I feel like I am approaching — if I am not already in — another time in my life that I will look back on and think of fondly as a very good era like that. But, too, I remember the anxiety and the frustration and the wondering when my turn was; all that feels very real to me right now.

There was a commercial jingle when I was very little: “we girls can do anything.” Between that and my Dad, who did an admirable job of making sure I believed I wasn’t limited by my sex and gender, I stumbled into adulthood really and truly convinced of that. Convinced that other people believed that, and it was a matter of time until all the dinosaurs died off and we could all sigh a big collective sigh of relief and go, “Okay, enough with all that foolishness,” and move past the inequalities our mothers and grandmothers endured. But, without delving into details, I’m finding that’s not the case. And what is most surprising is where I am encountering these attitudes.

I am waiting. It is so, so frustrating, to have to dig my heels in where I am supposed to be able to move freely forward, but I think that is the key to all real progress – refusing to walk away.

I will always remember Sgt. Israel “Izzy” O’Bryan as a somewhat reserved person. Stephen’s suitemate in Cooper Hall. Just starting a life, only a few months older than my own little brother.

It just breaks my heart that we lost such a nice guy in the prime of his life, even if I hadn’t seen him in five years.

I’m not one who believes that my city holds some indelible quality that endears it to God any more than other disaster-afflicted regions. I don’t believe that those who were less affected than others by the flooding were spared because they prayed harder, as Charlie Daniels implies in this piece, or for any other reason than accident of geography or engineering. I don’t quite understand the desperate need to compare Nashville to New Orleans, as if a week’s warning that levees would break in a city in a bowl next to the Gulf is the same as flash flooding on hilly terrain along a river. And I most definitely can’t fathom why a candidate for office would decide that government is detrimental because government isn’t a panacea.

Why would anyone devote mental energy to that when there are real problems in need of solving?

Or, to put it succinctly:

This month I’ve seen volunteers alongside municipally-employed heroes, working together for the common goals of rescue and recovery. I’ve seen more facial hair than usual in my sometimes painfully trendy neighborhood, as men have abstained from shaving “flood beards” to show water-conservation solidarity. I’ve seen capitalism at its best as shrewd businessmen deftly adapted offerings to meet emerging markets and appealed to the shifting consciences of their customers. I’ve seen Tennesseans of all races, creeds, and genders giving blindly according to their ability to Tennesseans according to their needs.

So quickly we come together, so quickly we fragment.

The breaks we’d long ignored, or camouflaged, or never noticed become more apparent. We are Nashville … but some are more Nashville than others?

Nashvillians pass word around that insurance companies are cutting checks on site in Cottonwood, and telling residents of Bordeaux to wait 2-3 weeks.

The digital divide becomes more painfully apparent, as newsroom cutbacks mean that there are fewer reporters and fewer column inches to devote to covering a 1,000-year flood and a labor of love becomes a major metropolitan area’s best source of information. Overconnected millennials grow “#floodbeards” while working-class Baby Boomer neighbors without internet access wash river mud from their cars.

In short, we’re returning to normal.

In some ways, that’s a good thing. It means the immediate danger is behind us. It means that the problems we’ve ignored – whether for a few years or a few generations – are now laid bare for us to tackle. However, I’m still disheartened. If we can’t keep up momentum longer than two weeks, effecting real change is going to be more Sisyphean than I’d ever thought.

The truth is that information post-flood is segmented: those who use social media and anyone else. Maybe they really don’t know.

The truth is that everyone keeps waiting for everyone else to make the sacrifice. I think I can handle about one more day of not washing my hair before I threaten to go shave it or start some locs.

The truth is there is probably an abundance of people for whom watering the flowers was part of their daily routine, and following it is possibly the only thing between them and snapping.

Driving around town, you can almost pretend at points that all is normal, that this is temporary, that any moment we’ll return to our regular lives, already in progress. And then your muscle memory does something – tries to scratch an itch that is painful to relieve with arms that slung sandbags up a hill; tries to take you up, say, the Jefferson Street bridge and you’re met with blue lights parked where your hands were trying to take you.

And there you are: the city is drowning. We are watching a 1,000-year flood recede. Every time, really, it’s jarring.

Tonight around ten of us – a sassy bunch of mostly women, with one husband and three adorable babies – caravanned around Inglewood and East Nashville, taking food, water and wipes to flood victims just coming back to their homes. The reactions were all fundamentally the same: confusion, especially when they learned we weren’t with an organization, followed by a level of gratitude that made me feel a bit dirty and embarrassed. Who am I to be thanked? My home is dry and undamaged and I am able bodied.

One woman, fighting back shock and tears, told us how everything in her home was going to have to be ripped out to the studs. Her husband was older than she was, she said, and so they were going to have to hire someone to do the work for them. Alison handed off her business card and urged the woman to contact her when it was time to start. “I’ll get some people out here, all you have to do is call,” she said.

The woman shook. She invited us to come into the house of the elderly neighbor who had taken them in so we could meet her husband. It was immediately evident that, in addition to hearing loss, his memory might not be faring so well either. She introduced us – and I at twenty-seven was the youngest – as “these girls who brought us dinner.” We stared out the back window at the shockingly close Cumberland. The woman told us she would call us, but not to feel bad if she couldn’t remember our names. We waved it off.

“I have a brain tumor,” she said. “So it affects my memory.”

We murmured quick comfort, choked back tears, then headed back to it, stopping when dusk became night.

We talked to a lot of first responders. You’d think after four days of this they’d be irritable at the sight of four carloads of women getting too close to the flood waters, thinking us disaster tourists or worse, but every Metro police officer was kind and gentle-voiced and thanked us for being out there. When, after dark, we dropped off the food that still filled the backseat of my car at the neighborhood fire station, we were met with a kind of surprise.

“Saturday and Sunday,” the firefighter who took pizza and oranges back for the next shift said with a sigh, shaking his head, before looking a little puzzled. “Why are y’all doing this again?”

As if, aw shucks, ’tweren’t nothing.

On the way to see if there was anything else we could contribute to the Donate Nashville project, Alison and I passed through Five Points, teeming with freshly-washed hipsters who ignored Do Not Walk signals, eager as they were to celebrate Cinco de Mayo. I grit my teeth, both hands on the wheel, and drove.

I’ve asserted before that I thought that if you have an idea of what thirty looks like from twenty, you’re doing it wrong. But from one week to another? And yet there’s plenty of continuity, just enough that nothing quite feels real unless I write it down, and yet so much that probably shouldn’t be, not just yet.

It’s funny how sometimes a moment feels isolated, and yet all these isolated moments work together to become your life. There have been a few moments this week when I’ve climbed into a car – mine or another’s – and pulled the seat belt across my torso and taken a breath and shut my eyes and thought, That happened.

I am immeasurably blessed – great friends, interesting opportunities, an incredibly patient husband, and a lot of luck with timing. Now I just have to have faith that I will continue to be guided down this path and make the best of what is given me … and try my hardest not to imagine what next Tuesday night looks like.

I don’t want to say I’m not a social person. Four gatherings in a four-day span speak otherwise, and there are more over the weekend.

It’s just that getting together with folks and then everyone going their separate ways and leaving you to your own company can magnify things you’re ignoring … made all the worse when there’s no clear path to fixing it.

Tonight I was trying to turn an anecdote about learning to hit a softball into a parallel for learning to craft a solid political message. How it can take a while for the swing to be natural but after you connect with the ball a few times, send it into the outfield, it’ll happen any time you want it to afterward. How, years later, you can walk past the ball diamond and hear a bat connect and know, just by the sound, where the ball ended up. But, just like a softball smacked to hell, the whole thing fell apart.

This weekend I wrote Approach #35 (or at least, it seems like it …) to Pivotal Moment in Novel. And it, too, has fizzled. I write the same thing over and over again. I read other books, get that itch, return to the word processor, write for a while. Look up, hate everything I’ve written, want to kick myself.

Exacerbating this is the husband’s ease with writing. The man never reads anything other than the newspaper, and lately hasn’t had the time. And yet, yesterday, while I thought he was changing a load of laundry, he cranked out this entry on health care reform and just calmly walked back into the living room and sat on the couch.

What the hell.

When my dad was teaching me how to hit, I would get frustrated and swing too fast. He would get frustrated.

“Hit the ball. Hit the ball. Hit the DAMN BALL. HIT THE GODDAMNED BALL.”

I am in both roles, now. I am swinging too fast and missing. I am waiting for me to hit the ball.

Except, today being a weekday, there were a few moments where I was thinking, “How did I get that task done?”

Parachutes is piped in through the speaker over my head, and echoes of junior year of college are reverberating through me. This is a good tone to set.

There is a pivotal moment, in this story, that moves the rest of it along. Except, I’ve written it about ten ways and nothing sits right.

This morning, I buried my face into the pillow and said, “It’s intinction.” The first Sunday of each month the congregation files forward, takes bread, dips it into the cup, encircles the pews, holds hands, sings the doxology. First Sundays and special occasions. Two weeks ago, at Emily’s ordination, it was late enough in the day that I had enough of a voice to actually sing.

We were waiting on a call for brunch, so I lay in bed a little longer, and the call didn’t come. Stephen bristled at the lack of courtesy. For the most part, I was pretty happy to have the time to wander.

I am given to trusting too much in constructs. Sometimes an anchor isn’t holding us where we should be but is instead deadweight, leading us to unnecessarily strain against the current taking us where we should go.

The last six months – after breaking free from a few toxic situations, after refusing to be sucked back in – have been extremely eye-opening. Liberating, even. Things are not perfect but I am at peace more than I have ever been.

While I’ve divulged more in more private settings – more than anything, it made me realize that I was losing touch with the people I want to be in touch with, and too in touch with petty things and petty people.

I’m putting this out there – I need to overcome my phone phobia. I will be reaching out to people more. And I will be reshaping what I do with this space. And I’m done with people who have expectations for who I’m supposed to be.

If you want to be on the call list, let me know.