Seattle

I have that feeling again. I told my mum last night that I was running away to join the circus. I think I was only half-joking. I'm in the midst of trying to sort out a life that, once again, is not making sense. Call it a mid-life crisis. Call it a sense that everything is spinning out of control and I can only hang on for dear life.

Five years ago, I left Ithaca on a mad flight across the country. It's still not clear to me, 60 months later, what I was doing. The thing I remember from that time was the overwhelming urge to run, to leave--really, to flee--a life over which I felt I had lost all control. It wasn't that my life was without meaning--on the contrary, I would say there was too much meaning, too many things going on--and it was as if my brain short-circuited and the primal urge of fight or flight hijacked my brainwaves.
I had just left my marriage of 12 years, had just conquered an addiction to opiates that had enslaved me in a cycle of chronic pain and narced-out bliss, had decided to "become" a writer, and had just had my disability benefits run out. In short, my life was simultaneously chaos and re-birth, and being stuck in a tiny town in the middle of rural New York was not where I wanted to be.