Sweat, Hay, Blood

No.

Spoiler alert: This is not a redemption story.

Today marks a year since I started at Twig Farm. My specific memories of those first few days are murky, but in among the mental snapshots of sorting crates of foraged apples and serving as valet to a goat named Talulah at the local school's harvest festival and trying desperately not to scratch at the welts of ringworm I'd been given as a parting gift from Lazy Lady Farm, I vividly recall the sense of relief at realizing I'd found a person and a place that would teach me -- REALLY  teach me -- what I wanted to know about making cheese. That was tempered by the deep, pit-of-stomach fear that I would never really absorb all the minute details that were involved, let alone master them. There were so many little things to remember that were both essential and simultaneously so unglamorosly and tenuously related to the actual MAKING of the cheese. This anxiety was compounded by my boss's reputation for being snarky and exacting in equal measure.

Spoiler alert #2, Part A: Making cheese is not glamorous and Part B: Is chiefly made up of all the tedious little details that are in and of themselves complicated to master before you can really even get to the real business of cheesemaking. Case in point: I remember the soaring joy I felt when, after months of toiling, I was finally able to wash the vat without leaving streak marks on the outside of it, reveling in its polished, beaming steel sides like I had just defeated fucking ISIS.

Despite my best efforts to remain open, humble, ego-less, hopeful, and all those other fucking catch words they're always invoking in yoga classes, I have never really managed to get onto the other side of the chasm of self-doubt, anxiety and general despondence that has characterized my last two years, let alone achieved what I (or my employer) would describe as more than passing competency at my job. TWO. YEARS. It's a long time to go feeling deeply incompetent, worthless and unseen, cloistered away from the rest of the world as your ovaries desiccate, your hair turns to straw and you see the life you'd always assumed would be a given backdrop to whatever stupid pursuit you managed to carve out -- a partner and a child, a family of your own -- become a distant, smoggy shoreline obscured by the white caps of all your poor decisions. (Aside from the constant barrage of Facebook-generated images of baby bumps and smiling couples, nothing reminds you of your ever-dwindling fertility, mating potential and biological value as a woman than ensconcing yourself in a business framework that relies critically on baby-making.)

I've always been uniquely vulnerable to the passing fads of health and beauty, ever since I was old enough to devour Allure magazines purchased alongside Bonne Bell lipsmackers with my babysitting money at the Walgreens walking distance from my house. I believed with the religious fervor of a devout Catholic that if I dutifully applied this apricot scrub every day, or dyed my hair a different color, or ate only yellow food, I would become something different and better than what I was. This notion has been one of the guiding principles of my adult life -- the desire to change and transform into some more beautiful, wise, kind, intelligent version of myself. 

And it was this notion that compelled me, two years ago, to take a leap and drastically alter the course of my life, to leave behind everyone and everything that I knew, to present myself to the danger of the unknown and accept carte blanche the hardship and loneliness that I suspected would be part and parcel of any worthwhile hero's journey. There were many MANY points along the way when I found myself sternly reprimanding myself for my tears by saying aloud, "This is what you signed up for," and then, silently, retreating into some amorphous belief that all of the pain and struggle was both penance for my years of easy breezy, unserious, lazy living and some direct conduit to an as-yet undetermined reward. 

Spoiler alert #3: I am still the same flawed, shiftless mess of a person I was when I left New York for goat-poop-populated pastures 25 months ago. 

Spoiler alert #4: The universe (or whatever) doesn't OWE you shit. All of that "Fortune Favors the Bold" nonsense is propaganda created to either encourage you to book a fucking Carnival cruise/safari/zip-line adventure OR, more likely, to make you feel shitty about the perfectly good, credible, conventional life you might have created for yourself. The truth is that sometimes you take a gamble, you bet the house, and you fucking lose. 

As I described in the last post, the absence of my boss for the last couple of weeks due to injury has forced me to really step up to the plate and immerse myself wholly in the running of a farm. It has given me the fleeting feeling that I've come a far far way from when I started -- the fact that I can be left almost entirely alone to care for 40 goats, milk them, make cheese (albeit not as well as I'd like to) has finally given me some measure of fulfillment and confidence in my abilities. And that, coupled with the generous amount of knowledge Michael has dispensed, makes me incredibly grateful. But after so many months of feeling broken down, stupid, plodding, hopeless, this payoff just isn't enough. It's too little too late. No one is handing out prizes for working 60 hours a week, and the satisfaction of a job well done is so ephemeral and inconsistent as to be nearly non-existent. 

There's been a lump in my throat for the last two days as I come to the very real, very concrete realization that this strange, heartbreaking adventure is coming to an end and all I am is two years older, uglier, and deeper in debt. Yesterday I knelt down in the pasture and let the melancholy confusion wash over me. I whispered to the girls, "What should I do? I don't know what to do. What do I do?"

 They crowded around me and licked my tears but had no other comfort to offer.