Failing Back

What if the life I spent decades trying to escape was actually the life trying to save me?

I’ve been writing for a long time - quietly, mostly for myself, in the margins of a career that kept me busy and a life that kept surprising me.

This is where I’ve decided to stop being quiet about it.

I write about the gap between the life we aim for and the life we actually get, and what happens when we finally look closely enough to see they may have been the same life all along.

Identity. Ambition. Family inheritance. The detours we spend years being ashamed of. The moments when two halves of a story slam together and we realize we were never as lost as we thought.

My first essay is below. It’s called Failing Back. It’s as good a place to start as any, maybe because it’s about starting over, about going back, and about what it costs to finally let yourself say: ya did it.

I hope something in it finds you.

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Failing Back

The campus had changed and it hadn’t.

I was back at Orange State University for a meeting of university leaders in my field – the kind of room where people say your name and then ask you what they should do. I had just left one of those rooms. Two universities had pulled me aside that morning for specific, detailed advice, and I knew at least one of them would call on me again. I stepped out into the Orlando heat I’d first felt at seventeen, and something in me went still.

Seventeen-year-old me had stood on this same ground. She’d come to OSU to go get a life – a solidly middle-class life, a life of ideas and travel and purpose, a life that mattered – and she’d had no idea whether she would get it. And here was the woman she’d become, crossing her old campus with a lanyard and a reputation, and the two of them met in the heat like estranged friends.

She looked at me. First she was shocked. Then she was happy.

Ya did it, she said.

For most of my adult life I would not have let her say it. 

For most of my adult life I’d have argued. 

Did I, though? Look at the detour. Look at what it cost. Look at where you ended up. 

For most of my adult life I had looked back at this girl and felt embarrassed for her – for how much she wanted, for how naive she was, for thinking the path she chose was worth the trouble. 

You should have kept the humble dream, I used to tell her. You should have saved yourself.

But standing there at fifty-three, I couldn’t find the argument. I just let her say it.

Ya did it.

* * *

What had she wanted, exactly?

Not riches. She was clear about that. She wanted to be rich enough to make a car payment on a new Japanese car – one that wasn’t a stick shift, that had working speakers and windows that didn’t crank. A Honda Accord with a sunroof. That was the ceiling of her ambition, materially. Everything else was about purpose.

She wanted to be a coach and a teacher, in the mold of the coaches who had lit her up as a kid looking for somewhere to belong. She wanted to give back the exact thing she’d been given: A chance to elevate someone. She wanted a life with zero doubt about whether she’d made a difference. She wanted, more than anything, to become her own version of Elise – her mentor, a dynamo, fun and funny and ethical all at once, the kind of person who made others want to live with more purpose. Everything in her wanted to be that.

She wasn’t afraid of much. She felt, in fact, on top of the world.

The first crack in the plan came on a back porch in Tampa. My father sat beside me with his cigarette and a salary sheet my stepmother, a high school English teacher, had given him. Starting teacher’s salary: twenty-eight thousand dollars. I pushed back – but I’ll get a master’s. He’d come prepared. He slid his finger to the next column. With a master’s: thirty-two thousand. He’d made his point and we both knew it. I brushed him off that day and went back to being a college student with an active dating life and several nights a week on Orlando dance floors. But the number stayed.

By the end of that first spring, an honors seminar and a charismatic professor of psychology had done their work, and I’d changed my major to psychology. I would be a professor and a psychologist. I didn’t know what professors made, but it had to beat thirty-two thousand, and that psychology professor drove a neat little sports car, so it was clearly enough. School came easy to me; I made A’s and B’s on no effort at all, unless a professor inspired me, in which case I’d actually study and take the A. Becoming a professor didn’t feel like a question. It felt like a formality.

I had no idea what I was choosing. That’s the thing I most want to tell her now, and the thing I’d never say. 

You think this is a small swap – coach to professor, gym to lab. You have no idea you are choosing the entire shape of the next thirty years.

* * *

I took the GRE the first time hungover – nauseous, sleep-deprived, my score exactly as unimpressive as that morning deserved. So, I taught myself. Any word I didn’t recognize went onto a blue index card: the word in black Sharpie on one side, a definition on the back. I rubber-banded them into stacks like a drug dealer’s wads of cash and carried a shoebox of them everywhere – stoplights, lunch by the river, dead time at work. Five hundred words, one card at a time. When the score came back eight weeks later in a fat envelope from ETS, I’d gone up ten points in math and a hundred and ninety in verbal. I sat there overcome – relief and pride and a vision of the future suddenly within reach. I did it.

Seven applications, five rejections, two acceptances. Tulane offered a full ride. Georgia offered no money and a feeling. I visited both, and Athens took me whole – musical, historic, tree-lined, soaked in red clay and soul food and the ghosts of R.E.M. and the B-52’s and a live Indigo Girls album. And there was the professor I’d be working with: Roya, young, debonair, wicked smart, worldly, and – of all the coincidences – from Jacksonville, like me. She’d shopped the same mall, known the same paper-mill stink, swum the same beaches. We connected instantly, then alarmingly. By the time I signed a lease, it was for an apartment two hundred yards from hers.

I won’t pretend I didn’t know what was happening. I knew. I just didn’t want it to stop. Within months I was folded into her kitchen table, her children, her late-night MTV world. On Halloween, while I was DJing a party in the middle of our friends’ frolic, she stood in front of me and said she was starting to dig me. I made her repeat it over the music. I think the feeling is mutual, I squeaked, and then she kissed me. The women around us looked unsurprised. They’d seen it before we had.

That was the first detour. The dreamer who’d fallen irrevocably in love pulled out the APA ethics manual as if it could bless the whole impossible arrangement. I switched advisors, handled it as best as I could, and finished the degree anyway.

And then I had the degree and almost nothing to do with it.

I’d spent eight years building a home and helping raise someone else’s children instead of building a publication record, and a PhD without publications is a key that opens very few doors. When the relationship ended, it all ended at once – the love, the home, the parenting, the path. What I had to show for it was student-loan debt, a set of Lenox china, and my books. I was thirty, starting over, holding a doctorate that felt worthless. Somewhere in there, I had even folded away the dream of children, because the life I was in had no room for them.

* * *

Then Coastal Florida University called.

The psychology chair, out of the blue: They hadn’t hired me for the tenure-track line, but the person they did hire had backed out, and they’d noticed I was from Jacksonville – would I want a one-year visiting position?

No, thanks, I said.

Go back to Jacksonville? To CFU, of all places – the very thing I’d left in order to chase the professor’s life? The hometown with the paper-mill smell and the people I’d fled? Absolutely not. He told me to sleep on it.

That night Elise called to check on me, and I mentioned it like a joke. You will not believe this. CFU offered me a one-year job today.

Did you take it?

No.

WHAT? Call him back. You take that job.

Why?

Because nothing would be better for you than being back home. Take the year. Be surrounded by family and friends – people who love you – while you get your bearings. 

And then, slower, in the voice you don’t argue with: Call. Him. Back.

The next day I called him back and accepted, with no idea what I was doing. But Elise had said to, so I did.

It felt like defeat. It felt like descending. I’d come down once already – from a top-tier university to CFU – and now here I was crawling back to the town I’d outgrown, hauling a failed relationship and a failed run at the professor’s life behind me. CFU had no football, no gardens, no traditions, no history, none of the things I’d been taught to value. CFU hadn’t even wanted me – how dare it not want me. I took the year as a kind of penance.

Little did I know how right Elise would turn out to be.

Being surrounded by family was balm for my wrecked heart. 

Teaching in front of eager students in my own hometown turned out to be a quiet kind of healing. 

I brought my little nephews to class. I had auntie sleepovers. 

I met whole new circles of people. The one-year stint became more years. 

I bought a house. I rebuilt. 

I met Sara three years into the experiment, and three years after that I gave birth to a daughter I could never have pictured in Athens – and then, not long after, to a second. The children I’d folded away unfolded into my actual arms.

Elise was right.

I relinquished the professor dream and took a job at the community college, kept teaching as a CFU adjunct for pennies – not for the money, but because I could not let go of being affiliated with a university, any university. I’m a professor at the community college, but I still teach at CFU, I’d tell people, holding one toe in the university pool, keeping the younger dreamer alive on almost nothing.

I have always been most alive in relationship – in inspiration, in the warmth of a chosen family around a kitchen table – and that aliveness has, over and over, cost me the solitary, joyless, lonely labor that academia demands as proof of worth. I’d traded the university CV for the kitchen table. For years I counted that as the great failure of my life.

* * *

The thing about a self-constructed prison is that you can live inside it for fifteen years before you notice the door.

Mine cracked open at UGA, of all places. Thirteen years after leaving Athens, I’d clawed my way back to UGA for an administrative job – back to the shining university on the hill, the bona fide major institution that, in my mind, would finally certify me. 

And once I got back there, I discovered that the good people of UGA believed they were the ones trapped in a penitentiary. Worst administrators, ugliest campus, dumbest policies, most oppressive everything. They believed about their promised land exactly what I’d believed about my exile. Their worst was my best, and watching them suffer inside it broke the spell. I wasn’t inferior because I had worked at a community college or at CFU. I was inferior because, for all those years, I’d let inferior rent space in my head and filter everything I saw. There had been flowers the whole time, if I’d only chosen to see them.

But knowing a thing and feeling it are different countries, and it took a bus to carry me across.

I brought my wife and kids back to Jax, where they longed to be, even if I hadn’t yet figured out how to reconcile my two minds about it. And ironically, I wanted to be at CFU this time.

It was an ordinary morning on my commute into CFU – the same traffic light, the same blue Coastal Florida University sign I idled in front of every day. And there, out of the corner of my eye, impossibly out of place, sat a massive red bus emblazoned with a giant black G. Buses like that exist in one place on earth: Athens, Georgia. The University of Georgia. I did a double take. I snapped a photo before the light changed, because I needed proof.

For eight years in my twenties, those G buses had been my whole geography. Student drivers blasting whatever they wanted; one of them slapping her knee to Tina Turner – we don’t need another hero – as we wound through the hills. When I’d finally ridden one again for my UGA administrative job, it had felt like homecoming, a sort of clean redemption after thirteen lost years.

And now the red bus and the blue sign sat side by side at one light. My idyllic dream and my supposed defeat, the elevated life and the institutional purgatory I felt I’d been exiled to, occupying the same square of asphalt at the same instant. I felt the thunder of it – two halves of me, kept apart for two decades, slamming together into one person, in one instant.

Because they were never opposites. That was the thing the bus delivered without a single word: Sublime dreams next to broken dreams make a single, real life. I had reached my elevation. I’d simply hit it right here – at this light, in this town, in front of this sign I’d been taught to be ashamed of. The dream I thought I’d lost and the life I’d actually lived had not been running in opposite directions. They had been converging the whole time.

What if the life I spent decades trying to escape was actually the life trying to save me?

There’s an irony I can’t walk past in who finally brought me all the way back. Years later, the developmental psychologist who’d been hired into the permanent version of the job I lost would be the person who invited me back into the CFU fold. For years, whether in psych department hallways or our kids’ school hallways, I’d seen her and only seen my own failure standing there. She was everything I hadn’t managed to become. Eventually I understood she was part of the same strange rescue.

* * *

So, I went back to sunny OSU and stood where the girl had started, and I finally let her say it.

For thirty years my questions had all been the same shape. Is this the right move? Will this validate me? Am I seen here? They were the questions of someone waiting to arrive – someone holding her own worth hostage to a verdict that never came. Standing on that campus at fifty-three, the question quietly changed. It became, simply: Do I want this?

That’s the whole arrival, right there, in the swap of a single question. The first kind needs something from the world in order to feel whole. The second kind already is whole, and builds from choice instead of from hunger.

I had it backwards for most of my life. I mistook the detour for a wrong turn, the return for defeat. I mistook the ordinary, hometown, fallback life – the daughters, the house, the students, Sara, chosen family around the table – for a consolation prize handed to someone who hadn’t made it. But the life I spent decades trying to escape had been building me the entire time. It gave me the children Athens couldn’t. It gave me the healing that distance couldn’t. It gave me, eventually and improbably, the university too – the very thing I thought I’d traded away – handed back to me by the woman who had taken my place. 

I think of Athens differently now. I went back not long ago and sat at dawn on a hotel patio at the edge of North Campus, alone with my coffee and thirty years of memory, breathing in the petrichor rising off the lawn where I’d once read Foucault under the oaks and once taken the phone call that something terrible had happened. The buildings hadn’t changed in three decades. The dream the place birthed in me hadn’t died; it had only been fulfilled somewhere I never thought to look – three hundred miles south, at a light, in front of a blue sign.

The girl at OSU wanted a whole life. A meaningful career, children, a home, belonging, room to think and create – proof that pain and instability were not destiny, proof that the story does not end where it began.

She got all of it. She just got it by the road she’d once been ashamed to be standing on.

Ya did it, she says.

This time, I don’t argue.

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