The Sunday Letter, #6: Transitions
In August of 2006, I readied my life to go to Scotland. I had been accepted into the U of St. Andrews’ Creative Writing Program and was due to start in September; earlier in the summer I had carted my life home to Ontario from BC’s west coast. I’d spent the previous four years in Victoria, loving university life by the sea. I’d also, as one does, broken my heart a fair bit while I was there. By the time August rolled around I was ready for a new start and looking forward to a change of scenery—West Coast mountains for the sloping peak of Ben Nevis; the long stretches of St. Andrews coastline sans all the chariots of fire. I had booked my flight. I was ready.
Three days before I was scheduled to go, I received notice that the funding I’d applied for in order to take that year in Scotland had fallen through and I wouldn’t be able to go. Hardly daring to believe it, I emailed the Registrar’s office and asked them if I could defer my spot. Then I sat back and wished desperately that they would say no, that I would be forced to pick up and go anyway even without the funding necessary to go. Stranger miracles have happened, I told myself. You’ll go. You feel it in your bones.
A short time after that, they emailed back to say that deferral wouldn’t be a problem. There it was: the future, pushed a whole year out onto the horizon. It felt like the longest stretch of time imaginable. I went and sat on the couch in the family room and stared at the TV without registering what was on. After a while, my dad came into the room and sat beside me on the couch. He reached over and put his hand on my knee.
“It’s okay, Amanda,” he said. “I know it feels awful right now, but don’t worry. Everything will be okay.”
He was right, of course. But it would take me 365 days to realize it.
This is my last week at the FOLD. In a few short days’ time, I’ll begin a year-long leave of absence to work on several new writing projects. It’s an extraordinary gift made possible by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, and even though I have known that this time was coming since the last days of February, it still feels almost impossible. Even though I have also known that this was coming, have also felt it in my bones. I have known that this year was coming since the clock ticked over into January—something inevitable about it, something solid and just there. Like waking up and knowing that the sun is in the sky.
I didn’t wake up on January 1 feeling excited about this future. It felt very neutral—just a fact, just a pocket of knowledge thrumming somewhere in my ribcage. I will be going to Scotland in the fall. I will be taking some time in the fall. I am going to be leaving the FOLD for a while. I wasn’t anxious or worried or can’t-contain-myself-ecstatic about any of this. It just felt true.
It’s hard to explain the neutral nature of this feeling, except to say that I felt the same way in the summer of 2016, after I had started working at the FOLD. When I climbed the stairs to my beloved little attic apartment and looked around and just felt, somewhere deep inside, that my time there was over—like I’d outgrown the space, like I’d outgrown that life. I needed to move somewhere else and I didn’t know where somewhere else was yet, but I knew that something had to change and so I made myself open to it, and started to listen. And a few months after that I found my beautiful Hamilton row house, the place where I have lived and loved and welcomed a dog and cried and gardened and overjoyed for the better part of the last seven years. Finding this house felt right in ways that I had rarely explicitly felt in my life up to that point.
Scotland, of course, had felt right too. As had BC before that, and the UK before that, too. But sometimes I look back on those adventures and I realize that part of that was just adventure for the sake of it—adventure just because I could. And why not? We all need those adventures in our lives.
But moving to this house in Hamilton was the first time I’d recognized that something needed to change. The changes wrought in my life before that were, in some ways, artificial, in the sense that they followed the school year, and the expectations that one has when they’re pursuing education after high school. The way that your life falls into four-year blocks and increments of time. You want to study here, so you go live here for a while. And after that you want to study here, so you go live there instead.
Moving house in Hamilton was the first time that I made a life move when there wasn’t school or work involved. It feels like the first time I actually stopped to listen to what I wanted, to how I had grown and changed and what was necessary to welcome the next stage of things.
This was how I began to feel last summer, when the first thought of some time in St. Andrews began to take shape.
I have been extraordinarily blessed in my life thus far on this swiftly tilting planet. I have also, as have most of us, had my share of hard times. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that that listening-to-the-body’s-call-for-change came in the summer of 2016, after I had crawled out of the depths of three years of depression, and I don’t really think it’s a coincidence that this upcoming year of writing and Scotland time and who-knows-what else came as a result of weathering these years of grief after Jess died. Something happens when you grieve. Some kind of irrevocable, molecular, change-that-you-feel-in-your-bones happens. You enter grief—much like you enter depression—as one person, and eventually you come up for air (I won’t say you come out because really, who ever does?) as someone different. Your priorities shift. The things that you need shift. The way that you imagine your life—all of this is no longer the same.
In June of last year I remember walking through Queen’s Park at Word on the Street Toronto and thinking only that something had to change. In the first months after Jess died, back in early 2020 (what a time that was, for so many reasons), I remember longing only for everything to stop: for the world to rush to a halt so that I could sit and do nothing and contemplate the black hole that had suddenly winked into being. The world did not stop, not even for a pandemic, and as always there were both good and bad things to this. It was good to have things to focus on—a new book, an in-person festival that suddenly had to pivot to a virtual festival in six short weeks—and also good to have reasons to understand that the world was still beautiful and worthy of loving. But the thing that happened with the advent of remote work (for the rest of the world, because we were working remotely already) was that work suddenly became everything, all of the time. Suddenly arts organizations everywhere were looking at how to produce content and have content available year-round. Suddenly it felt like—even though we tried hard not to enforce this, and mostly succeeded!—I needed to be on for everything. Putting two books out in the first two years of the pandemic did not help with this, at all. I have loved virtual events with every ounce of my soul but two years of constant book promo for two books alongside a full-time job is, well, a lot.
I had known for some time prior to that walk in Queen’s Park that I needed to find a way to re-jig all of it. When I spoke the words leave of absence out loud for the first time they felt like a key—yes, yes. This is what you’ve been looking for for ages. Even though I did not yet know how I was going to make any of this possible. Even though saying the words felt somehow sacreligious.
But you love your job. You love the people you work with. You tell anyone who will listen that it’s the perfect job for you.
Yes and yes. All of these things were true. They still are.
But if you make that space for listening, especially to your body, here’s the thing: your body will always tell you. It will never not comply.
And now here we are, a year after that walk in Queen’s Park in June. As it turns out, a year is not a long amount of time after all. It passes in a flash. The year that passed between 2006 and 2007 felt a little longer to me—partly because I was living with my parents again, sharing a bedroom with my sister, making a nine-dollar-an-hour minimum wage at Chapters and feeling like life would never start. But then I stepped on that plane to St. Andrews, and a few short hours after that I met Jess, and greeting her at the doorway to our St. A dorm
apartment felt like the fitting of a puzzle piece. What’s more—it felt like a puzzle piece I’d been waiting for. Like some kind of otherworldly recognition. It’s you. Of course it was you. It was always meant to be you.
I can talk a lot about that feeling, and probably will in another post. A post where my musings on cosmic space and time and the otherworldly nature of this worldly universe we live in meshes with the truly out there, woo-woo stuff that the Amanda of five years ago would have gently scoffed and smiled at. The Amanda of now is much more comfortable with it, just as she has gotten (somewhat more gradually—grief, by contrast, is really a crash course in so many things) comfortable with listening to that call for change.
So, a new and different year awaits. It will probably pass by me in a flash. I was all neutral and zen about things earlier in the year and now that I’m standing on the precipice of it all I’m a little more nervous. I am trying hard not to worry about the things that I would normally worry about and instead just to trust that neutral, solid pocket of knowledge that still sits in my ribcage. The whispered sense of knowing that one way or another, everything will work out in some way. My dad was right, all those years ago, when he spoke comfort in the face of my sadness over dreams deferred. They still came! And they brought with them a friend who made so many things possible, and continues—even now, perhaps especially now—to make so many things possible even after she is no longer here in ways that I can see.
Time is magic, and change is more magic still. I hope, almong so many other things, that the work I do in this year ahead—even the resting work, the dreaming work, the loving work, perhaps especially that!—can be worthy of that.
Currently Reading: How I Killed Pluto And Why It Had It Coming, by Michael E. Brown
Currently Watching: Hijack (honestly, give me Idris Elba in anything, pls)
Currently Eating: This Summer Bowl with Hot Honey Halloumi, from Good Mood Food. 15/10, would recommend.