All posts by Rebecca Michelle

Educator, traveler, reader, blogger. Loves learning, black coffee, and friendly people.
On My Mind

Voice Memos

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I hadn’t meant to spend the night reading, but that’s what I did, reading punctuated with a phone call and then another phone call, reading punctuated with the smiles I could hear in the voices over the line. I hope they heard mine, too.

I guess I’ve settled in. I’m in the process of, as they say, settling down. And it’s a far cry from the voice memos I listened through recently, the reminders of a searching soul. Maybe it’s the years of memorizing and performing monologues that comes through when I need to stand outside myself to look at myself. Maybe it’s the need to say aloud, quietly and under the cover of darkness, what I would scream into broad daylight if I were braver.

But maybe that’s defeatist.

Maybe I record my thoughts only late at night because the day brings the active work to forget them. Maybe it’s because at night, when the mind is tired, I let down my guard and speak to what’s buried somewhere in there. There’s hope during the day, hope demonstrated by the fact that the voice memos are time-stamped very, very late.

Many years ago, during a particularly turbulent time, I found myself recording voice memos at night when I couldn’t sleep, which was often. The voice memos, most of which I saved simply as “Night”, range from around 20 seconds to nearly 8 minutes, the pitch of my voice swinging between whispers and the scratchiness of unrealized tears. Until recently, I never went back to listen, and I recently listened through only the most recent because of the significance of the dates. Sometimes I want to shake my younger self back to her senses and other times I want to wrap her in a hug. Looking at those dates reminds me how quickly something can change.

I’ve returned to that habit only sparingly, having gotten a bit of a grip on my place in the world and learned to have hard conversations instead of imagining them. What is striking is not that I almost always fall asleep from either exhaustion or relief once my words are out of my system, freeing me from mulling them over, but rather that my hesitancy of going back over these thoughts is quite like the way I don’t read over old journals, except when looking to corroborate something I think I remember. It’s not quite an aversion, but I stay relatively removed.

And I’m not sure why that’s the case. A fear, maybe, of hearing, in daylight, what I don’t want to acknowledge, or maybe embarrassment at the melodrama of lying awake. It’s interesting to notice, and I was not at all surprised when I quieted swirling thoughts recently by recording my first voice memo in a good couple years.

But then I did something differently. I wrote down the thoughts, too. And I said them out loud. And the thoughts became a conversation, and the conversation reached a conclusion, and the vortex stopped swirling. It’s different when the whole thing plays out in real time and not just in my head. It’s a whole rather than parts.

And it means that a solitary night reading is nothing more than exactly that.

On My Mind

On Regret

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We were were sitting at the base of a crag eating apple slices, chatting with another pair of climbers about things like job interviews, health insurance, and courage. After they packed up to go, I mentioned that it was lack of bravery on my part that led me to say yes to my current job. It was not at all what I had imagined for myself after years of the sights and sounds of big cities, and the idea of going someplace so small was not as prestigious as what I’d thought working in Europe could be like. I wanted a better work-life balance, a society with social ideals, and a change of perspective, but I also thought I wanted a bit of glamour.

Fast forward a couple years: It turns out I love living here and am far more comfortable with my role in a small family-like school than I was in an environment with higher stakes all around. There’s a lot more to life than big names and big cities. And Weimar, as it turns out, is known for ideas and culture. It is also home to the people I’ve become close to, who are lovely indeed.

The question surprised me when it came because I hadn’t thought of it myself: Do you regret it?

No, not at all.

We finished the apples, reorganized the rope, and tied back in. Time to move on.

But I’ve been thinking about the question, and what I’ve found most interesting is not that it was asked, but that I hadn’t asked it. That’s not to say it’s been easy moving here, and being in a bigger city would have made certain things significantly easier at the beginning. My early blog posts about the move to Weimar only scratch the surface of everything I was holding inside at that time, and some old voice memos indicate that I’d been lying awake. But regret? Even when it was hard, there was no regret. I’d made a choice, and I’d made the choice for a reason, and that was the best I could do at that time. Perhaps it wasn’t the best reason and perhaps something else would have come along had I waited patiently, but I didn’t want to wait. I wanted the certainty of knowing. I had savings from years in Singapore, I saw a climbing hall when I looked at a map, and that was good enough.

Making choices means that we’ll never know what would have happened had we made a different choice. While I can smile at the question of what my life would have become had I, at 19 or 20, learned Italian and gone to Florence for a semester as I’d planned upon entering university, I don’t need to spend any more time thinking about it. I made a different choice and that was that. It was the best I could do at the time, and the only thing I can do going forward is remain aware of what has developed since. Just because I made a choice once doesn’t mean I have to make a similar choice in a similar situation in the future. Saying yes once because I didn’t want to wait doesn’t mean I have to say yes the next time.

Learning from an experience must not mean regretting having had the experience. Unfortunately, negative experiences are excellent teachers, and I find that we need those sometimes. When everything is easy, there’s little opportunity for reflection, and it is through reflection that we grow. I don’t see that as something to regret.

Do I regret moving here? Do I regret my impatience in wanting a job? Do I regret giving up the dreams of glamour and prestige?

No.

In the end, Weimar had a climbing hall and I’ve always been one to choose the café on the corner over the hot new spot. Maybe I know myself better than I thought.

On My Mind

Making Music

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I don’t pick up my guitar very often, and certainly not as often as I would in my fantasy image of myself (in which I also fearlessly climb hard things outdoors, have more reliable hair, and tend a successful vegetable garden), but I go through phases where I really enjoy playing. I enjoy the feeling of the strings under my fingers, I enjoy the size of the instrument between my arms, and I enjoy being able to make something beautiful.

I can tell it’s been a while since I’ve played when my fingers are sore and the strings rub in places not calloused by climbing. And I can tell that my hands remember how to play when I realize I’m playing without thinking. I’ve had a guitar for over 20 years, though nothing about how I can make it sound would suggest that.

An aspect of making music that never ceases to amaze me is how quickly the time goes. When I’m in the mood to play, I sit there until my fingers are too tired to continue, or until my neck is sore from bending over the strings to look at the chord charts on the phone in my lap. I spent my high school years performing in chorus concerts and musicals, and the times when I play guitar have become the times when I sing aloud, voice wavering in ranges that used to come easily. I’m always surprised when I check my watch – an hour already gone?

Talking about treasured items with friends many years ago, one looked at the guitar case sitting in my childhood bedroom and said, “That’s a good example – you’d never go anywhere without your guitar.” But even then, I knew that I would. I took lessons in high school and dismayed my teacher with my avoidance of practice, and I’m sure I didn’t take my guitar with me to university. I may have wanted to be that chill person who sat back and played (see above fantasy self), but I never was, and never actually tried to be. (There’s want and there’s want.) I’m fairly confident my guitar stayed at my parents’ place even when I shared an apartment in my last year of university, but it definitely moved with me to my first apartment after university. And then I moved to Malaysia with two suitcases and no guitar as a carry-on – again, I wasn’t that cool.

But the world spun around a little, and after a subsequent year in Singapore with two suitcases (still no guitar), I decided I wanted it again. I took that long-neglected guitar to New York, and then to Singapore, and then to Germany. It certainly has travelled, and having it makes me feel settled. Taking it out to play puts me in a place that I used to know well, and there aren’t so many places like that in my life anymore.

I’ve never taught anyone to play guitar, but I’ve shown people how to hold it, how to strum the strings, how to form simple chords. It’s easy, I always say, give it a try. And that’s another thing I love about playing guitar – it is easy to play, though, like anything, the room for complexity and beauty is not to be underestimated. I am by no means good or even decent at playing guitar, but I can read music, strum some chords, and sing along and that works for me. I don’t have to start from the beginning when I pick it up after a long while; I just have to take a few big steps back and slow down, which is not a bad thing for me. Just like at the climbing hall, I don’t mind the reminder of how far I have yet to go.

Playing guitar has not been the place where I frequently spend my spare time, but it’s always been there as something I enjoy. I am glad that I learned to read music, to understand chords, and to take care of my hands from a young age. I’m not an artist, but I know there’s something really special about creation, and it gives me a warm feeling. It’s something to get lost in and there are times when all I want to be is lost. I’ve never played often and I’ve never played well, but I’ve always been willing to start from wherever it is that I am.

And with that, it’s time to play.

Yunnan, China – November 2018