Holden Caulfield & Me: Stopping the Fall
“This fall I think you’re riding for - it’s a special kind of fall, a horrible kind. The man falling isn’t permitted to feel or hear himself hit bottom. He just keeps falling and falling. The whole arrangement’s designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn’t supply them with. Or they thought their own environment couldn’t supply them with. So they gave up looking. They gave it up before they ever really even got started.”
~J.D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye…………..
I’ve been re-reading The Catcher in the Rye, because I think that in packing up my life and giving friends and family less than a 3-week’s notice a year ago before moving to New York, I was trying to stop my own fall and save my life in the process.
The thing is - that this past year has been one of the most challenging, humiliating, at times self-defeating year of all.
And maybe, just maybe, all the experiences …
… the bad apartment, hateful landlord, limited outlet to make friends, and weight gain and loss …
and the people …
… my marriage & separation, series of incomplete friendships, the subsequent sex with inappropriate people (really just the one), and recent issues with the “almost-friend” I didn’t have …
and the random gigs at a few different companies
… the inability to innovate and execute that revealed my greatest gifts under circumstances far beyond my control …
—Maybe together these experiences and people are all a part of a post-college, post-grad school “welcome-to-your-30s” course that I signed up for in haste and without fully knowing what I was getting into.
Perhaps, my social awkwardness, my raw soulfulness, my unnerving authenticity is finally making itself known with clarity and purpose—to me.
And, perhaps, because I didn’t and haven’t given up looking, in spite of seriously wanting to throw in the towel and shut my eyes and wish myself back to Virginia suburb-living, I should hang on a bit longer, because it’s clear to me now that I stopped the “special kind of fall” I was headed for a year ago.