The week I left my job, I bought an air-conditioning unit as a proxy for an enriching professional life. I selected the unit at the type of appliance store (cash only) that sells toasters and personal massagers and imitation maple bedroom sets at bargain prices, and 10 seconds later a small, wiry man slinked out of the storeroom, hoisted the unit onto his shoulder, and walked it around the block and up four flights of stairs to my apartment for me. When we were both in my bedroom, I fished a $20 bill out of a pair of shorts on the floor, sent the man on his way, and sized up my new colleague. It was the perfect thing to keep me refreshed while I lazed around my bedroom reading teen lit and ignoring the impulse to shower — plus, its electric roar would drown out the loathsome noises of people in the park outside my bedroom window. I installed the unit in under an hour, a little too pleased with myself.
But underneath the self-satisfaction, I had the knowledge that unless I made a lifestyle change, and quickly, the air-conditioning unit would be my constant and only companion for the rest of the summer. I'd decided to work from home on my own for the foreseeable future, which probably meant working from bed.
Fearing such indolence, three days later I did the corniest thing anyone who just quit her job could have: Alone, I drove north to the mountains for some fresh air. I booked a room at an inn with a hammock and an afternoon cross breeze and a dog named Waldo roaming its grounds, dozens of miles away from a major highway and only steps from a creek. I was the only guest. It was the perfect place about which to tell someone it changed my life forever, for good.
I had been feeling pretty disingenuous for a while — the job I'd quit had mostly consisted of tweeting — and if I were to renew my commitment to my Best Life, I would have to kick-start it by doing something completely different, something earnest. It wasn't enough that I puked (twice) at my going-away party on my last day in the office: I needed to purge it all. I had 72 hours, some spandex athleisure pants, and a rented, dented Hyundai Accent with Florida plates.
But about 10 minutes into my trip to the Catskills, windows down, I lost that earnest optimism. A singular concern gripped me as I clenched the steering wheel at ten-and-two: My air-conditioning unit was going to fall out of my fourth-story window while I was away.
I was headed out of cell phone range, and my unit was going to impale a bunch of kids walking to school. Or the tough guys who sit on my building's stoop, or my mail woman, who still blasts The Pinkprint on her rounds every afternoon. The plunge seemed inevitable, and I'd come home to a tragic homemade memorial, a police warrant for my willful negligence, and, even worse, a perfectly good reinvention trip ruined.
Despite my boasting to anyone who seemed mildly knowledgeable about HVAC installation or second-wave feminism, I hadn't actually read the entire instruction manual. During the installation process, I'd missed a bracket here, a sash lock there. My work wasn't that of the person I'd historically been. I've long been plagued with the sort of obsessive thinking that possesses me to double- and triple-check my work. Normally, I'm unable to allow myself to half-ass anything — until, that is, this year, when the work I found myself doing led me to develop a sort of feigned, stilted hustle. This, unfortunately, bubbled over into the one tangible goal I still had in my life: to successfully install a working air-conditioning unit. Once it was in the window, I felt so relieved that I at least had something to show for my work that I excused the shoddiness. I figured I'd secure it later, maybe when I was back from the mountains, refreshed.
When I found myself focusing only on the air conditioner unit, instead of the literal, supposedly transformative open road (and when I had specifically intended to leave such cosmopolitan worries behind), I began the kind of last-ditch psychic bargaining that mental health professionals had often warned me against. I made a wager with the cosmos: If I did everything on this trip the right way, then the lives of dozens of potential air conditioner trauma victims would be spared. If I completed my hike perfectly, without having an accident or turning around before the summit, everything else would be perfect, too. To be sure, these mental gambles had a proven 0% success rate in previous high-anxiety situations, but if I didn't make them, I'd be surrendering to fate in a place without cell service.
It was then for the sake of the innocents underneath the air conditioner that I pursued each nature activity I encountered with what a youth sports coach might call "110%." On my first miles-long hike, I ran out of water one-fourth of the way up, and simultaneously realized I was still wearing a pair of Wellington boots instead of Asics, the most trusted brand of athletic shoe for wide-footed women like myself. So I called upon a myriad of motivational tools I had picked up from doctors and Jillian Michaels and Dora the Explorer. To get the rest of the way up that mountain and to the promised scenic vistas, I chanted through tears, "You go, girl!" and "One foot in front of the other, baby," spinning platitudes into incantations to keep the air conditioner from ceding its ground. On the way down, legs shaking and toes jammed into the front of my boots, I realized I had taken a different trail than I had on the way up. To a passing wasp, I said aloud, "I believe that the road less traveled made all the difference for at least one other industrious American!"
Later, when I couldn't get my campfire started after 45 minutes and I'd run out of newspaper kindling, I resolved to burn every flammable I had in my backpack, including old résumés and some insurance information I probably need. It seemed necessary — and just maudlin enough. The papers started the fire. They had to; the fire must keep burning on the altar.
On my final morning, I told myself I'd baptize myself in the freezing creek outside the inn, the thawing runoff from a nearby mountain. I tried to make the experience holy and immaculate, but mostly I thought about that air conditioner, falling out my window back at home.
And on the way back to the city, driving at precisely the speed limit and offering each tollbooth attendant exact change — all in the name of karma — I delayed what I was sure was inevitable: I stopped at every country market and antique shoppe I came across. I bought three pounds of fudge, five crates of strawberries, and countless moldy old postcards I'll lose in a drawer, all to buy myself even a few more minutes before I had to see the destruction my air conditioner had wrought.
When I finally approached my block, I swallowed a fistful of butter pecan and looked up. The air conditioner, of course, was still resting gingerly on my windowsill, and not very likely as a testament to my anxious bartering, or my renewed commitment to wilderness-bred self-transformation as a means of salvation from blunt-force trauma. It was just Newton's First Law: An object at rest will stay at rest.
By that same law, a girl in motion will stay in motion, no magical thinking required. As I shouted empty proverbs from high elevations and communed with wildlife for the sake of an inert air-conditioning unit, my pace stayed the same — slow, and slumping, but steady. Words motivated me up a mountain, but I was the only one to hear them. They didn't spare the lives of any children who walked under my window; the mountain air didn't breathe new life into me. Sometimes all self-reliance does is give you the confidence to admit when you need professional help — from a therapist and an AC repair expert, specifically, whom I called the second I walked through my front door.