Please, and Take it With You

As with so many childhood stories, I’m still learning from The Wizard of Oz. The older I get, the more deeply I seem to feel Dorothy’s struggles. Maybe I can blame it all on “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” one of the simplest, most beautiful songs I know, and performed flawlessly by the very young Judy Garland. I was a kid who was arguably too impressionable for the message. Birds fly over the rainbow. Why, then, oh why can’t I? It’s that “Oh, why” that really gets me.

An ordinary girl wants more and sets out to get it. Despite meeting some wonderful characters, she gets sort of broken by the experience and ends up returning to what is familiar and secure. Hm.

Interestingly, but maybe only to English majors, Dorothy’s path from the farm to the big city and back again is, in literary terms, typically the boy’s rite of passage. If I remember correctly, the girl’s story most often ends in marriage. I did get married in my story. Mark and I set out on the road together, but he died about fourteen years in, after almost four years of illness and struggle. I’ve never worked harder in my life than when I took care of him, but the reward (if you can call it that when your only patient dies), was just that: the knowledge that I’d done a difficult thing. Similarly, I’ve always been really well-behaved, and to my surprise I’ve learned that all you get for that is a shining record of good behavior. Not quite what you hope for, but there it is. Sometimes the thing itself is the only prize.

Mark died in July of 2008. I was laid off from my job two weeks later, and just like that, I had nothing to do. There was no one but me to take care of, and a little pile of life insurance money to stave off panic and finance my journey. And I thought, Well, here you go. Time to figure things out, and maybe carve out a living doing that thing you said you would do. I’d dreamed of being an actor for as long as I could remember, and while I spent many years dabbling, and fitting it in where I could, I was finally free to concentrate all my efforts on making a living doing this thing.

It didn’t work out quite the way I planned, I’m deeply sorry to report. I’m not as intrepid as Dorothy, it turns out, and the path was not nearly as clearly marked. Though I was creatively busier than I’d ever been with improv, writing, and auditions, the money dwindled. I began to panic, and before long, I was looking for paying work. As an underemployed freelance copywriter, I spent the better part of a year cursing my ill-timed lapse in employment and beating myself up over my apparent inability to chase my own dream.

Job interviews are very like auditions, lots of guesswork and acting the part — and often the idea of winning is more compelling than the role itself. But I finally found work in the fundraising office of a local arts college. I may be one of those people who can’t be happy anywhere, but I was clear-sighted enough to be grateful for almost everything about it. Good people, a sense of shared purpose, and artistic endeavor everywhere. But … a career? My life’s work? Well … it didn’t make my heart sing.

It’s the performer’s life, you know. Day jobs. Just for a bit, only until you get your big break. In one of the many books I read about how to make an artist’s life, it said that should you need to work to pay your bills, you can and should strive to do as little as possible at your job. You should do only enough to keep it, and use the extra time to see to your real goals. But I have never been able to manage that. I threw myself in. I am not just eager to please, but fearful of displeasure. I work for anyone to the exclusion of everything else. But it was easier to think that those jobs were what got in the way of my creative work. I was so worried that a job would become my life, and then my dreams, or whatever they were, would be left by the wayside. To compensate, I made sure to never take the promotion –- always stay low, so you aren’t as beholden. “This way I can go on auditions,” I told myself. That I never went on auditions was a knot I couldn’t untie for a long time.

It’s possible to stay focused on your dreams while handling the practicalities of life. I know this because I’ve seen other people do it. But I’m on my own now. There’s no savings account, no other financial support. I have dealt with catastrophic illness and just came through three years of underemployment. I need a steady paycheck and health insurance. It’s not cool, which is probably why it’s taken me so long to come around to it. Not that I’m generally cool, I’m not. I just inexplicably chose to take a stand in this area. The artist’s life looks fun.

But this new job didn’t sound so terrible. It could be a regular life, a grown-up life, where I buy things with cash and pay my bills on time. And when that niggling little doubt would surface, “What about the stuff that makes you happy?” I reminded myself, I haven’t been happy yet, so let’s just see what happens, shall we? My thinking was warped by decades of yearning for something I had no idea how to get. The witch’s broomstick. I wish it were so simple. Surrender, Jenny. Take the job.

The hardest part is getting used to not yearning. My dreams may have been unrealistic, but they were there. They took up room. I’m not quite sure what to do about the yawning space they left behind, and I catch myself feeling like a total waste of air and food. What was any of that for?

Hollywood. The Emerald City. Where the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true (ahem, for a statistically insignificant number of people). I realize now my dreams were never specific enough. I thought I was special, that I’d just need to show up. But I was ill-equipped for the journey. You need to be able to convince people of your worth. This is not only not a strength of mine, it turns out I’m viscerally opposed to doing that. I think you should just love me, and if you don’t, then I think you should just go fuck yourself. And that attitude, good people, will only piss off the wizard.

My friends were so encouraging about the job. I mean, it had been a long haul for them, too. They’d been on Widow Watch for a while there. They told me I deserved it, but I don’t know what to do with that. On one hand, I’d think, Do I? I mean, for this particular job, I waited and relied on a friend on the inside to sell me for me. That’s the only reason I got it. But on the other hand, I’d think, Is this seriously all I get? I have been so well-behaved! This can’t be everything. It just can’t. Why, oh why, can’t I?

Dorothy Gale should’ve known from the start of that yellow brick road how things were going to go, and I should have too. Who builds a road made of bricks through a forest? And what is that pointless spiral at the beginning all about? Just start over there, Dorothy! Everyone can tell you’re wasting your time. Ugh. Apparently, in life, you just have to go in circles for a while. In front of everyone. (And then through jungles while avoiding flying evil to this magical city where a wizard might grant you a wish, but only after you do the impossible, and by the way, he’s lying.)

At the end of the film, when they ask Glinda why she just didn’t tell Dorothy the way to get home in the beginning, she says, “She wouldn’t have believed me.” As a kid, I thought that was such a cop out. We were watching, Glinda, and you didn’t even try. For the longest time I thought they were just covering a hole in the plot, that the person who couldn’t help her in the beginning could suddenly do it now.

But now I get it. She had to believe that there’s no place like home. The magic wouldn’t have worked because Dorothy didn’t yet know that statement to be true. She had to live a little. And in the end, she had to say goodbye to some things, and if you’re like me, you can hardly stand it when she does. “I think I’ll miss you most of all,” she says to Scarecrow. And the reason that’s so sad to me is because even though it’s true, it has no bearing on her leaving. Sometimes we have to move on even though it hurts.

There were never any guarantees that I’d get the bright and shiny world I dreamed of. I just wish … well, that’s it. I just wish.

I mean to figure this happiness thing out, and if I’m lucky, it’ll be the right-now type of happy and not the if-only kind I’ve been living with for so long. When it gets me down, I try to think about the end of the film, when Dorothy wakes up in her familiar, albeit less-colorful, world. All the things she thought she’d left behind are still there. They look different, rooted as they are in regular old reality, but they are a comfort to her and part of who she is. And that will always be so.

What a world, what a world.