The Little Red Umbrella: melissa hughes

Starting Over At 35 by Melissa Hughes

I can remember precisely when it hit me. I was staring out the window of my big, empty office, watching an even bigger home go up across the street. We were living in one of those up-and-coming neighbourhoods, selected not for its charm, but for its potential increase in value. The fact that houses were being torn down and replaced was a selling feature, my fiancée said.

In principle, I agreed, but the atmosphere of destruction depressed me. All winter, while I struggled to set down words that would mean something to someone, somewhere, I’d looked over at what had been on that lot. It was a small, pink house that sat awkwardly on the street, a sloped-roof affair in a land of bungalows and stone McMansions. Its upper windows were left open to the elements, frozen curtains flapping in the wind, as if in capitulation, though the spray-painted markers and safety tape had already gone up by that time: nothing and no one could save it.

On the outside, my life at 35 looked great — a promising career, a doting partner, an elegant home, things, vacations, a big engagement ring, money in the bank.

There was just one problem: I wasn’t happy. I was good at my work but I didn’t believe in some of the fundamental aspects of what I was doing. I was invested in the idea of a partner I could share my life with, and yet I felt deeply alone.

The lies crept in softly. First it was a kind of sublimation, in the shaky ‘trying my best’ of my 20s — well, that isn’t exactly what I wanted, but that’s probably close enough — and into my 30s it became a momentum of “alrightness,” of being okay. A sort of, ‘hey, this is like what other people I know are doing,’ without a real consideration of whether it was right for me, or what a happier life would even look like.

And here’s the secret: I got good at it. You get really, really good. And then you wake up one morning and you pad into your office, and something in your line of sight has changed, and you have no idea who the hell you are or how you got there.

That’s reductive, of course — in reality there were myriad tiny realizations. But the sum was this: if you aren’t honest with yourself — cuttingly, painfully honest — life can’t be honest with you. I could not attract the deep understanding, the tenderness in a partner that I wanted and still want more than anything. I could not use my talents and insights to help the people and causes I care about, to effect the change I want to see. Not unless I was honest about who I am and what I want.

Walking away wasn’t the hardest part, though it felt like it at the time. He followed me around the house as I threw my life into boxes.

You can’t leave me, he kept saying. Oh, but I could.

For the first time in my adult life, I was going to do what was right for me, without a complex inner negotiation, without a decimation of self. I did not want to marry this man — no part of me did — and if I couldn’t find someone that every fibre of my being did want, someone I could deeply love and respect, I would rather live the rest of my life alone, with my ideas and my sense of self intact.

What I didn’t realize at the time is that facing into our decisions is where the real work and the fear and the self-doubt begins. It’s everything after the dramatic exit, the door slam, the (justified and unjustified) self righteousness, the rolling down the street in a truck with nowhere to really go, realizing you’ve wasted time and there’s no way to get it back. That the reason you don’t have the things you wanted — a loving husband, a family, a career that actually makes a dent in the world and will leave something after you’re gone — is you, your own shortcomings and your fear. And maybe you’ve missed the boat, entirely.

What I’ve described here is the decision not to “settle”; my experience is in no way special. But what’s worrying, and worth pointing out, is that settling was like air; except for brief punches of grief and despair that seemed to come out of nowhere, it didn’t feel like anything at all. I had lied to myself so well — in so many areas of my life — it seemed natural, normal to just keep pressing forward until the memory of what I’d wanted was like a distant dream, faint and ridiculous.

But our dreams aren’t ridiculous. In fact, they aren’t really “dreams” at all. They are who we are — the most fundamental expression of ourselves as individuals, before the negotiations and the bullshit and the doubt pile up on us.

The specifics of why I veered so far from myself aren’t important, except for this: I believe it’s part of a pattern, one we can’t fully see until the end of our lives. Of course, if we look, it’s almost certain we’ll find what we seek: We’ll see our triumphs and our failures in the context of the hands we were dealt. Regardless, I’m certain of this: If you are honest with yourself, no experience — good or bad — is ever truly wasted.

After walking away from a life I didn’t want, I let go. I fell deeply and honestly in love for the first time in my life. It was short and brutal and he broke my heart — he actually crushed me completely, for months I felt like I couldn’t breathe — but I saw the curve of what an honest love could be like. It’s the most beautiful and breathtaking thing, to place yourself gently in the hands of another human that you respect and like, and ask for what you want: to be loved back, cherished, understood.

I see now that this is all part of my pattern, and so are the good things, too. I moved to a place I like. I deepened my friendships and made new ones. I embarked on a new career path, working with people who inspire me. I found the courage to start sharing my fiction — the deepest held parts of me that I’ve been pushing down all my life.

It occurs to me that starting over was letting go, and letting go is a bit like prayer: Involuntary and also deliberate. You will get what you ask for, what your energy moves undeniably toward, the most desperately whispered desires of your heart. It’s only that the answer might look like nothing you imagined.

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This post originally appeared on Medium.

Melissa Hughes is a Toronto-based writer whose freelance work has appeared in The Globe and Mail, Ottawa Citizen, and on CBC radio. She has worked as a reporter for the London Free Press and the Barrie Examiner. You can read all of her posts here and follow her on Twitter @meliss_hughes.

Love In Binary by Melissa Hughes

The app delivers one match. There are three photos. In the one she likes, he is standing on a sidewalk under a tree with the sun breaking through the leaves. The light hits the bridge of his nose and she recalls how this was the place she most liked to kiss him. That one tender spot.

The others she’s less fond of – but this one, yes, the pale skin, a certain curl of the lip, an arrogance of expression. And she tells herself she is not looking for someone like him, but she had shuffled the profiles right to left, “Not him, not him,” as if her brain had stuck on one card in the deck, hinged onto a moment months ago and refused to relent.

They message all week. His name is Royal. The first time they chat, she is in her hallway, near the door. Alex had stood in that same spot and he put his hands on her waist. “I’ll text you from the road,” he’d said, and she tried to take one last look at him.

Royal tells her he has a Rothko print in his bathroom. She sends him a photo of the Klimt her mother hung across from her sink, the orientation upset so that it is vertical, a woman standing or falling.

I like you, he writes.

You remind me of me.

This goes on, night and day, until they are both convinced. They are similar in almost every way. And it is not simply a projection; it is as if he is in her life when he is still outside out it. As if they have imagined each other perfectly. Her heart unfurls as if opening the fingers of a closed fist.

And that is how this first warm day feels on her face. Like the opening up of something she had not known existed. She is on her way to meet Royal for the first time, and she walks by Alex’s work – she’s not conscious of her mistake until she realizes she is staring at his car.

She looks down at her shoes and she thinks again about that last time with him. A feeling of terror and also of awe. How he sat with his legs wide as he put on his shoes and he smiled and pulled hard on the laces. She could watch him for hours doing only this. And this was love, and she had not known it before this time. Involuntary and insane.

She chooses a bench near the entrance of the park. Tells herself she’s being cautious. A half hour passes, then another. The sun starts its descent across the sky. Those who approach become shadows but none of them are him.

She rises and buttons her coat. Walks toward the lake like a magnet pulled south, turning, circling blocks, walking against the rising breeze as she rounds grey corners and sees no one. Tracing a grid that keeps leading her back to the water’s edge, squares and squares that join and then break apart in her mind.

How is it that a lover becomes real? How does it happen that what we most desperately crave starts to feel like a thing we can hold in our hands, blow away with sweet breath –

She missed the headline, of course: *App experiment raises ethical questions.* She might not have seen it if she’d known what to look for. It spiked on Twitter for a few hours in the lazy midafternoon, spawned a hashtag, and, like a whisper or a dream, was gone.

In the harbour, chunks of ice float like shards of diamonds, come from far out – blown clean across from the other side by the wind that does what it wants and answers to no one.

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The Hierarchy of Losers, Luck, and Our Inconvenient Reality by Melissa Hughes

I’ve been thinking about a man I encountered yesterday: a person I had an opportunity to meet, but chose to pass by. He was standing on the corner of Bay and Wellington, his coat in tatters, his toes poking out of holes in his shoes. His shoulders shook almost rhythmically, and he approached me, saying, “excuse me, miss—”

There is a thing people do where they look you in the eye — you’ve made that important, human contact — and yet you refuse to properly return their gaze. I did that to him, stepping around him as he approached, as one would dart around a taxi.

Later, I sat in my living room, with its hardwood floors and high ceilings and its winking, wide-eyed view of the lake, and I thought about a thing from years ago, the kind of recollection that can enter a clearing in your mind when you’re troubled by your own behaviour.

I was at a cocktail party in Rosedale, one of these events I’m forced to attend from time to time, that make me want to draw a circle around myself with chalk and sit in in it, reading a book and speaking to no one (this worked for me in high school. Not so much, lately).

Of course, I was asked what I do for a living. As my answer was clearly insufficient, he pressed, “But what do you want to do?” “Well, I want to help people,” I said, simply. He leaned in with a quizzical look, as if pondering some math problem, or how to properly carve a ham (in fact, he was looking down my dress). “Well,” he smiled. “I never thought of helping anyone.”

I have this problem with people. Sometimes I laugh in their faces. I have my methods of suppression: a strategically placed cough, the feigning of a sudden grimace of pain. To be clear, I do not laugh at stupid people, or ugly people, or those who are guilty of dull conformity. However, I have no problem pointing and laughing at someone who is unkind. I suppose it’s an unfair bias. People get mean the same way they get ugly; they’re born with it, or it develops over time from bad thoughts and generalized neglect. It’s fashioned out of emotional laziness, or, its opposite: overwrought ideas about themselves and their place in the order of the universe.

Let me be clear: there is not one fuck I give about a person’s social status. It’s bullshit, and, worse still, it is boring — a simple mechanism of sorting; it means we’re likely to be surrounded with those who are only outwardly like us, who look like us and sound like us and agree with our choices no matter how mediocre they are. And, so, it comes to pass that the first question you’re asked by a potential acquaintance is, “What do you do [to make money]?” (I’ve decided this is the white collar conversational equivalent of smoking.)

Social status is meaningless because a large component of life is luck. We can only transcend some circumstances. Hard work and perseverance won’t beat back mental or physical illness or profound personal trauma. You can go to war for yourself and your place in the world with all your might — and lose. Failure is always an option, and our society promotes a comfortable hierarchy of losers: our athletes are the easiest example. He gave it his all. He tried his best. He made $10 million last year, but let’s not judge his inability to win all too harshly.

The losers down at the bottom of the rope — those who have clearly been rattled by some devastating misfortune, the kind that leaves you passed out in a pool of your own urine with commuters stepping around you — they’re the ones who should have tried harder.

Chances are, they’ve also been through something most of us can’t begin to comprehend. And that something — the mere fact of having survived — might be the opposite of the kind of life experiences that churn out average people destined for mediocrity. They have a voice — something to contribute to the human conversation — and, yet, they are unseen and unheard. Voiceless.

I walked away from the fellow on Bay Street because the conversation was inconvenient. I was in a rush. I felt overwhelmed by my own small tragedies. His very existence was an annoyance to me.

But the most fragile and irretrievable equation in life is other people. They’re the thing we cannot replicate, the inconvenient reality. Life is cruel, and rarely fair. If we stop and look straight at it, we face a brutal and terrifying fact: all that separates us is often as slight as one terrible turn of luck.

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This post originally appeared on Medium.

Photo: The Toronto-Dominion Centre (Adam Bunch)

The Internet: Stop I Want To Get Out (Written From A Country Where It Isn't Shut Off) by Melissa Hughes

Disclaimer: This was written prior to the Government of Egypt shutting down Internet access in an apparent bid to quash protests and access to information in that country. My feelings about the medium have not changed. The content in this piece applies strictly to spoiled North Americans living in functional democracies. Thank you for your understanding.

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Tell me if this scenario sounds familiar: You realize you have no reception on your phone. You can't read email, access Facebook, or message your friends. Maybe you are underground or maybe you are in a plane. Perhaps you are in Resolute Bay. You become antsy. You play some Brickbreaker, scroll aimlessly through old emails. You consider actually phoning someone – until you remember that won't work, either.

I had this unsettling experience while on vacation. Knowing my Blackberry would not work, I was still compelled to check it. Please note that when I say compelled, I mean physically – it was an automatic action. Remove Blackberry from purse, look at screen: Nothing. I was a hundred feet from the ocean; I could smell it, feel its fine humid mist on my skin. I found myself down in the lobby, checking email.

It would seem we're all Internet addicts nowadays. (If you don't agree, try telling people you're going to stop using the Internet – just go cold turkey – and see what kind of looks you get.) My question is, can this possibly be healthy for us, and, more pressingly, does anyone really care?

Nicholas Carr’s book, “The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains” documents the science behind this digital distraction. He takes readers through the concept of neuroplasticity – how our brain is continually rewiring itself based on the stimuli we expose it to. Our knowledge of this process is still in its infancy, however, one thing is certain: what we're doing online is changing what – and more importantly, how we think.

This would account for why, when I'm “unplugged,” my mind feels clearer. After just a few days my concentration improves. Ideas seem to form spontaneously, out of nothingness, as if not having a constant flow of information on tap allows time for some sort of synthesis to occur.

Would it be apocalyptic to say that in a decade’s time we might see higher incidences of attentional and sleep disorders, a waning sense of reality, and the sheer physical burden of constantly being hooked in? Or is it better to assume this is all completely safe and deal with the consequences later – sort of like cigarettes? Regardless, it's hard not to conclude that we should be moderating this inundation in some manner; unplugging if not for weeks or days at a time, for hours at least. But is that enough? And, if not, what then?

Marshall McLuhan wrote, “Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot.” He posited that content is merely “the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.”

So, we argue over whether Kim Kardashian should have posted that photo of her sister making out with someone else's boyfriend, which is more fun than, say, a discussion of whether or not the Internet itself – taken to its current extreme – is such a good thing. That's the kind of conversation that can make you unpopular at parties. But bear with me for a moment. Why does it seem like no one is debating the morality of the medium? Well, partly it’s because morality itself is painfully outmoded in thinking circles – relegated to church freaks and the tragically backwards. (Thinkers like to think of themselves as having ethics. So do corporations.) But mostly, it's because the content – and what the Internet can do – is just so damn amazing. I make myself unpopular to myself when I argue against it. And yet, I am torn: My body is telling me “the medium is the message,” in a way I never understood when I studied the theory in school. It’s almost as if I am living inside of it. I feel dizzy and sick in the head as a result, as if some fundamental disconnect with reality is underway and I am powerless to stop it.

My nostalgia for the old world order – that ancient civilization that existed all of a decade ago, where you could wander the streets unplugged and oblivious, no useless or irrelevant stuff zooming at you from all angles – is more complex than a luddite’s fear of what’s new. We all live in the land of the new, instructed from an early age that newer is better. New – especially when it comes to, say, toilets, and governments – can be better, but certainly not always.

Large-scale social movements occur when enough people look at how the world is changing and decide that it isn’t for the better. My fear is that the type of change we’re in the eye of is so fluid, so lighting fast, and so woven into the fabric of our existence that we can’t feel it as anything other than the norm. If I could equate it to a physical concept, it would be that of being velocitized: if we just stopped and really thought about it, we might feel that something isn't right.

I can find no evidence that the Internet or any of its trappings has made people safer, friendlier, more productive or more connected to reality. Knowing what's going on in the world at a faster pace doesn't mean that information is more accurate, or more beneficial to anybody.

Consider how the digital generation looks to authenticity for its reality fix. “Oh yeah, I like that place, it’s really got an authentic vibe.” As opposed to the inauthentic world in which we live? Or is it just that certain things, stylized as they are, remind us of how we ought to be? Are certain aspects of life – human connectedness, physicality – like a rock, a lighthouse that is immovable and cannot surf the bullshit wave?

The challenge of being human is one of personal adaptation: having the courage and the conviction to act as an individual. Each of us can choose where we draw the line when it comes to our level of digital immersion. (Mine seems to be Twitter.) But, if McLuhan had it right (and it seems he has that tendency), our efforts are likely wasted. The digitization of our minds is unavoidable, a simple evolutionary process that will change us so much that eventually we will be unrecognizable.

I can't help but think a sober second thought about such a radical shift might be a good thing; this is my contribution. Hey, where else would I put it?

Melissa Hughes is a Toronto-based writer whose freelance work has appeared in The Globe and Mail, Ottawa Citizen, and on CBC radio. She has worked as a reporter for the London Free Press and the Barrie Examiner. You can read all of her posts here and email her at melissa@littleredumbrella.com.