‘New Slang’: Song #8 from the Boundless soundtrack

Let yourself chafe. Let yourself be feral. This is how you change everything. In BOUNDLESS, my newly published memoir, I take a cue from ABQ indie band The Shins.

Dec 28, 2024

I wanted out. I wanted away. I wasn’t someone who was waiting for my next opportunity. I was someone who was chafing. I was so chafing, I was feral. I stood at the brink of being frightening to others, that’s how feral this desire was to be someone.

EXCERPT from BOUNDLESS
TO BE CLEAR, I WAS ALREADY A SOMEONE. I had led an award-winning magazine for sixteen years, worked in senior management in the newspaper industry, and coauthored seven books published with Penguin Putnam.
If you googled my name, I would be one who filled the first search screen, except for the occasional notorious other same-named me who might make the news for acts that—and I’m here to clear this up now—I did not commit.
I’d also won literary prizes and given a TEDx talk that increasingly got views and drew gushing thank-yous for the inspiration. My LinkedIn profile did a nice impression of a someone, to be sure.
Clearly, I existed.
But what I really was: Someone who was chafing.

For too many years, I could hardly bear to be with what I hoped for and what would never happen.

I loved my twins. I loved New Mexico. I loved print journalism and the idea that it matters in our shared dialogue and that together, we make a better world. I loved making a difference.

In BOUNDLESS, my high-minded feminist ideas collide with the realities of the diminishing influence of substantial journalism in a dying industry. In an industry so desperate to align with power and save itself, the integrity lapses were everywhere, and they were piling up all around me as the industry abandoned the very thing that made the product work: actual real journalists who worked hard.

In this song by Albuquerque indie music darlings, The Shins, their lament about how hard it is to make it in music from a flyover town is utterly palpable. Yes, they were singing my life when they sang, “Gold teeth, and a curse to this town.” They don’t want to curse it because they love it. The video tells you that. All the footage is from the most ordinary places in Albuquerque while they are re-enacting the four Beatles in the pool moment.

EXCERPT from BOUNDLESS
So I waited. I chafed and tried not to chafe. I was single parenting on a salary that had been frozen since 2008. I strained at a yoke I had not chosen. Every day. But I loved my children. So I calmed myself, and I waited for a miracle.
For ten years, I looked for a better job. I had always landed on my feet, but I already had had one of the top jobs for women in media in New Mexico, even in a good economy. I had hit the glass ceiling a long time ago. I lived in a media desert, and lest I had doubted that, in the spring of 2017, I was right in the middle of a project for the Democracy Fund, doing interviews that proved to me exactly what my search for a better job the past ten years had already told me. In interview after interview, journalism leaders and entrepreneurs in the state reiterated, story after story after story, that there was no place for me to go… in New Mexico.
Anyone who was talented in media in New Mexico had already drained off to somewhere else. Except for all the co-parents. I liked to think we were a secret galactic force. The Jedi journalists.

The conflict was I loved contradictory and opposing things. I loved my children beyond all measure, so staying in New Mexico to co-parent them into adulthood was my absolute priority. I also loved my noble talent as a journalist, the animating idea that if I created a forum for other people’s stories, I could make a difference.

I craved security, and I craved creating meaning. Even after I cast my fortune back east, even as my daughter and I cross the Kansas prairie to reverse-migrate to the East, I am torn.

EXCERPT from BOUNDLESS
I feel sad about leaving Albuquerque. I feel sad because I loved it for twenty-five years and I love it still. I feel sad because some terrible things happened to me there. I feel sad because not everything worked out. I feel sad because I’m giving up before everything worked out because it still could. I feel sad because I waited so long for everything to work out and it didn’t. I feel sad because I love the place and I don’t want to give up on it.
This is the cage I’m in.

In the early chapters of BOUNDLESS, I tried my best to train fresh eyes on New Mexico, the place that had been my home for a quarter of a century, the place that was my twins’ hometown. I try to look at dream catchers and Kachina dolls with appreciation for their craft and awe for their spiritual aspirations.

I can’t even summon it.

All I knew was how to be gone. Because I’d been practicing “being gone” in my mind for such a long time.

We know what we feel by what we notice. This is part of my meditation practice, which includes the art and power of noticing for self-awareness and insight. What I was choosing to notice about New Mexico was the badlands, the stretches of dry, desolate land that nourished no one. The landmarks of location shots for “Breaking Bad” populate the story, mirroring my desperate search for a way out of not meaning anything to anyone. I wasn’t ready to cook meth and become a drug lord, but I did hear the agency in, “I am the one who knocks.”

My youngest sister, knowing my lost-ness on this question of where I would go and what I would do next, walked into an Old Town Albuquerque touristy gift shop and bought me a “Breaking Bad” T-shirt and a coffee mug to remind me I had choices. I was the one knocking on this life.

In BOUNDLESS, I want you to take in this awareness. Notice when you chafe. Notice when your desire turns feral. Take note how potent that is. Do not be frightened by it. Harness it. This is what it means to live boundlessly.