Making a hairpin turn to happiness
Featuring Guest Writer Sarah Rosanthal from Nervous Wreckage
Hey all - Welcome to a new feature on Noise Reduction - Guest posts on 30,000 Days.
Guest writers will be sharing stories from their 30,000 days so far. First up today is Sarah Rosenthal.
Sarah Rosenthal is a writer and professor at the CUNY John Jay College of Criminal Justice and NYU. Her work has appeared in BITCH Magazine, Creative Nonfiction, Electric Lit, LitHub, The Sun, and beyond. Her publication, Nervous Wreckage, documents her own experiences with panic disorder, and uses anxiety as a lens through which we can better understand (and empathize with) the world around us. Nervous Wreckage was a 2021 Featured Substack Publication. You can learn more about her work at nervouswreckage.substack.com and follow her on Twitter @sarahmrosenthal
I hope you’ll join me in welcoming her, and both she and I will be really keen to hear how you relate to the story she shares today.
As I write this, I am 32 years old, or 11,700 days old.
But when I was 9,486 days old, I found myself crying on a bus criss-crossing through a Norwegian fjord.
It was just past the summer solstice. I had arrived in Oslo, Norway a few days earlier, and felt utterly disoriented—the sun set at midnight and rose at 3 in the morning, giving the entire trip the feeling of a fever dream. Yet being here felt peaceful, the opposite of my home back in America.
But let’s rewind for just a moment.
Just before I reached the 9,486 day mark in Norway, I was a 25 year old living in Brooklyn, trying to do everything everyone had told me to do to lead a secure, happy life. I was a writer with a corporate job, one that gave me the stability I needed to cram in some writing early in the morning or late at night.
When I had graduated from college at 7,980 days old, I’d told myself that it was time to devote myself to serious career pursuits. I’d heard it countless times: my love of writing would never pay the bills. I was too anxious to be a starving artist, too insecure to potentially embark on a path that might lead nowhere. I wanted to prove to the world that I was useful, productive. I conflated financial stability with personal value.
Yet 1,506 days after college graduation, I was stuck. My corporate job had no room for growth, but truthfully even it did I wasn’t sure I wanted it. Other folks my age were diving into careers they seemed to love, or they were getting promotions, or going to graduate school. They had direction.
I’d waffled on almost every other big decision in my life, but not my dream to write. For as long as I could remember, what I wanted most in this world was to write a book.
I’d known that long before I’d stepped on a plane to Europe. Planning the trip had been painfully cliché: well-educated creative American woman traveling abroad to find herself. Embarrassing, really. My objective for this trip was to remind me how good I had it, to let me get my restlessness out of my system. And so I booked it with a combination of savings and birthday money. Surely I’d come home feeling refreshed and ready to dive back into my job and career a bit more satisfied with the life I’d created for myself, warts and all.
But as I walked the easy-to-navigate streets of Oslo, wandered through the sculptures garden at Frogner Park, and nibbled on reindeer sausage, I found myself dreading returning home. Although I knew it was not true, I felt as though I had nothing to return to. My friends and family might miss me, but my job wouldn’t. I had nothing tying me to New York City, a place I loved but felt lost within, except for an apartment lease. But I also wasn’t under any illusions about moving to Oslo either. My attempts to speak small bits of Norwegian to native speakers had been met with polite yet firm retorts in English.
But then came day 9,486, when I boarded the bus that would drive me up into the Norwegian countryside, specifically the Geirangerfjord and Aurlandsfjord regions. The vibrant green land slowly became an operatic display of mountains and valleys, cliffs and boulders. Rivers, lakes, and streams carved dizzying and profoundly steep pathways through ancient rock. Even in summertime, the highest points were still freckled with snow. I made a snowball at the foot of the remnants of an ancient glacier. Waterfalls seemed to appear out of nowhere, the cascading water pouring down from dizzying heights.
I was glued to the bus window as the landscape unfurled all of its spectacular glory. I was, and am, a city girl through and through. I never understood folks who cried at places like the Grand Canyon. But here I was, weeping. The fjords were, far and away, the most beautiful expanse of earth I’d ever seen. I felt so infinitesimally small next to the waterfalls and and steep cliffs.
What I hadn’t admitted to myself until then was that I was so wrapped up in conventions and jaded narratives about what my life ought to look like that I hadn’t thought anything could surprise me anymore. And yet here I was, weeping at every increasingly stunning stop on the tour, unable to fathom the idea of going back home. These fjords were incredibly strong, ancient formations of land that felt impossible, but here they stood before me, unapologetically weathering the test of time. Animal and plant life had proliferated around them, even amidst the harsh seasons and substantial changes in light and dark year-round. Life flourished here amidst the uncompromising beauty of the fjords.
It hit me then: I needed to pivot my life in a direction that meant taking more risks. I knew I would not be satisfied with however my life turned out if I did not give myself the opportunity to write more, even if it meant making less money and having less security.
While rolling up and down winding, too-narrow Norwegian roads, I changed my mind about what I wanted for myself. I’d already spent more than 1,000 days of my life trying out what others claimed was the safer path. But here, the landscape reminded me that it was time to create a new kind of terrain for myself, even if it didn’t look like anything I’d ever seen before.
To get to a place where I was happiest, I would need to make the unanticipated hairpin turns necessary to reach the top of a cliff with a view I couldn’t even conceive of yet. I had to adapt. I might reach a few dead ends before I reached the top. But to get there, I had to give myself permission to change course to see what other forms of beauty and what other scenic vistas I might be missing out on.