the best way to fail: on a quest for legendary calves

I was twenty-seven, and I could hardly walk. As I limped around D.C., I thought, I’ve aged 50 years. How quickly ten minutes of running on your toes can wilt you.

Two months before, I’d bought a pair of black and pink “toe shoes” on my paltry budget. At $100, this was a big investment, a bucket-of-paint-against-the-wall sort of splurge into the unknown. “Reduce foot injuries!” they proclaimed. “Strengthen foot muscles!”

Well, I’d never had a foot injury, but–assessing my pale, shapeless feet with new eyes–I certainly wouldn’t object to stronger muscles. Before my shoes arrived, I consulted their website for proper preparation: fourteen days, they advised, of “foot exercises.”

I spent a night trying to curl my toes under, to bend them up, to pivot the ankle while balancing on the ball of my foot. I tried five or six times to pick up a small towel between my toes. My feet obeyed feebly, the toes moving by robotic degrees until I had finally gotten hold of a terrycloth corner. Then I dropped it and could not pick it back up again.

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doing a little bit well

Six months ago I experienced a streak of jagged, bullying depression. It was a slow evolution, a brick-by-brick construction that I didn’t fully process until it was on me. I only knew that I was lonely, isolated at my new job, that I felt a deep mental fatigue on waking—the kind that arrives, settles, doesn’t go away—and a terrible sense of confusion about what any of my life had been or would be for.

It peaked on a work trip, where I sat in a hotel bed, tore through a whole bunch of M&Ms, and thought of how deeply meaningless my life had been, was, would be. Reader, I cried something awful, and felt worse for that, too. I wish that feeling on no one.

Shortly after, things got better at work. I moved to another part of the office, found community. I signed up for the local Y, ran around their track in the evenings.

And I started to write again.

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staying hungry

Four years ago, as an English teacher at a midwestern university, I caused a student to drop out of college.

He was from China, quiet and bright, one of only two students who had shown up to an optional class on the day before fall break. Toward the end of the semester, as part of a speechwriting unit, I played a video of Steve Jobs’ Stanford commencement speech. His conclusion, a rallying call to the graduates, is a phrase that has since become iconic:

“Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”

It’s also nearly synonymous with privilege, the opportunity to drop out of Stanford (as Jobs did), to pursue one’s dreams at the cost of a steady, easy future. Those of us socioeconomically blessed to be only figuratively hungry, or smart enough to be only figuratively foolish, could really get behind it.

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the art of getting what you want

The art is in picking a worthy thing to want.

We’re not designed for endings. Two years ago, I desperately wanted a job. I had one that paid $13 an hour as seasonal customer service for a startup. I answered phones, troubleshot problems, stared out the window onto a brick wall when I had nothing else.

I was commuting two hours each way into D.C. because I couldn’t afford to live there if I wanted to eat. This was six months out of grad school, when I was twenty-seven years old and the hungriest I’d ever been, alternately despairing and prideful.

On the train in and out of D.C., I wrote four cover letters each way. Nights, I sent them all into space and rarely heard anything back.

I heard back so rarely, in fact, that two years later, I was still a temp.

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between authenticity and schmaltz

At the microphone, a woman with cropped hair and suspenders put her hands to her chest. “My love for you, Cheryl,” she said, “is a secret message between my heart and yours.”

Cheryl put a hand to her own chest, her face lit, eyes crinkling.

This was the start of the question and answer session between us–mostly young women in late-fall trench coats and boots–and Cheryl Strayed of the Pacific Crest Trail, of drug addiction and recovery after her mother’s early death from cancer, of cutting wisdom and wit which had inspired an almost cult-like adoration for her among the lot of us in the D.C. synagogue.

The next woman approached the microphone with a similar outpouring of adoration. And–despite our moderator’s admonition that we should “just ask the question, please,”–the flow of vignettes did not stop. “I found you when I Googled ‘best book to read after a breakup,’” one woman said.

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