Two Steps Back
Three steps forward, two steps back. Or is it three steps back? It might even be four.
I was driving back from the same Aldi I had visited so frequently during my first year in Dallas. I’d found my old reusable grocery bags stuffed into a corner of my trunk, behind the Swiffer mop and curtain rods that haven’t quite made it into our new apartment yet. I was driving the same route back home to an apartment that was just next door to the dingy one I’d lived in only a year before.
Two steps back.
Back to the same neighborhood, back to the same Aldi. Back to a smaller apartment and paycheck. Even less of a clear trajectory, even less of an air of pride when I talk about my job, even less ability to pretend that I know what I’m doing. This time last year, we were moving into a bigger, nicer apartment. My part-time job at the church had just turned into a full-time job. I accepted it because that’s what you do when they offer you a full-time job. You take the next step forward, no matter what direction it’s in. I stopped shopping at Aldi because when you have more money you spend it on the same avocados, but in a store that doesn’t make you feel so poor. I secretly enjoyed the look on people’s faces when I would tell them I was in school full-time, working full-time, writing, and taking Greek and Hebrew at the same time. Hearing “How do you do it all?” is a drug to people like me. I even enjoyed articulating it just like this: “Well, I was working part-time and they offered me a full-time job.” I might as well have shouted, “I AM IMPORTANT AND GOOD AT LOTS OF THINGS.”
Now I look down with a giggle when I tell people I work at a popsicle store.
But on that drive back from Aldi, I began to wonder: maybe you need to take a few steps back sometimes. Maybe taking a few steps back is the only way to get a good view at the direction you’re going.
Three steps forward, two steps back. Enough to see where you’ll actually end up if you keep going.
It’s my first month in this new apartment and everything in life feels smaller. Smaller, but brighter. I have a little space to breathe for the first time in a year, and it turns out that my lungs like the taste of air. When I tell people that I left my job at the church to work at a popsicle store and do more writing, I used to think I could feel my actual soul being chipped away. Instead, I think it’s my “How do you do it all?” performance, being picked apart, piece by piece.