As I move forward with my book, and with my life, I realize that there is nothing "typical" about me that I can discern. Nothing.
I guess this moment in Duluth is allowing me to fully appreciate this without totally freaking out. The circumstances of my life have been so wide-ranging and contradictory that I may never find a friend or community who I can hug and say, "You get this, you lived this too."
Friends who grew up in "typical middle-class American suburbs" at least may have been brought up with some shared values and experiences...type of housing, public high school, work ethic, etc. I have several friends who grew up on farms. On a very basic level, they lived a shared experience. They know what it is like to grow up in that unique environment. I have several friends who grew up in fundamentalist households. However different their circumstances might have been, there is a core spiritual experience that they could mirror to each other were they to meet. And of course, virtually all my friends married and had children, so no matter the dissimilarities in the other details of their adult lives, they know some of the "typical" trials and joys of partnership and childbirth and beyond (along with some atypical ones, surely).
It has always been hard for me to find a family of people who know what it is like to be American, but to have grown up with ultra-upper-crust "aristocratic" values but no money. To have family living in luxury one minute and dire poverty the next, and not even be allowed to talk about it. To be an American girl wanting to sing the English men and boys' choir tradition of music decades before that was possible. To have never settled down to husband or home because of those reasons and more. I have had so many friends over the years, and I love them and am so grateful for them. Right now, though, I am in such a different "place" than any of them that I feel somewhat panicky. Whether they are American or British, our actual day-to-day lives and struggles have had very little in common. I can rarely say, "You know what this is like." I wish I had more people with whom I had a specific shared mix of life experiences. From that standpoint, my life can feel outrageously lonely.
Yet this is all the more reason to increasingly tell the truth in my writing, the truth not only of what happened at specific moments, but also the truth of how things felt. I need to tell the truth of the evolution of my ability to emerge from numbness into human emotion. What I have experienced seems to set me apart from most other people, but how it affected me is the factor that may bring me back, closer to others. I may never be "typical" except on that deeper, feeling level. My heart has been broken over and over. That cannot possibly be atypical.
