I have learned a lot about myself every time my heart gets broken.  And in the almost 30 years that I have been on this earth, I have had some doosies.  It all started in kindergarten—yeah, we’re goin’ there—with a boy who instead of sharing his crayons with me, would rather run around during recess pulling my skirt up in front of the other boys in class.  Sometimes, he’d be really nice and do nice things like let me cut the line ahead of him or lie next to me during nap time, but most of the time he was a jerk.  So I started wearing shorts under my skirt uniform and then when he tried to pull my skirt up again, I tripped him.  That was the end of him.

Then in 7th grade, there was another boy who walked me to my locker in between classes and wrote me funny letters with drawings of Taz, my favorite Looney Tunes character.  Sometimes he would hold my hand and we would walk home without saying anything, sometimes we would run around during P.E. laughing and being silly.  For Valentines Day, he gave me a Troll (remember those?) with purple hair and a purple jewel on his belly.  He was the perfect friend for a girl who had no friends, in a new country full of strangers and strange things.  He broke my heart only because before we knew it, it was the summer time, and 3 months apart for two 13 year olds is an ocean of time.

In high school heartbreak was a way of life.  That’s what happens when you stick a few hundred teenagers under one roof for 8 hours a day.  But as intense and immediate feelings seemed to be when you’re 16—as you think of what to say when your crush finally talks to you, or as you hope that the cute boy in Math class would ask you to prom—bouncing back from a break-up seemed easier.  Perhaps it’s because at that age the possibilities seem endless, and the world is just one big playground.  So while I slow danced cheek-to-cheek with a cute boy, to Janet Jackson’s “Again” or Boyz II Men’s “I’ll Make Love to You” or to Jodeci’s “Come and Talk to Me,” and everything is so perfect that it doesn’t matter that we’re in the cafeteria and that the floor’s a little sticky or that in 3 minutes, the song will be over and I’d have to go home, I always felt like this was only the beginning and that there will be infinite perfect moments like this with other boys, and that the world was indeed my playground.

Then you get older and boys become men, and things become more serious and somehow those magical moments on the dance floor become so few and far between that they are regarded as myths or worse, fairy tales, lies that they tell us to keep us believing and hoping for things that don’t seem to exist.  And just when you stop believing, something happens, and you meet someone who takes your hand, makes you laugh at silly jokes, writes you letters and then dances with you, cheek-to-cheek and makes you feel drunk without ever drinking a drop of wine.  But as soon as you begin to believe in magic again, he is gone, and all you have left are memories, approximations of the actual experience, phantoms in the spaces where he used to be.  Suddenly the possibilities become eclipsed by the pieces that you are left to pick up and the self you have to restore.

But despite the loss, the disappointment and the broken promises, despite making grown men cry and the tears that I’ve shed on my own, I still choose to believe in amazing possibilities.  I guess that’s the most important lesson learned from all these years: that there is life after what seems like the greatest of losses, that while there are jerks who will embarrass you and leave you hanging, there are still men who can make you laugh and who’ll silently hold your hand as you walk home and that heartbreak can actually fortify the belief that there are still infinite magical moments to be had on the dance floor.  This is why despite it all, I will continue to wear my heart just where it has always been, exposed and unguarded, in danger of being broken, yes, but always remaining open to the glorious possibilities that lie ahead.

Fall is in full swing and I am back after taking a much needed mental break.  Blogging, at least when blogging about one’s life, can become really involved and exhausting.  And after facing some of my hidden fears and anxieties in the first few entries, I was already eager to return to my hidey hole, where it’s warm, safe and full of denial.  I do have a reputation to live up to which involves a very happy poker face, something that doesn’t really go well with neurosis.  The good thing about blogging is that it keeps the crazy in check and, well, I really need to keep the crazy in check.  So here we are!

The fall and winter seasons are my favorite time of the year.  For many, it’s the spring, the eternal symbol for renewal, when flowers start to bloom, the ice melts, birds begin to chirp and hibernating bears come out squinting at the sun, ready to live in the light again, like a scene from some 1950s Disney cartoon.  This is like some nightmare for me.  A nightmare compounded by allergies, bugs and Easter bunnies.  Yikes!  For some summertime is the best time and, while I may love the beach, boogie boarding and long flowy dresses like any true blooded Californian, the summer for me means questionable employment and being completely alone with my dissertation and my thoughts all the damn time.  Just awful!

So here we are.  The season which for me has always carried the most potential.  Maybe it’s because I’ve been in school for so long that my internal clock perks up when it knows to gear up for the back-to-school grind.  What a nerd.  Maybe it’s the hot, often oppressive L.A. heat giving way to crisp mornings against blue skies and fresher air.  Maybe it’s all the great clothes which mimic the rich colors of the outdoors: the brown, orange, red, plum and burgundy hues which make me oh so happy to be alive AND a girl.  Maybe it’s the fall t.v. line-up which offer a kind of solace, an escape from the scary world of recessions and budget cuts and fellowship applications and existential dilemmas.  There is a comfort in knowing that on Wednesday, I can expect to be entertained by the best show ever (Glee!), even if it’s just for an hour.  More and more, I am thankful for small pleasures.  Maybe it’s the beginning of the holiday season, a nightmare for many, but for me it signals family, food, San Francisco lights and marveling at the passage of time embodied by nieces and nephews who I will always see as babies, despite how quickly they grow into amazing little people.  I suppose it’s all of these things and they are all very good reasons to feel alive and hopeful which seems to carry over as the the Fall melts into winter cold.

Yes, here we are, finally! Hello Fall, my name is Lisa and I am your biggest fan.

This week I spent a lot of time talking to my students about critiquing grand narratives, like the Enlightenment, for example.  The movement of writers and thinkers and artists who brought to us reason and science, also gave the Western world the ideology to justify colonial conquest, all for the sake of saving little brown and black brothers from thier savage selves.  Grand narratives are developmental and universal, teleological stories that supposedly apply to us all.  I spend a lot of pages in my work messing with those kinds of narratives, and rather than find understanding in the rigid path of history—the causes and effects of “big” events in our past which should shed light on our present moment and perhaps even the future—I look for meaning in the meanderings these narratives take.  Always, always I search for the counter, the thing that tells a different, often antithetical story, whatever might be hiding in the shadows of the events marked into certainty by our history books.  Always, always I try to seek out the secret whispers, the thing hiding in plain sight, in order to unmask the fallacy that we, every single last one of us, should be following a pre-determined path or a designated timeline.

I have come to be suspicious of grand narratives—like a good academic should—and yet I find it hard to avoid these so-called universals in my own life.  Where was it that said we, every single one last one of us, must follow the same path?  I have yet to find a believable argument for this, but every where I look, I see the results of time marching onward, as if it had always been this way forever and ever, as if this was the only tried and tested truth: we are born, we grow up, we go to school, we go to work, we find mates, we have children, we buy homes and cars and stuff in between, we grow old.  Do we all merely enact variations of the same tired old story?  Where are the beautiful meanderings, the whispers, the thing hidden by shadows, the counter?

In life, as with my work, I search for other paths.  Perhaps this is why in life, as with my work, I often find myself unsatisfied.  It took me quite a bit of time to search for the appropriate word to describe how I feel, but “unsatisfied” seems right.  I feel like I am in a perpetual search for something different, something I have yet to see, something else, something more.  All this in an effort to find something better.  Better than what? I don’t really know.  Not knowing—this perpetual stance, teetering at the edge of the diving board—is the hard part.  It is a daily struggle for me not give up all the uncertainty of my life for some stability.  Always, always I re-evaulate the choice that I have made to delineate from the given path.  Always, always I fight with the desire to seek comfort in the conventional: normal job, normal house, normal husband, normal 2 and 1/2 children, normal dog, all under a normal sky.  But while this kind of life may prove enough, and even blissful, for many, for me it feels exactly like screaming in desperation without ever being heard.

So I keep searching, not for perfection, but for the better:  for better words to fill the page, better ways of understanding big events, better methods for seeing through the masks, better moments in my life, better paths to walk than the one laid out in front of me.  Perhaps I will find whatever “better” I am always looking for, perhaps I won’t.  That’s the fear that I live with everyday, and oh boy, as I become older and see all those around me begin to follow the path, this fear becomes all the more potent.  Maybe they’ve got it all right and I’ve got it all wrong.  Maybe at the end of the day, we are all looking to create our own individual narratives, no matter how similar they may look.  Whatever may be the case, if given the choice, I will always, always opt for the search over the settling, because for me, whatever beauty is left out there to behold will always come from forsaking the tried-and-so-called-true, for the sake of creating new narratives to live and tell.