as blond or brown. It’s not quite straight but not quite wavy, which basically means that it looks like a hot mess if I let it air dry or leave it down when I’ll be outside for long periods of time. 

I’ve often wished that I could trade in the entirety of my skin for a new model. I’ve never been able to rid my face entirely of the acne that appeared at age 12. The skin on my nose is permanently 3 shades redder than the skin on the rest of my face, and consequently my nose often shows up bright red in photographs and I’m asked whether I’m sunburned when I haven’t seen the sun for weeks. Exercise makes ugly, rash-like bumps appear on my upper arms. And I have more moles than I’ve ever cared to count. They look ugly when exposed. They leave visible bumps under form-fitting clothes. And they’ve also left me covered with scars of various sizes, shapes, and colors, due to the need to remove at least one a year for precautionary skin-cancer screenings.

I do like the color of my eyes. They are hazel, showing some green, some brown, some gold, and even a thin ring of blue. However, my eyes are chronically dry, so the pretty irises are ringed by nasty red veins that almost never fade.

I could go on, but I won’t. I realize that everything I just wrote puts the worst possible spin on my features. But I was not trying to be objective; I was trying to write an honest account of the things that go through my mind when I look in the mirror. While I’ve never felt self-conscious enough to make me not leave the house, it is a rare occasion when I feel pretty.

I have made some efforts in recent years to feel better about my appearance. I stopped settling for whatever clothes I can get on, and starting putting in the effort to find clothes that fit well and learn which colors and cuts look best on me. I started forcing myself to wear bigger and more colorful accessories, despite the fact that I often feel like they are over the top. I have made periodic attempts at wearing makeup (but that’s one thing I have yet to master, so I’ve never stuck with it for long).  Whenever I get my hair cut, I talk myself into cutting it too short to tie back, so I’m forced to fuss with it and learn what looks nice on me.

These steps have helped in some ways. At the very least, I’ve learned that people who look coordinated and put together aren’t able to do it without some effort. I feel a little more grown up and a lot less guilty about buying things for myself. I’m more confident, and maybe even happier. But as far as feeling prettier? Forget it. I still feel like I’m just doing the best I can with the mediocre hand that I was dealt.

I am quite sure that I am not alone in this. Far from it. But I don’t find that thought very comforting. Actually, it makes me a little sad to think that there are women everywhere who struggle to feel pretty. That idea has led me to think back on the moments when I have felt pretty. Surprise, surprise, I’ve noticed that these moments have something in common. I feel pretty when someone tells me I look pretty.

The fact of the matter is that it is next to impossible to be objective about your own looks. It’s much easier to believe that you look pretty if someone else tells you so. Before all the feminists object, let me say that I don’t think it has to be a significant other. After all, I’ve never had a significant other, and this has worked for me in the past. I never had any kind of romantic entanglement with my late friend Stephen, yet he made me feel pretty all the time. My cousin Kim has a way of complimenting my hair and clothes in ways that sometimes make me feel like I look pretty. Even some stranger on the train complimenting my shoes can make me feel pretty.

While some part of me hates the idea of other people controlling any part of my self-worth, I think there is an alternative way of interpreting this. Maybe the lesson is that it is so, so important to tell someone they look nice when you think it. Make it a point to compliment someone every day. Maybe if we all hear it enough, those feelings of prettiness will have a better chance of becoming intrinsic.

It’s just another way to pay it forward.

Robot

“Sometimes, your eyes see something your brain doesn’t. You pick up a newspaper and your head gives you a phrase that you didn’t consciously read yet. You walk into a room and you realize something’s out of place before you’ve bothered to properly look.”

--from Linger by Maggie Stiefvater

I often feel like I exist in the gray area, career-wise. I work in education, but I am not a teacher. I work in publishing, but I don’t work for a publisher. I don’t work in corporate America, but I’m also not quite in academia. Honestly, I really enjoy this ambiguity. It allows me to dip my toes in several different career ponds without feeling like I am stuck in any of them.

One of the weirdest things about my job, I think, is the way my skills are somewhat divorced from my education. My background is in mathematics and learning sciences, and I do believe that is critically important to being able to do my job well. But my marketable skill set is in editorial. I think of education and editorial as the two, rather separate hats I have to wear in while completing my day-to-day work tasks.

I will freely admit that I wasn’t very good at either aspect of my job when I started. I’ve been able to really refine and develop my ability to think like a mathematics educator through graduate school, attendance at conferences, and simply talking with my colleagues (who happen to be among the best in the field). Almost every day at my job is a professional development opportunity in that sense, and I’m lucky that way.

Appropriate editorial professional development opportunities are harder to come by. There are certification programs I could go through to show that I am proficient with the Chicago Manual of Style, but because I work on materials intended for young children, we mostly work from our own specialized style guide. I am as familiar with the CMS as I need to be. I honestly could not tell you if there are editorial conferences, but even if they are, I doubt that I would find them very useful. The materials that I edit just have too many unusual characteristics about them.

Thus, I have not made much conscious effort to develop my editorial skills over the years. Lucky for me, these skills seem to have developed quite nicely on their own through years of practice.

Most days, I feel like my subconscious does most of the work for me. The kinds of information that I can pick up from a glance at a page of one of our books is really kind of fascinating. Sometimes, I can glance at a page and my eyes are immediately drawn to an error. Other times, I take a quick glance and know that somewhere, there is a hyphen missing, but I have to look again carefully to find where it is. Still other times, I can look at a page and just know that something is not right, though it often takes me some time to figure out what it is.

This phenomenon fascinates me. I have so many questions about it. I’m sure it’s a skill that develops through practice, but did I do something specific to help it along? Is it some sort of photographic memory? Do I actually pick up so much information with a glance at a page that my working memory can’t hold the location of the missing hyphen along with everything else? Why can I instantly see errors on the pages of math textbooks when I can read my own writing ten times and still miss blatant typos?

On a different track, here is another question. How much of it is just a basic survival instinct? The feeling I get when I know something is wrong with a page is similar to the feeling I get when I walk into my apartment and know someone has been there in my absence (or my cat has knocked something down). I can’t always see it right away, but I know that something has been disturbed or moved. It’s the same sense of not-right-ness.

Getting back to the idea of professional development, is this something that could be taught? Familiarity with the thing you are editing is important, of course. Someone who has never seen one of our math books would never be able to sense that something is wrong with a page the way I do. But is the skill generalizable?

Despite how little I know about my ability to sense missing hyphens and incorrect fonts, I am grateful for it. It removes a lot of the tedium from my job. I think of it as my own version of the Lost in Space robot, except instead of saying, “Danger, Will Robinson, danger!” it says, “Error, editor Katie, error!”

My error robot is awesome. I’ve come to think of the Lego robot on my desk as a sort of portrait of him. He’s a great defender of mathematical accuracy and a fierce opponent of bad grammar. I think Stephen would be proud.