Persephone1It will come as a surprise to no one who knows me that I become very lame very fast without structure. Just now, for example, when I was supposed to be working on, oh, I don’t know, a novel? I decided to eat a pomegranate. First, how come I never noticed before how much the seeds look like roe? Second, is there any fruit that takes longer to eat? In a sort of reverse-Persephone I decided to eat the whole thing, every seed, standing over the sink, as though determined to remain stuck for good in this underworld of none-to-low-literary-output.

So why should freedom feel like such a trap? Why should the feeling, I can eat that fruit! mean I must eat that fruit? There’s the problem: when no one is watching you, there is no reason for self-restraint, and without self-restraint there can be no priorities, and without priorities, who are you? If one thing is just as possible to do as another it becomes just as worth doing. And that, I believe, is a disaster.

Let me start at the beginning. I was laid off from my dreamy part time job on November 30. The sensible part of me knew this was bad. I was facing not insignificant losses, among them income and health insurance and colleagues and a place to go that was not my apartment. (I live in the sort of apartment where you can see the bed from wherever you’re standing. You try to write a novel someplace where you can always see your bed.) Anyway, this was a good job. We’d been going steady for about four years. But I couldn’t help thinking it would be fun to hang out more with No Job. The wild times we’d have! The pages we’d write! As the end of November approached, I started to persuade myself that I was breaking up with Good Job instead of the other way around.

“It’s time,” I said kindly to my office desk with its smooth-tracking and capacious file drawers.

“We had a good run,” I said to my office printer of endless cartridges.

“Where’s the magic?” I asked my ergonomically-self-specific office chair.

“I need a challenge,”  I said to the prepaid office postage meter.

So I felt pretty good on December 1st, and I felt pretty good on December 2nd. I was even feeling good on December 10 when I went to Walgreen’s to refill a prescription. I told the pharmacist what I wanted and wandered off to get cotton balls and read US Weekly. Ten seconds later my name sounded over the intercom.

“That was fast,” I said to the pharmacist.

“Your insurance has expired. You still want this?”

The “this” in question is not a life or death prescription. It’s what you might call a vanity prescription. It’s a cream. For the face.

“I’m getting COBRA,” I said. “Obama is paying for part of it.”

“Um,” she said. “You want this now?”

“How much is it?”

“Seventy-three ninety-nine.”

All of a sudden the skinny tube of skin stuff seemed not vain but insane. And I felt embarrassed, like I’d been spotted in the couture section of Saks by a saleswoman who knew I couldn’t afford one of the t-shirts two flights down in Juniors. What I mean is I felt pretentious and guilty for wanting to buy something that cost more than it should have in the first place, and, even weirder, I felt ashamed that I didn’t have insurance. Health insurance allows you access to medications you need, of course, but it also means you don’t have to differentiate between kinds of need. It makes things feel tidy, as though all your wants are normal and important, and everything is ok.

So now I find myself in a position of having to decide, at every moment of the day, what is necessary and what isn’t, what is more important than what, what is worth doing at all. It’s exhausting. I make mistakes all the time, and mostly they’re the kind of mistake that involves outlay and regret. I bought the cream. I ate the fruit. I lay on the bed.

I hope I get the hang of it. I hope one of these mornings it will feel more worth it to get up early than to sleep late. I wonder whether Persephone really ate those three seeds because she was hungry or thirsty. Maybe she just wanted to know where she had to be for three months of every year. Maybe she wanted to know what were the rules and what the limits, so she could plan her damn life.