It was in late August of 1972, the year of the Agnes flood, that I first arrived in Mansfield, PA.
The year before that, in late August of 1971, I finally realized with cold terror that unless I got myself out of my house, I was going to be trapped there forever with my violently depressed, alcoholic, schizophrenic mother.
I had stupidly thought that she would help me go to college. I had stupidly thought that she wanted me to be a success, to realize my potential.
But, no.
My mother wanted me to stay home and tend to the wreckage of her life: mop her vomit, put her to bed, pay the bills, fix the holes in the walls. Forever.
That August, I realized that I needed to get the hell out. Whatever it took.
I needed a plan. And I realized this with a pain and a sadness and the most loneliness I had ever felt before, that no one was going to help me.
It took me a whole year, but by the following August— and I’ll never forget it — I stood and faced my mother in the living room and told her that the following day I was leaving and I was never coming back.
She laughed.
That was my first long-term project. Since then, I’ve completed other big life projects: college, graduate school, pregnancy, building a house, but none of them was as beautifully satisfying as that first one. It was hard, and it took lots of steps involving bureaucrats at the Social Security office, bank officers, and personal discipline to save every penny I earned at Sears for a year.
What I most savored about this first project was its stealth. Nobody saw it coming. Not my boss at Sears, not my friend Barb, who I used to pal around with on the weekends, not my sister, and certainly not my mother.
It took a lot of just biding my time, biting my tongue, putting up with a lot of nonsense and bad behaviour. But mostly it meant not giving up.
Every August, I get the urge to do a big stealth project. It’s ridiculous, I know, because I don’t need to escape any horrible situation anymore. My life is pretty great. But there is something irresistible to me about having a secret plan, even if it’s something relatively trivial like building a website, learning a language or an instrument, training for a race, and just not telling anyone you’re doing it until you show up online, or order a meal in Italian, or step up at an open mic with your guitar, or win your age group at a 5K.
There’s something so delicious in the “big reveal,” in hearing your friends say, “I didn’t know you played the guitar!”
I’ve been looking for a new project for some time now. I am a project-driven person and haven’t had one since my fixation with fashion last spring. But yesterday, I found one and I’m excited about it, and I want to tell you, but I’m going to hold off. I’m going to keep this one secret for a while. In a few months, I’ll do a big reveal, but for now, just know I have a plan. And it doesn’t involve leaving.
Maybe you have a project of your own in the works? Something you’re planning to surprise the world with? If so, I’d love to hear about it… in a few months.
Inspiration Location 