What Are We Doing Here?

Up the mountain.

What kind of person do you want to be today? The kind who rolls over and goes back to sleep? Or the kind who goes up the mountain?

That was my question, every morning, for a month at my mother’s in Victoria. I would wake up around 6:00 a.m. with the knowledge that the sun would be out for maybe twenty minutes, from the top of Christmas Hill, before it was swaddled in clouds for the rest of the day.

The bed was set up in a corner of her basement in-law suite living room. My sister had taken over the rest of the house and while she did have a spare bedroom, I was not welcome there. The house belonged to my mother. My unemployed sister was the boss. It was as miserable and degrading as it sounds.

Having crashed out my life at the age of 40, I was taking stock from my mother’s basement while all of my earthly belongings languished in a storage unit in Ottawa. I wanted to be in Austin, but that was impossible. I wanted my career to be doing better. That seemed impossible too. In journalism, as a woman, if you haven’t made yourself indispensable by age 35, and established your credentials as having been, at least for a short time, beautiful, then your place on the professional ladder is unstable at best. I got a late start. Let’s not talk about it.

The bed was warm. The room was blackout dark. Still, the red numbers on the clock…