Ramen-Noodle Days
Do you ever have one of those days? The kind that dawns along the neural highways in your head, dazzling with well-laid plans, crisp with fresh possibilities. Then life slams on the brakes. The road you expected to travel that day is closed for construction. In frustration, you bemoan the lack of orange cones, the absence of the big sign indicating the need to utilize a detour. You are left to wonder if the warnings were there all along, but you were too taken with the roadside scenery to notice them.
Such days leave me wanting to curl up inside myself with a bowl of ramen noodles, binge-watching favorite memories like so many classic movies, a refuge of seemingly simpler times. Is this what tempted the Hebrews to long for Egypt as they traveled across a wilderness?
The last few months have felt like a steady succession of those days. Not that life has been bad, or that I have been idle, but on the heels of my tectonic transition in 2021, I didn’t stop to realize that aftershocks are to be expected. You don’t get a mountain without smashing a couple of plates.
“I didn’t stop to realize that aftershocks are to be expected…”
New experiences, new people, new places this past year granted me a tantalizing array of perceptions, personalities, and perspectives to process and ponder as a writer. Along the way, I discovered a painful but essential lesson as well.
Most days, I feel like a kid on the inside, an imaginary superhero cape flying in the wind behind me on my way to the next adventure. I have discovered my outsides, however, are not as young as my heart feels like I still am. Truthfully, I was never very physically strong to begin with, given my nerdy bookishness and generalized clumsiness. So, attempting to help a little old lady load the tiny trunk of her sedan with forty-pound bags of manure in mid-October while working at my side hustle was not too bright an idea. I forgot I am now a little old lady, too. I went home that day, stiff and sore.
As it turned out, I had ruptured a lumbar disk in my back, but I did not know that at first. I have a rather high pain tolerance. I stubbornly soldiered on at work as well as in the rest of my life. I couldn’t figure out why my aching back was not getting better despite all the icepacks and Epsom salts. In fact, the pain got worse, so much so that one day my right leg felt like it was being electrocuted. Of course, our nervous system does run on electrical impulses, so objectively speaking that experience shouldn’t come as such a surprise, I suppose. Nonetheless, I never want to feel that particular sensation ever again.
The clinic treating me referred me to consult with a very gifted, but, thankfully, painfully honest surgeon. What she outlined in our visit shook me to my core as I faced the reality I had been seriously injured and could be permanently disabled. Due to complications, mine would not be an easy surgery and its success was not guaranteed. I got that news exactly one day before the official launch event for my premier novel, The Throw Away. Overwhelmed by the shattering news about my back, gathering my thoughts for the talk I was to give to welcome my guests and introduce my reading left me grasping at shadows late into the night.
By some miracle, the day was a success. My posse had put an amazingly well-coordinated celebration together, and even though I was haunted by the fear I’d just freeze, look like an idiot, and let these dear women down in the process, we sold out of all the books on hand. Special guests had attended whose lives had been intertwined with mine when my former role as guardian ad litem had led me to chase down out-of-state records, one of many experiences I drew on to lend realism to my book. Two sisters who had not seen one another since they were small children were reunited, each of them at the beginning of their journeys as young women, much as I had been at their age so long ago.
In the days and weeks after the launch event inevitable decisions about my health loomed. Due to my back injury, I had been given time off from my job by the surgeon’s order. The prescribed rest, exercise, and therapy restored my strength as the days progressed. My leg is still numb in places, but it is working again, at least enough to get me around and back to my life.
After weeks of restricted activity, it has occurred to me that perhaps physical work is not my highest and best use at this time in my life. Stocking shelves and food service was how I paid for my education as a young woman. Learning to work was part of the process, teaching me to value the dream for which I was striving. A return to these roots after retirement was a poignant reminder of all the people who taught me so much back then, and not just professors and teaching assistants. Mature coworkers at my college jobs taught me lessons of diligence, teamwork, and common sense one can’t really obtain in a classroom. My time at my current side hustle showed me that thankfully these people still exist. And every one of them is essential.
At my last follow-up appointment, the surgeon appeared relieved by my miraculous improvement. There is a story that a long time ago massive crowds were fed by meager resources augmented by prayer. The admonition following the miracle was to gather up what remained that nothing would be lost.
After a lifetime of experience as a woman, spouse, mother, friend, student, attorney, business owner, community volunteer, and finally, a published author, my purpose is less that of the heavy lifting than candid reflection and authentic storytelling.
Since the advent of my dream on a cold January day over a cup of coffee and a dare, I can say I have never felt writer’s block. Ramen-noodle days may sneak up and try to snatch my motivation from beneath me, but the words just bang on the walls of my brain demanding their release.
It feels good to sit down at the keyboard in this new year after a morning trekking down well-worn paths of inspiration on the snow-frosted Ice Age Trail. There is no experience in life that does not yield a lesson to be gathered up in the aftermath. Not even failure—which can be picked up, cleaned off, glued back together in a novel configuration with a fresh coat of paint, to find new purpose as wisdom gained.
The ordeal with my back has made me realize how real my dream of being a writer has become, how brightly it shines, such that it must not be shoved under a bushel basket in favor of less risky pursuits. It is said one cannot hide from the will of God, what others simply call destiny. Time to reflect, remember, and just plain rest—noodles and all—even in times of overwhelming change or unexpected challenge, are a part of the journey. I am thankful for writing and the chance it gives me to collect the morsels along the way so that nothing might be lost.
