Leaving Isn't the Hardest Thing(78)

It’s no wonder we’re all depressed. Our culture doesn’t value experiences or living. We value work so you can buy things. We don’t even value our mental health and inner lives enough to not call buying things “retail therapy.”

The last company meeting I attended, they gave a guy an award for never missing a day of work in ten years—not a single sick day, not a snow day, no vacation. And he has kids. I thought he should be publicly shamed, and long ago. Maybe the first year he hadn’t used any vacation. Sure, you can sell some of it back. But not all of it; they’re not a charity. But ten fucking years? In a sane society, he would be a cautionary tale. In our society, he got a plaque and a fifty-dollar gift card to Best Buy.

   It’s no longer enough to show up every day, do your job, and go home. It’s like every company bought the same self-help book on how to save money by skipping raises and get the same loyalty by turning your company into a cult. But it wasn’t loyalty that kept me there. I simply didn’t see another choice. This was what I was supposed to do.

Until that visit from Tom, the mirror of having to explain my life to someone else. I couldn’t ignore it anymore, could no longer shut my mind off and watch TV. The problem was, it wasn’t me that was failing. Like I said, I was doing what I was supposed to be doing. Living the fucking dream. The problem was, I didn’t want any goddamn part of it.

Once I saw it, it’s like a stain on the ceiling. It’s all you can see anymore. You start noticing all the other stains. That line where the drywall’s about to come loose and it’s going to cave in. You just don’t know when. The narrative we’re sold works for a while, until you see the holes. We work. We consume. We get sick. We die.

I couldn’t sit through another meeting praising company values, company culture—don’t just show up to work every day, tell your friends and neighbors about us, and let’s bring out the one guy who started as a tech but made it to management so he can tell you all how he bleeds blue, the company colors, and let’s hold a moment of silence for Ronnie, who worked in the warehouse for thirty years and every morning he’d tell you how many days until retirement. He was going to move to North Carolina, be close to his people. Do some fishing. He was supposed to retire four years, three months, and seven days ago. But the company got bought out, the new company didn’t count his time. Still, he fucking made it. Finally. He retired, and he dropped dead a month later.



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   I felt like I did back when I was a kid, surrounded by true believers, and for so long I’d thought I was trapped. But I was only trapped by my own fear of losing it all. And when I added it up, “all” was just stuff I didn’t need anyway.

So I trusted my instincts because the one thing my instincts know is a cult. I decided that day was as good a time as any to schedule a long-overdue ankle surgery. I listened to my inner voice when it told me to use the time off to hop around on crutches, hanging crown molding and scheduling the flooring crew. I sold the Ikea sofa and the TV and dresser. I gave away what I couldn’t sell. Then I sold the house.

I figured I could live off the savings a little while. (I maybe had been going through some shit, but I’m not stupid.) I never actually quit my job. I didn’t go back either. I was in California by the time the disability ran out. Maybe my inner voice is just the remnant of that wild kid who grew up all over the world, leading me on a fun but ultimately lonely path to destruction. But that kid didn’t want things.

   I wanted to fucking live. I wanted to be a writer.

That’s how, at thirty-seven years old, I ended up driving around the country in a Winnebago, with a worn-out banana box of cult literature that somebody had failed to burn, stashed back in the shower that didn’t work. That’s why when my inner voice had an even crazier idea, like I bet I can find the ranch, I pulled over into a strip mall, parked next to a Panera to borrow their Internet, pulled up Google on my laptop, and typed in “Texas Soul Clinic.”



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The Soul Clinic if you’re cool, the TSC if you’re a cult baby—the ranch was where my parents joined the Family. Some people visit Civil War battlefields. My dad stops and reads historical markers on the highway. Apparently I try to find old communes.

You won’t find Thurber, Texas, on a map. It’s a ghost town with a diner and a brick museum, made of Thurber bricks, where, if you’re interested in bricks, I’m sure you can learn about Thurber bricks. (I spent a lot of time on Google that day.) My Winnebago, propelled by a four-cylinder Toyota pickup with a house crammed on top, topped out at about fifty miles per hour, downhill. So I took the back roads until I got near the old town.

I pulled over at the diner called Restaurant, ordered a tea and a salad, thankful for some healthier options than Subways in gas stations. A few old timers were slow-sipping coffee at the next table. I thought to ask them. I was sure they’d remember. Thurber isn’t the type of place people move to. But I chickened out. I didn’t belong—that much was obvious—and I didn’t know how to explain what I was looking for or why. I knew the looks I’d get.

   I felt a little better asking at the brick museum, so I drove over and parked in a nearly empty lot. No one was studying the history of Thurber bricks that day. The docent’s face looked like it hadn’t seen water since the Dust Bowl. She asked if I was looking for the RV park. “No, just passing through, ma’am. I was wondering, back in the ’60s, early ’70s, there was a cult out here.”