I’m home in Boulder for the next five days, three days longer than I have been in town for three months. I’ve been looking forward to this week for a long time, but when I drove into town last night I felt empty instead of relived. I’ve become addicted to the road. The travel creates a sense importance. I need to be places, need to talk to people. Now I am just at home doing laundry.
    I wonder if I could do anything, if I just started doing it. And this is not about the skill, but more the tolerance. What can we get used to?
    A few weeks ago in Houston I was careening down the highway at 80mph and getting passed on each side of the 7-lane highway at 12:30 pm on my way to a hotel. The dome light in my rental car was out, and I used the slight glow from my dying phone to illuminate my directions. In the middle of it, instead of saying I was over it, I was trying to figure out if I could do it. But it really does not matter what you can do. It matters what you want to do. Or it does if you have the luxury of having the time and the resources to make changes from one to the other.
    I’m traveling around the country, at the tail end of the initial tour push. Along the way I am seeing everyone from my past, and just now figured out that beyond reconnecting with old friends, I am also trying on alternate versions of myself. There is the urban planner with his pediatric neurologist wife, the entrepreneur, the stay at home dad, the public defender. We all started from the same point. I know I’m lucky to do this. I’m lucky to do a lot of this. But it’s also incredibly tweaky to your head. Because after trying on every pair of jeans nothing feels good anymore and all you want is to just get out of the dressing room.
    And so I come home. And I did it even before Boulder. On Friday, my friend Sarah picked me up in her dying Previa Van at the end of the Commuter Rail outside of Boston. I sat on the floor in the back and realized I was breathing differently for the first time in weeks. I like to make things difficult for myself, always have. At one point I was supposed to go to the University of Chicago for college and the reasons I decided that this was the right choice were the following: everyone said it was the socially hardest place to go to school in the US, that it was impossible to have a life there, and that the academics were insane. Great, I thought, I am in. I will go and prove that I can do that.
    But proving that I can make it from the financial district to Lowell with 130 lbs of luggage is really not proving anything. I didn’t do this in my twenties, back then I was building a strawbale house on 4.5 acres bordering national forest land. When I left that house and that life, I thought I might have missed out on something else, that I might have wanted to be in central Boston or Miami, or that I should have been. But what I’ve come to figure out is that I might be in the right place after all. I get off the plane in Denver and think yes, this is home. But it only became home once I started going away.
    Choices are intoxicating. For all of us. Almost everyone I have visited with says the same thing. It’s like we try to limit them and augment them at the same time. I’d like to think that at some point we just chill the hell out and live them. Or that I will.

When I was in sixth grade, I thought being an adult meant you were done. Done with anything tough or complex in friendship, life, love—any of it. My best friend had recently been stolen by an evil girl, the boy I had been going with moved to another school and seemed to have lost my number, and I suddenly sucked at French. My parents, all four of them, in contrast seemed fine. Normal. Done.
    Twenty years later, I get together with long time friends and we look at each other and can’t figure out how we got here. Weather we read “The Second Shift” and are now working it, weather we promised we’d never get divorced and just left our spouses, or if we swore to stave off panty hose and now carry two extra pair in an oversized leather purse. “This,” we say, “This is it?”
    I think back to my time as a kid and my interpretation of my parents as having it easy. What’s clear now is that they just didn’t let me in on the underbelly of their lives: the custody negotiations, promotion pass-ups, potential bankruptcy, fights to stay in the same city with their children, or missed hours of sleep to get in a run or bike ride. My parents just did it all, and didn’t tell me about what if felt like when the all felt like too much.
    Maybe they should have.
    Sure, I appreciate their tenacity. I owe the same in me to them. But, if my mom had turned to me when I was 12 and said, “watch out, it doesn’t get any easier,” might I have been better off?
    Life is about choices, constantly. I’ve given eight shows in five cities in six days and with each stop I meet yet another person who is trying to understand if they have made the right decision to be a teacher/ leave the peace corps/don a suit/have a child. It’s memory lane, accelerated. From out of the crowd comes a friend from kindergarten, summer camp, or college. All long displaced, but suddenly more real than my day-to-day life at home. We stare at each other and want to secretly steal part of each other’s lives.
    In between all of these encounters, I am zipping around the country perusing every airlines version of the sky mall magazine. I’m contemplating THE PERSONAL BETWEEN THE SHEETS BED FAN even though I don’t have the other person to warrant needing an independent bed cooling system.  The 150 COUNTRY TRAVEL ADAPTER is a must. So, to, is the PORTABLE PET CHECK IN SCREEN AND WATER MONITOR. (This, surely, would make the reunions with my poodle smoother when I come home.) But when I get to the MARSHMALLOW SHOOTER, and when I think it might come in handy, I know something in the system has broken down.
    Am I trying to prove to myself that I to can do it all without looking like I am doing anything? To whom is this message going out? My poodle over the portable screen? Maybe the beauty of growing older is being able to look at our friends, long lost or current and say, yeah, this is tough, but this is what makes it interesting. That clear, easy track I foresaw as adulthood never existed. Admitting to uncertainly encourages the same in others. I’m odd in that I like this clustering of thoughts and ambitions and realities. I seem to think that only when a friend and I can both say, “what the hell are we doing?”, that the real conversation starts.
    Human life is not prescriptive. That might seem obvious. But I think I am only understanding it now. I think that had to do with making sweeping choices when I was young—job, house, marriage—because if I just set myself on a track I could keep going. But you can never really keep going, or at least I cannot without serious psychological drugs that I am unwilling to take. So instead I get this—a life up tumbling through the skies at 35,000 feet wondering is I should buy bamboo lawn furniture covers for lawn furniture I don’t event have.  And then wondering who does do this, if I should, when I would know if I should, how to know, if knowing would be easier if I moved to Manhattan, if I would understand the word better if I had them, if I would understand myself better, if… and then I land back on the ground.

Guest Blog for The Conversation, the blog for Telluride Mountain Film, where Majka will be this May with her book tour.

"And so we begin. Away from images of an aching population continually subject to drought and famine made worse by human hands. Toward something deeper. For me, this depth includes adventure—climbing this time—in a landscape and culture that is known only for everything that is the opposite." read more

I got married young. Back then, I would have never admitted I was young—back then I was 21 and had it figured out. Back then is nothing like now. Now it’s ten years later, I’m single, I’m dating, I’m changing my career, and nothing is figured out.
    Does anyone have it figured out?
    The driving conversation we all seem to be having it what we are missing. What we lost of ourselves along the way. Take math. I used to love it. I used to calculate parabolic equations with abandon and be able to write papers on Shakespeare as well. We all did, in high school. That was when you could do everything, and were supposed to do everything. But that came college, majors, specializations, adulthood. Does that mean I can’t do math anymore? I hope not. But I miss it. I miss the simplicity of looking at a formula and getting to an answer. I miss the quantification of it. But I had to let it go to pursue other things. Because at some point you can’t seem to take it all with you.
    I’m traveling around the country right now talking to people from South Beach to Portland about what they wish they’d held onto. It’s adventure, math, broomball, international awareness, travel, stability. We meet each other across tables and see what we left in the opposite reflection across the shellac.
    I’ve been in my line of work for over a decade, but I don’t feel old enough to have done anything for a decade. (And we’re not even going to talk about the fact that I was with a man who is no longer a part of my life for a similar decade). It seems that it is right at this moment that we all look around and say, “What the hell have I done to my life without my knowing it. What have I given up?” And it seems if we don’t claim it now that we might never get it back.     
    It’s that icky feeling we get when we realize that it’s not all going to be slick. I think I wanted slick, back at 21 when I walked down a dirt aisle on a mountain overlook to join my adult life in the form of marriage. I wanted everything to be packaged as one thing, because without knowing it, I had decided that this would make it all easier. If life had one direction, than I could live it without always wondering what else was out there, what else I should be doing, what else I should know.
    After my parents told me I could do anything (see Free Time below) they would often have to tell me, five days later post meltdown, that I was not supposed to try and do everything all at once. I feel I want to say the same to myself, and others, right now.
    What if things are not lost, but are merely temporarily displaced?    What if they adventure drive that you had at 23, when you hitchhiked through Malaysia, is still there, but taking a break? What if it doesn’t all have to be firing at the same time?
    Right before I got married young I wanted to save the world. I would go to bookstores every four months and stock up on political titles I thought would be good to have read. I plodded through Kissinger’s Diplomacy at age 18. It was not pretty. I abandoned this path, or so it seemed. Because I didn’t absorb any of it, because I had to make room for my other life. But yesterday I spent four hours online looking at the political structure of Ethiopia and how it relates to US foreign policy. The words that would not have stuck three years ago suddenly held traction in my mind. And this made me realize that perhaps I could trust that the things I want, and the things I wanted, might merge again.

I’m in Miami. South Beach, to be exact. I saw more mini-dresses, three hundred dollar flip flops, and oversized sunglasses in one hour last night than I have in the past year. This morning I sat overlooking an aqua pool encased in glass so that it runs over into the ocean, almost. It was breakfast. For sixty dollars. When the bill came, I reached for it with callused fingers.
    The conversation stopped.
    “What…” The other woman at the table, Erin, asked, eyes already lined and mascaraed.
     “…Are those?” Her boyfriend Travis finished.
    They were pointing to the oozing scabs on my hands from climbing sandstone for the past two week straight.
    “These?” I said. “You should see my legs.”
    I’d like to say I restrained myself, but I didn’t. I displayed my bruises up and down my outer thighs, the scrub-oak scratches decorating my ankles. And then I reached for the check, again.
    “Majka,” Travis said. “You’re a rock climber. Let the import/export guy pick up the tab.”
    In South Beach, I am a rock climber. Clothes that I think are dressy are not even allowed into the nightclubs. My eyebrows are suddenly waxed 10 days too early. My legs? We already talked about them.
    Anyone who splices communities knows what I am talking about—that moment when you are called out for not completely fitting in, for being “other.” With full time climbers I get it as a writer, with writers I get it as a guide, with Midwesterners eating genetically engineered corn I get it for being an organic girl from Boulder. With academics I get it for being a writer for a glossy magazine.
    There is a moment, in every call out, that I want to protest. The other night in Ft. Lauderdale I was in the middle of a heated debate about China’s role in African politics and I wanted to call time out and head back to the books and know more. I wanted to run that conversation, I wanted to have thirty years of experience to relate. But I am only 31 and could not read yet thirty years ago. I sat at a table with people my parents’ age and education and life experience level and to them I was the speaker about Ethiopia. They liked that I was different. This morning, Erin and Travis liked that I’d taken off my bracelet and shown them my scabs. I am local color, flavor, spice. It’s both gratifying and demoralizing to an ego. Or at least to this one. So now I'm going to go wear a bikini for the first time in six months and see how the upper thigh brusises go over to the beach crowd.