commitment.

last week, i bought a bed. for the first time in three years, i have something other than a futon to come home to. and now that i have this amazing wonderful bed, i wonder what the hell took me so long. what i have spent my money on since graduating college: food. of course. a car. sold the car to pay taxes and to finance an lsat class. lsat class. intended to land me into a new york city law school. bus rides. to new york. plane tickets. to people i love. this has meant no savings. but. it's a small price to pay for indulging my wandering feet and my heart that's so willing to empty my bank account and my head that tells me that home is just a city away.

when i was in kalamazoo, i thought it was a stopping point on the way to a life abroad. when i was in chiang mai, even though i felt alive and full for perhaps the first time in my life, i knew it was a stopping point on the way to discovering the importance of a cultural and linguistic home, as contentious as my relationship with home might be. when i was in cleveland, it was a stopping point on the way to the east coast. when i moved to dc, it was intended as a stopping point on the way to new york - the final and only destination.

a year and a half later, i find myself still here, making decisions unimaginable to me only a few months ago, let alone the me i was who made the decision to go to law school while sitting outside with two of the women i love most fiercely, drinking coffee, eating pastries on a sunny spring day, and i looked up into the face of the woman who has seen me through so much, who i have seen through so much, the woman who has never wavered in her love for me, as ridiculous as i might be sometimes, and i knew then that this was love worth committing to, worth moving for. so law school it was. and i got back to dc and signed up for a course, hoping desperately to get into my dream school, and it would be a fairy tale ending of sisters building critical mass, creating movement, but mainly just loving each other in a way that women are always discouraged from loving each other.

yet here i am. i finally discarded my two-inch futon (no, no frame) on saturday and in its place is a beautiful queen size bed that is so luxurious that i have to force myselt to get up, as if that wasn't already hard enough. this is the bed i was supposed to buy in new york, of course. i had told myself since finding that $20 mat on craigslist, folded it up and carried it out of the apartment building with molly, and transporting it to my room the weekend i moved into dc, that i would buy myself a bed when i was ready to commit to living in a city, when a city convinced me that it was more than just a gas station on a road that ended, i hoped, somewhere near contentment.

tuesday night, i was asked by one of my students how to make a decision about whether or not she should take the lsat in june. while the training for becoming an instructor was an exhaustive process of learning how to teach various approaches to what seems like an impossibly large number of methods when you're taking the course, the hardest part about teaching hasn't been teaching the techniques. the hardest part has been how to look into the faces of students and see the fear of not being good enough, and still teach what i am paid to teach. to not stop in the middle of the lesson and tell them, "never let your life be contained within a score. never let a number determine your self worth." and of course, i say that anyway, or something similar. and the fear is mixed with a hope they aren't sure they should have, and i know, and maybe they know, that this is really not much of a choice, that this is really not up to them. that the rules have already been determined, long before them, and we all know how ridiculously important this test is to them. so i tell them that they need to decide right now whether they're going to law school to get into a particular law school, or whether they're going to law school because they have decided that this is their vocation. who knew how much i'd sound like max weber? and no, the lsat is not at all content-based - it's about how well you can learn to think a certain way that does seem a bit preposterous to me, but really, what do i know? so it's that. but it's also about confidence. and i teach these classes, and they're mostly women. and mostly women of color right now. and it is not at all surprising to me that this is the biggest struggle. believing that they are good enough, believing that they have the capacity to take this test and chew it up and spit it back in the faces of the lsat writers and the institutions of privilege we are expected to beg to get into. i tell them that i know they can do better than what they're doing, and they all seem surprised.

and of course, i have many luxuries. i am teaching the course, not taking it. i got into my dream school and told it no. because, in the end, i refuse to kiss their ass and tell them i'll do whatever it takes to go there. i walked away from them because they didn't want me nearly as much as i wanted them to. and it's a sea change that i never ever even thought about. it was never a possibility in my mind a year ago that i would be walking away from them. i have the luxuries that come from knowing and loving my sisters who look at me, and i know what love is. i keep thinking to myself that the trajectory of my life was never supposed to place me here. i remember taking my first class with my favorite professor my freshman year of college wherein she said before handing back our first exams, grades don't matter in the end. obviously, you all are here, and the fact of the matter is, this is a middle management school. it will train you to become middle management. or something like that. it was the first time it occurred to me that there was a world that i had no understanding of. it was crushing. but kind of freeing. i got a 64, by the way. my worst grade ever, but then i just told myself, eh, middle management. what do i care? she is, i think, irritated by my decision to stay in dc in the end, but.

so, i bought myself a bed. i bought myself a bed because i figured that it was about time to consummate my commitment to myself. to this city i never really gave a fair chance to. to me, this woman i've always had a hard time loving and being fair to. and to the idea that sometimes, you think you want something so bad, you don't see anything else, and you think if you don't get this one thing, then you'll regret it forever, and maybe one day you realize that decisions based on fear of loss, fear of regret, make you miss out on some pretty big things. like seeing yourself. and your life. and how you could be. that it's not about one person or one place. it's about you. it's about you and how you allow yourself to be loved, how you relate to these places and these people. and you've always prided yourself in being able to look at people in the eye and make them feel like they were the only ones worth talking to, but you realize your hypocrisy because everyone in the room knows that what you really wanted was to be somewhere else. and then, oh. oh.

and in the end, i know what i've always wanted is to be someplace and be at home. to not be thinking constantly to myself, what next? where next? because as much as i love spending time by myself, maybe, just maybe, i have been running away for as long as i can remember. it's much easier to maintain my sour disposition and snarkiness that way. i have always been waiting for an auspicious alignment of stars, when really, i look around, and wonder when i got this lucky. i joke a lot about my lack of willingness to commit. and i've been hard on myself, really hard on myself, for this very reason. and this past week, i was having this conversation with a woman i love dearly, who knows a little something about what it's like being so hard on yourself, and she tells me, "i don't think that's true at all. i think you're scared of being vulnerable, but we all are." and yeah. that's exactly it. but i mean, the commitment thing has always been at least partly true. that's why it works as a joke. because i've never really been able or willing to commit to myself. to other people, to the work i happened to be doing...yes. but to me? that's the struggle.

so, i don't know. i don't know if i'll be at home in dc. but i'm starting to be at home in my own skin. and it feels kind of nice. and i bought this bed, and i think, there's not much more that i need. i am the type of woman who wants it all. i want all the people i love with me, but you know, sometimes, they have to do their own thing too, i guess. and i know, i know our lives are so imperfect. but god, sometimes, doesn't it overwhelm you by how beauty emanates in such unexpected ways? because really, when i hear one of my students say, god, yeah, i really needed to hear that right now, in an off-handed way, it makes my heart stop. i teach for moments like that. because sometimes, it's not just about technique. because sometimes, you realize that you've been training for a life in a textbook fashion, and what you really need, you've never been told. it's content, not form. and i've been bending over backwards for way too long trying to get the form just right. but fuck it. my new bed pulls me in close, and i lay on it however i want, dreaming about beauty.