A writer who won’t give up! (part 2)
(continued from July 5)
It was mid-January. I routed my road trip through the southern part of the country to avoid encountering a potential storm. Going over the Rockies to get from Santa Cruz to Denver wasn’t going to happen. I mapped out my route on Google Maps and drove from Santa Cruz to Barstow (CA) to Flagstaff (AZ) to Santa Fe (NM) to Denver (CO), and booked cheap/safe hotels along my route. It worked well. I only encountered minimal roadside snow and the hotels were exactly like what the pictures depicted on the Internet.
I borrowed a few audio books from the library, thinking I’d have plenty of time for uninterrupted listening while driving through four states. I picked a classic (Flaubert), a biography (Isaacson), and a comedy (Sedaris) to try and keep things light. Hah!
I ended up not listening to any of my audio books. There was so much going on in my head that I never once got the urge to listen to someone else’s (published!) thoughts. (My own thoughts do keep me company, but honestly, sometimes I wish there was an OFF SWITCH!)
You’d think that my thoughts would have been admitting to myself (again):
“OK Trish. You’re not going to become an instant millionaire. Doh! Lower your expectations!”
But instead, I pre-occupied my mind with trivial things like:
“Did I pick the cheapest/safest hotel (for whatever pitstop I was approaching)?”
And…
“I hope my room has a microwave for the Trader Joe’s frozen dinner (in the ice chest on the passenger seat next to me) that I picked for my meal tonight.”
More salient thoughts occurred too, like wondering why I was on such a blind-ambition, frantic mission to get to Denver and Hillary as soon as possible. (I didn’t figure it out till months later.)
I also remember not ever seriously considering relying on “those other skills” (20 years as tech writer/intranet manager at Hewlett-Packard) to generate income once I landed in Denver. I hated being a corporate drone.
Before I left on my road trip, Hillary asked me to send my resume. I did and she suggested using some IT connections that she had in Denver for potential job leads. I politey responded, knowing in my heart that IT work for upper managemenet really wasn’t what I wanted to do anymore. It made me SO unhappy and I was SO determined at this point in my life (I’m 53) to pursue something that felt right (er, left).
When I finally got to Denver, astonishingly, Hillary and I re-connected right away. The elapsed decades since we’d last seen eachother (30+ years) didn’t seem to matter.
To be continued…
