I’ve long moved on from my divorce, and my memories of what it felt like to be so full of sorrow, to be brimming to the point that I stole a quick cry every time I bent down to tie my shoe or turned my back to stir my tea at the kitchen counter, are fading.

Before those memories disappear entirely, I want to root for those people one more time, out loud. Brand-new divorcees of the world, I’ve got seven things to say to you:

BE PROUD OF YOURSELF

You’re battling a bogeyman that some people would do anything to get away from, that a lot of miserable people decry with histrionic fervor. Right now, somewhere, a man or woman is tolerating treatment that erodes his or her humanity just to avoid the experience currently hitting you in the face with a sledgehammer.

These people, the ones who still need their lives to be a story that makes sense, say it loudly, so that the monster under the bed will hear: Divorce isn’t an option. Well, you’re making it an option. You’re making it an option like a fucking badass. Maybe you found yourself dumped into an arena against your will, facing that monster gladiator-style while the deadbolt slides into place behind you and you clutch whatever weapon you can find in terror. Or maybe you dragged that fucker out by his ankle and have tackled him out of sheer rage about everything that has happened in the last months or years, everything that made you feel broken, alone, or so bored you could scream. Either way, you are fighting, for yourself and often for your children, and that is hard.

You’re making your world from scratch, and that requires tirelessness and bravery. Be proud of yourself.

DON’T GET NOSTALGIC

I’ve said it before: Two happy people do not wake up one morning, get into a playful fight over the last bagel, and wind up in court. Something got you here, and I’m willing to bet it wasn’t “No, I love YOU more! No, YOU hang up!” Divorce isn’t a masked man who pops up out of the shrubbery and demands that you hand over your happy relationship. Divorce is your relationship, or at least what your relationship has become in this moment. Nothing has been done to either of you that doesn’t happen to couples all over the world. If you want to work it out, work it out — but with honesty and an extremely discriminating eye for eliminating the issues.

And before you moon over those wedding photos, remember that it’s easy to look happy when someone else has done your hair, your new mother-in-law has just given you a really nice rice cookier, and a photographer is waiting in the wings to Photoshop out the zit on your nose. It was easy to look happy when you were still in the youthful business of condensing your happier moments into something everyone could see.

Your life right now is no accident, and you can’t afford to lie to yourself about that. Don’t get nostalgic.

REMEMBER THAT THIS IS YOUR FIRST TIME

Maybe you miss your spouse. Maybe you miss your house or your children. There are a lot of very logical reasons for your distress, for the feeling that you don’t know what to think about or where to put your hands, but remember that unfamiliarity causes a great deal of distress on its own, regardless of context. You’ve never been in pain like this; you have no idea how long it’s going to last; your life experiences thus far have not yielded a map out of this dark maze. Remember your first breakup, how you thought you’d never heal, how you thought you’d ruined everything? Yeah, like that — except this time society agrees with you, because unlike other breakups, this is a breakup we’ve been taught to pretend will never happen, a breakup we aren’t allowed to accept as a standard part of learning and growing.

People have asked me if I’m afraid to get married again out of fear of having to go through divorce all over again someday, but I can’t imagine any divorce being as bad as the one I endured, because at least half of my misery came from the utterly false notion that I had permanently damaged myself and my life, that I was a ruined human being. If I ever get divorced again, I will have an enormous advantage over the last time: Experience will have taught me that I will be just fine.

You are nowhere that you’ve ever been. Remember that this is your first time.

DON’T MAKE ANY BIG, CRAZY DECISIONS

I know you’re going to anyway, but … I just … later you’ll … oh, well. Your hair will grow back, I guess. Just be aware that your opinions will oscillate wildly for the next year, or two. You’ll be so sure of something only to later realize that you were speaking out of pain, or fear, or anger. It’s okay to have those feelings, but try let them marinate for a while before deciding they’re worthy of action. Don’t make any big, crazy decisions.

IT’S OKAY TO BE SOMEONE ELSE NOW

Every day is going to make its mark on you no matter what, unless you’re okay with living a life devoid of personal growth. Every experience changes you — that’s just part of the process of becoming one of those badass senior citizens who fart anytime they want and are willing poke rude people in the sternum on the bus. You’re only stressed about the change now because you think that the new you is the unhappy version, but that’s not forever; grieving always sucks even when it’s time to move on and do just that.

But eventually, you will feel better, and you won’t mind your new perspective so much. In fact, if you’re like many people I know, you’ll struggle a lot less with fear than you have in the past, because you’ve seen firsthand how tough you can be, and you finally trust yourself to handle whatever comes your way.

You will never be the same, but that was never the deal. Every heaven or hell on earth you have ever set foot into has resulted in someone else walking out the other side. It’s okay to be someone else now.

LIFE IS NOT THE SUMMARY OF YOUR CIRCUMSTANCES

Life is not the summary of your circumstances. You can be more. Reach outward, just a little, even if it just means making a point of looking around you. You can be the observer of things that have nothing to do with you. You can be someone else’s good day. I know you don’t have a lot of energy, but even a small gesture, a glance upward, can make you feel better. I developed this practice of reaching outward during my divorce, and I’ve kept it, and it enhances my happiness still. Because I’ve looked around, I know a lot of little things, like the fact that the train I ride to work every day, in my new life, was manufactured when I was five years old.

I like to think of it being made while I went about my business in kindergarten, having no idea that commuter trains existed. I like to think of it shuttling people back and forth long before I got here, its doors opening and closing and people pouring in and out while I grew up and got married and got turned around and suffered the devastating loss of my marriage two thousand miles away. I find it deeply reassuring that reality is defined by so much more than what I feel like today, that it is not my sole responsibility to stand here and make this train real, that it doesn’t have to matter so much how I feel.

Look up. Learn something. Life is not the summary of your circumstances.

YOU REALLY ARE GOING TO BE FINE

You really are going to be fine. Look at the divorced people around you. Are they living in some urine-scented alley somewhere, drinking whiskey for breakfast and spending the rest of the day sitting on the sidewalk with their backs against the wall, staring into the middle distance with bloodshot eyes while they hold up a sign that says WILL WORK FOR LESSONS ON HOW TO CHANGE THE FILTER IN THE FURNACE BECAUSE MY HUSBAND ALWAYS DID IT SO I DIDN’T KNOW HOW AND NOW I’M HOMELESS? If you don’t know any divorced people, consider me your token divorced person; feel free to refer to me that way at parties. I am fine.

I am better than fine, actually. I am healed, and happy, and excited about the future. And I have faith that someday, not so far away as you think, you will be, too.

After dinner, we curled up together under the swaying lights and sipped wine as the train horn blew and the lights of towns and farms and factories rolled by outside our second-story window. It was, in a word, perfect.

If this were a lifestyle blog, I would have accompanied the above story with a smattering of darling pictures full of polka-dot ribbons and neat handwriting, and that would be it. But I don’t want that to be it.

I want to be more than my own dollhouse.

I even think I have an obligation, as a human being, not just to try to be more, but to tell you about it here, even if that’s uncomfortable for both of us.

With the life I’ve lived, I might as well have been shot into outer space, climbing into a gleaming rocket and offering that grubby cluster of open-mouthed kids a salute before I took off. I have enjoyed beauty beyond what any of us could have imagined when most of my friends were prying switches from trees in the front yard and peeling off their leaves while the adults stood in doorways, waiting to wield the weapon on its weeping deliverer. I once swam in the pool at the top of the Tokyo Park Hyatt (better known as the Lost in Translation hotel) while the sun set around me. And then there was the gigantic Jacuzzi tub in New Zealand, the one with my breakfast plate balanced on its edge and the gorgeous view of sheep-dotted hills rising up outside its window. And that dinner in the enormous square, at night, in Spain, with all of its balconies and the hundreds of dioramas behind them—some partially shuttered, some flung wide open for all to see. The hotel in Chicago where a maid delivered freshly baked cookies in the afternoon. The first-class suite on the airplane to Los Angeles, where I had my own bed and my own little salt and pepper shakers.

These are extreme examples, of course, rare and unusual gifts or perks that I never could have afforded if I were footing the bill. But that’s the thing about cultural and intellectual privilege: people start giving you advantages that the poor don’t have access to. The dynamic of life favors you more heavily without you noticing, because it doesn’t occur to you that the doorman doesn’t offer the same expression to everyone.

Even in my ordinary life, I’ve funded plenty of my own smaller, more common indulgences, whether I paid for them with cash or time: lattes, salon visits, gym memberships, throw pillows, cupcakes. The kind of indulgences that arrive topped with whipped cream or in a pretty box. The kind that almost anyone I’m likely to associate with can and does routinely afford, even as most of us lament how broke we are. The kind we barely recognize as indulgences at all, because not everyone can afford to choose the color of their walls.

I just wanted to be happy. No matter how much money you have or what you spend it on, I’m sure you do, too. Almost all of us have assumed, correctly or otherwise, that our happiness is the point, or that our children’s happiness is the point.

My life experiences have certainly not been fruitless. I was happy. I am happy. Hell, I’m often drunk on a complex cocktail of profound gratitude, enjoyment, wonder. I’m not here to present my life or yours as meaningless. I’m not discounting our search for beauty, our ability to foster tiny joys by way of coat buttons or key hooks. At least we are joyful. Plenty of privileged people aren’t, choosing instead to exist in a state of astonishingly steady outrage, paired with an amusing but unflattering air of disbelief, as if the rest of us climbed onto the bus to utopia this morning and left without them.

So, no. None of us are monsters. Many of us have used the significance of matrimony as an excuse to spend more money on one evening of our lives than it would have cost to buy my brilliant childhood friend an entire associate’s degree at the community college. But we still aren’t monsters, not really. That’s how complicated this is.

We do make choices that we don’t recognize as choices. We do use “need” in a way that would baffle or disgust anyone still stranded in my old stomping grounds. Some of our bucket lists don’t have a single item on them that isn’t about getting something we want. Some of us don’t even realize alternative options exist, because we have, often with the best of intentions, made universes out of ourselves.

But I think we could be more. I think we could climb out of our own stories if we realized our allegiance to those narratives, our servitude to that photo of a kiss at sunset.

Listen, I get it. I once slept in an $800 hotel room in Tokyo. I understand. I just want to be more than my own life. I want to walk out of the dollhouse and make stories that aren’t about me at all. If you want to be more, too, we should talk about it. If you don’t, the rest of this series is probably not for you. I’m not looking for a fight, I’m not interested in making you feel guilty, and I’m not here to convince you of anything you don’t already know. I just want to be more.

I always thought this was the creepiest house, but there were certainly other contenders.

The neighborhood baby, the one we carted around in a stroller and cooed at to make her smile, died when her mother’s boyfriend beat her in a fit of rage. In the house up the street, my childhood friend’s father shot her mother to death mere feet away from her. A bit farther around the block, a two-year-old child died when his siblings shut him in a car in the middle of summer. No one had been watching them. No one ever was.

I remember once looking out the window and seeing one man whaling on another man with a pipe, across the street. The pipe-wielder was already somewhat notorious, as he had bitten off a man’s nose in a previous altercation. As one does.

And then there were the neighborhood children who would disappear and come back around in cycles, as protective services transferred them to foster care and back out again, and the ones who wandered the streets all afternoon with their pants filled with shit. I would often look out the window to see some random ragamuffin using my tree swing or my toys; a lot of the kids weren’t big on manners, and a lot of their parents weren’t big on caring what they did.

The first girl in our neighborhood to get pregnant was ten at the time. Ten years old. Need I go on?

This is the closest house to my old one that’s for sale. And here you thought $241 was a car payment, not a mortgage.

Me, I had good parents who invested heavily in me, both financially and otherwise, and I also had good neighbors–the elderly ones who had refused to leave even as the neighborhood degenerated–who kept an eye out for my welfare. With the exception of one rather alarming evening that I spent being held at knifepoint by a paranoid older neighborhood boy who was high out of his mind, I don’t know that I was ever in any serious danger.

Yes, knifepoint, though all he did was talk a lot and refuse to let me go home until after dark. I was too young to realize how much differently that could have ended. Years later, he would get shot in a botched robbery. I don’t know whether he lived.

For a few years, my family was as poor as everyone else. We rode around in an ancient blue boat of a car that we named Blue Bessie. Bessie’s seats were pocked with cigarette burns, and she didn’t smell so great. We ate pancakes for dinner, or egg sandwiches. I can still remember the disappointment and confusion of choosing a pretty outfit for myself only to hand it over to the layaway lady.

But eventually, my parents dragged themselves out of their financial rough patch, and each became the owners of their own successful businesses. As my parents joined the lower middle class, I became more of a pariah as, hilariously enough, a “rich kid.”

It’s amazing to think I once knew anyone who thought two relatively new cars in the driveway, a house that wasn’t peeling with old paint, and a pair of Guess jeans made you rich. The notion is even a little refreshing.

From their Have-Not perspective, I was a Have. Kids stepped on my new shoes on the bus to dirty them up, and I came home crying; the situation got so bad that my parents wound up driving me to school until I was old enough to drive myself. I was teased because I was one of the only kids in my school who didn’t smoke–in fifth grade.

My expansive vocabulary was certainly not appreciated. I can remember getting harassed once because I had used the expression “bound to,” as in, “that’s bound to happen.”

A neighborhood girl said, “bound to? What the fuck does that mean?”

“It’s a figure of speech,” I told her.

“What’s a figure of speech?”

“A figure of speech is … it’s … just something people say.”

“You’re making that up,” she responded angrily. Then she hit me in the face with her fist with an odd sort of gentleness–almost like a chin-chuck to the cheekbone–to see whether I’d fight back. I didn’t, choosing instead to use the brilliant military strategy of standing stock still and praying it would end peacefully; I knew a losing battle when I saw one.

She was so amused that she called a friend over to watch and then hit me again, but harder this time.

My parents drove me to school, but I still had to survive the bus ride home. Once, when I was still in elementary school, a group of kids told me they were going to smash my face and then chased me all the way from the bus stop to my front door. I didn’t have the key–my sister did. I twisted the knob in a panic and begged her to open the door while the kids behind me called out sarcastically that they “just wanted to talk.”

By the time I managed to fling myself inside, I was so terrified I could taste it.

I’m not sure I can really blame them. They had nothing, not even decent shoelaces to keep their shoes on their feet; my mother would quietly replace those shoelaces anytime they came over. One of my neighborhood friends in particular was just as bright as I was, but without any of the opportunities. My parents would ultimately scrimp and save to pay for me to go to one of the top five journalism schools in the entire country. Meanwhile, her parents wouldn’t even take her to our elementary school’s awards night, even though she was being featured prominently.

She won enough awards that the awards presenters eventually just got her a chair near the stage, so she wouldn’t have to keep walking up and down the auditorium aisle. My parents, who had driven her there, were the only ones there to see. I’m glad they could do that for her. Later, they would take her out for ice cream to celebrate.

I doubt her own parents knew or cared where she was that night. She wound up in foster care permanently once their rights were terminated.

When I was in college, my parents finally moved out of my old neighborhood and into a nice subdivision more typical for someone of their income. I walked out of my old house, went away to school, and simply returned at Christmas break to a different house altogether–one with vaulted ceilings and a Jacuzzi tub in the master bathroom. I’ve only been back to the old neighborhood a handful of times, and it’s been years now since I’ve laid eyes on it.

Part of me, though, never really left. And now, it seems, that part of me has a few things to say.

When my derby league is nine months old, I realize my season here is almost over. They’ve grown up now; they can do this themselves. They look to me for reassurance once in a while, but their dependence on me is mostly in their heads. I realize I’m not doing them any favors by stepping in whenever they get confused or upset. It’s time to back off.

I feel that same old restlessness setting in, the feeling I always get when I don’t have my shoulder to the wheel, when I’m not rolling a boulder uphill.

I’m going to Portland, for real this time. I’ve been working on Operation Hobo (my project in which I aim to fit everything in my car) all year, but I kick it up a few notches. The employees at Goodwill know me now. I give away paintings, furniture, anything I can possibly live without.

Meanwhile, more in need of a distraction than ever now that my derby league is running more or less fine without me, I go on a date despite what a bad idea that is for someone in my state of flux.

I walk into a bar, just like it’s the start of a joke, mainly because it usually is.

There he is, already waiting at our table: the one solitary guy who survived the OKCupid elimination process. His name is Andy. He has a dog who is also named Andy, which is just one of the many reasons I have found myself unable to rule him out.

I’m late, flustered. But he looks up at me idly, like we’re old friends and I’ve just come back from the bathroom. Nothing in his face reminds me that I am made of meat. I approve of this.

We talk for hours, pleasantly if not avidly—this is not a story of instant chemistry, exactly, but it goes well enough. It’s the wee hours of the morning before we both stand up. I’ve confessed to seeing what I could find of him online and mentioned that I saw pictures of him on crazy high-tech stilts. As he walks me to my car, it is revealed that said stilts are, in fact, in the back of his car. Which is how I wind up wobbling around a parking deck at 3 AM, on stilts, in borrowed kneepads, making a complete fool of myself while giggling uncontrollably.

Right before I stand up on them, he holds out his hand in that same mild way. He’s not timid about it, but he isn’t hungry either—just thoroughly bemused. I take his hand without having to think about it, and he pulls me up onto my stilts, and right then is when I know for sure I’ll see him again. It’s November 17.

He lets me work my way over to him from my guarded perch on the couch over a series of marathon hangout dates. He sets mugs of tea down in front of me, lets me think it over. I can stay, or not; I can sleep in the guest room, or not; he doesn’t seem to mind one way or the other. This drives me completely crazy, but in the best possible way, because it’s not an act. He isn’t playing hard to get. It’s just my decision, like I said I wanted it to be.

No one has ever been clever enough to wait for that before, to leave me stewing on my side of the table until I’m willing to take responsibility for what’s going on, until I’m willing to show my cards.

I am impressed.

Besides, he owns a T-shirt of the grim reaper riding a unicorn and he knows the difference between rifling through something and riffling through something. Who am I kidding.

I concede the existence of our relationship via a Kindle presentation that includes a diagram of a bee’s knee, and that’s that. It’s December 2.

In the next few weeks, I look like hell. I’ve taken the walk of shame and made an entire lifestyle out of it. Half of the T-shirts I wind up wearing to dinner aren’t mine. I smile stupidly at other people, at my own hands, at cans of beans in the grocery store.

I try to hide what’s happening, but my mother is smug regardless. She can tell I’m getting my ass kicked. She has never seen a loudmouth with so little to say.

I bring over some yoga pants, a toothbrush. I’m casually given a drawer in the bathroom and the code to the garage.

A package comes to the door one afternoon: it’s a present for me. I pry it open, examine it. It’s an entire dictionary of the word “fuck,” a word that I’ve likely uttered more times than just about any other.

I have to sit down with it immediately, astonished. He laughs knowingly at the look on my face when I crack it open.

There is a bird called the windfucker. This is yet another thing I didn’t have before that I have now.

I stop talking about going to Portland. He starts talking about where he should look for work now that his contract is expiring.

We realize we have an awkward problem: if Andy gets a job here, he’s stuck here for quite a while, where I don’t want to be. But if he gets a job elsewhere, surely I can’t just come with him after a month of dating. That would be ridiculous. Right?

An opportunity presents itself in Phoenix. Unwilling to say what I mean, I make up stories about the bloodthirsty zombie gnomes that plague the city. I send him pictures of the Brown Cloud, Phoenix’s seasonal haze of pollution. I also casually mention that I hear the West Coast is really nice this time of year, or any time of year.

A job comes up in California. He asks me what I think.

I pause. “San Francisco is one of my favorite cities in the world,” I say.

He understands the way I talk around things. He decides he’ll take it if they’ll have him. It’s December 21.

While we’re waiting to hear about the job, an enormous opportunity arises for the roller-derby league: the chance to play a real arena, something many leagues never accomplish. It’ll be a massive undertaking of ticket sales and advertising and frantically trying to find a halftime act, and we only have a few weeks to pull it off.

We decide to do it, because we’re insane, as per usual. Plus, we plan to donate 100% of the proceeds, so we figure we can raise a little money for cancer research.

Andy hears back about the job, and it’s a go: we’re moving to California.

It is January 14, almost our whopping two-month anniversary.

I don’t want to get married or anything, though. “I like to wait for the big three-monther for that,” I tell him.

Never in my life will I have whistled louder or longer through a graveyard than I’m about to, and I’ve traversed some very large metaphorical cemeteries in my time.

On January 22, the big bout comes. We have nearly given ourselves ulcers scurrying around with the planning, and I’m just frantically hoping we pull the whole thing off, as we’ve slapped the entire event together with duct tape and a prayer; up until the last moment, we aren’t even sure our event insurance has been approved or whether we’ll have to cancel.

By now, everyone has heard that I’m moving to California with some guy I barely know and they’ve barely heard of. People are startlingly supportive, probably because I clearly already know this is the worst idea ever, which seems to reassure them that I won’t be crushed if it doesn’t work out. It dawns on me that people don’t so much mind foolhardy romantic decisions as long as you don’t sugarcoat those decisions into some kind of fairytale. Most people politely fail to mention those hundreds of thousands of times I swore I’d never live with anyone again. This is nice of them.

The biggest thing everyone is hung up on is how on earth I’m going to manage to get all the way to California in a car. I find this both hilarious and sadly poignant. I keep telling them, “It’s just like a road trip, but longer.”

I’m announcing this bout, just like the last one. When I signed up for it, I didn’t realize it would be good-bye, but it’s one hell of a way to go.

Three thousand people come to see us. Many of the faces are familiar, family members and friends who are seeing roller derby for the first time. When the game comes all the way down to the last moment, the entire stadium roars in a way that will later put goosebumps on my arms when I’m reviewing the footage.

Oh, and in the end, we do manage to raise a little money for cancer research. In fact, when I see the total, I exclaim, “Holy SHIT!” and then hastily check to make sure my microphone isn’t on. (It isn’t.)

We present the total while cancer survivors in the stadium stand up and everyone within a mile radius of that giant check weeps into their shirtsleeves, myself included.

It is one of the proudest days of my life.

When the whole thing is over and the stadium is nearly empty, I pull my earpiece out and marvel that I’m really done; I will stay for the one-year anniversary party, but right now is really the moment that I am done with this endeavor, that I can rest. I spend the afterparty with my head on Andy’s shoulder, exhausted.

We drive Andy and some of his stuff out to California. As we cross the bay bridge and San Francisco rolls by, we can’t stop laughing. Thanks to the wonders of Glympse, my family watches from home as we cross that threshold, and they cheer me on via text message. We hang out our heads out the window, amazed at the gorgeous weather and even more amazed that some people are actually wearing gloves and hats as if it’s cold outside; as two people who grew up in a place where the inside of your nose freezes in the winter (quite a weird feeling, if you’ve never experienced it), we find this hilarious.

We go to the beach, we drive around town, and then we find an apartment. When we’re sitting in the leasing office, I wonder for the billionth time just what the hell I think I’m doing.

I sign on the dotted line and fly back to Illinois to finish Operation Hobo.

I go to the league anniversary party in a car that already has everything I own in it, packed and ready to go for the next morning. I fight tears while my rollergirls say incredibly nice things about me. Walking out to my car from the party, I look up at the night sky and feel my first thrill of this-is-really-happening excitement about leaving the next morning. Just a few more hours.

But when morning comes, I don’t feel excited at all. I feel downright awful, frankly, almost incapacitated with doubt and anxiety. I have forgotten this part, how it feels to really say good-bye. I can scarcely bear the sight of my mother crying in the driveway, and for a minute I want to just call the whole thing off. But I program my GPS, pull into the street, drive away, and proceed to sob brokenheartedly all the way through Illinois. I’m not sure why I expected anything else.

Everything is going to be fine—much better than fine, actually. I’ll settle into the Bay Area, get a job, and walk to work each morning while reminding myself that today is a stunningly beautiful day—not because I’m grouchy, but because on my spot on the bay, almost every day is stunningly beautiful, and you forget to notice that after a while if you aren’t careful. I’ll learn my way around the trains, the streets. People will ask me for directions, and my ability to answer them will please me enormously.

Six months from now, California will feel like home.

Awhile after I get there, Andy will tell me about something he did when he was little, when people were being mean to him. It will be a funny story, but I’ll also feel an anger rise up in me. Is someone being mean to a wee version of Andy sometime back in 1983? Because I will claw my way back in time and rip their limbs off. Don’t think I won’t. Don’t you even TRY it, 1983.

A beat after that flash of rage has subsided, I will recognize that protective instinct for what it is. Andy will have become one of mine. He will have become home, too.

On my way west, I don’t know any of that yet. But as the miles roll by, I start to feel a little lighter. When I get to Iowa, I merge onto I-80, the road I will be on for the next 1,789 miles.

I turn the music up, and I start to sing.

THE END

Thanks to the amazing David Vernon for all images except the cheering little boy (courtesy of Hillary Wasson) and the photobooth collection (courtesy of a couple of dorks in San Francisco).

In dating, you’re considering candidates and choosing the best one you can. In job interviews, the exact same thing is happening. But only in the business world are the economics of this endeavor routinely considered.

There’s an anecdote about a human-resources worker who felt overwhelmed by the stack of resumes sitting in front of him. When he complained to his boss about the grossly unprofitable amount of time it would take to consider such a large number of candidates, his boss picked up the stack, split it in half, threw half of the resumes away, and said, “We don’t want to hire unlucky people.”

In the business world, this is rational for reasons that become clear when you give the notion some thought: a cost-benefit analysis tells you that at some point, the quest to review every single applicant becomes more expensive than hiring someone out of a pool half that size.

But in the dating world, I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of anyone deliberately rejecting perfectly viable candidates even while actively seeking a mate.

Meanwhile, the economics are pretty similar when you think about it … and after being smothered by the OKCupid resource-draining avalanche of messages and winks and chats, I was finally thinking about it. Hard.

Tangentially, there’s another reason to purposely set out to reject as many people as one can: the quest for a happy ending creates a dangerous bias. I’ve argued before, in an old post I can’t find anymore, that our desire for real-life narratives (“They lived happily ever after!”) can be incredibly destructive in romantic situations. The need to feel like the main character in a love story causes people to tell themselves outright lies about themselves and about their relationships—lies that form this wishful mythology that continually reinforces itself toward the conclusion that all of this is meant to be, that they’re making the right decision, and that what they have with their partner is a unique, once-in-a-lifetime, unusually compelling situation.

The obsessive future bridezilla who thumbs through bridal magazines even while single, or the slightly reluctant, mostly accidental girlfriend: whom do you trust more? I can’t imagine not having more faith in the romantic feelings of the latter.

Anyway, my point is, after my harrowing OKCupid experiences, I realized that dating budgets totally exist, and mine had gone into the red about 200 messages ago. It was time to downsize.

My old dating profile was quite long, if you remember.

This was my new dating profile in its entirety, under a completely new name.

Trapdoor Spider Mode: activated.

I winced in anticipation the next day–with my luck, invisibility would turn out to be a wildly popular fetish of some kind–but a peaceful, tranquil inbox greeted me, with nary a “LOL” to ripple its placid surface. Ahhhhh. Now I could concentrate on the task at hand.

Here’s the thing about me: I’m kind of an overachiever. When I settle on a goal, I pursue it with a dogged singlemindedness that is either deeply inspiring or achingly pitiable, depending on the context. My new dating goal was to reject and/or avoid as many men as humanly possible, and I went after that goal with my whole self.

Have you ever noticed the Hide button on OKCupid?

They should make that button bigger. And glowier. And maybe “I Believe I Can Fly” could play on rollover. I don’t know. I’m not a web designer.

My new goal was to find a reason, any reason, to push that button until every single man in a fifty-mile radius had disappeared. If I failed in my quest and stumbled onto some accidental romantic success, so be it, but I was going to do my damnedest to die an old dried-up crone.

I worked on this goal off and on for weeks. It was strangely, soothingly meditative, like popping bubble wrap, if bubble wrap came with built-in affirmations of one’s standards.

There are a million reasons to say no to someone. In dating, we frequently ignore those reasons. What if this one niggling little wrongness in their profile is just a fluke? What if we’re being too judgmental, too rigid? What if we’re harming our chances of finding happiness? So, in the spirit of the old college try, we explain it away with some theoretical excuse and utter the two most ill-fated words in dating history: “Why not?”

Fuck that. You know perfectly well why not. You knew why not the minute you saw why not. 90% of the time, you have been right and will be right in the future, and your mistake is chasing after that 10% possibility. Give up on the other 10%. A corporation would. A niggling wrongness in a job interview rarely causes an HR person to press harder or investigate further. There’s a solid economic reason for that.

I started with my search results and hid as many people as I could based simply on the few lines I got next to the preview thumbnail. This wiped out about half of the candidates.

Then I read each profile with great scrutiny. Sometimes, as I scanned the lines of text, I would panic a little, because I wasn’t immediately seeing any reason to disqualify the person. I was playing the OKCupid version of Supercollapse, and I really like to win at Supercollapse.

But then I’d discover some lurking incompatibility and my face would light up. Aha! Christian and serious about it! HIDE!

Sometimes, I couldn’t put my finger on what was wrong, but something was, all the same. I would confront the profile, standing stock-still in my little hidey-hole, all eight of my black shiny spider-eyes focusing, motionless except for my little spider-hairs trembling minutely in the breeze, and some instinct would tell me no.

I listened.

By the time I’d finished that process, I was down to three. Three, out of hundreds.

I scrutinized their profiles again, grumbled under my breath at their wily ability to evade all of my defenses, and sent each of them a detailed message, complete with photographs, that essentially amounted to a customized dating profile on my behalf.

All three men responded.

Two of those messages included a downright obvious reason to remove the sender from the running.

That left only one.

Just a few weeks. Zero dates. Zero gross messages. Zero stress. It couldn’t possibly be that easy.

But it was.

Let’s recap: online dating made me miserable. If I logged on to slog through my messages, that only made things worse—the “Now Online!” flag on my profile would send another deluge of messages from every godforsaken corner of humanity, including some along the rather creepy lines of I KNOW YOU’RE THERE.

I didn’t feel excited about dating; I felt burdened by it. I didn’t skip to my inbox in anticipation; I dreaded opening it. I was unhappy. Things needed to change.

But when I suspended my account, I hadn’t given up. Not at all.

My personal philosophy is that, barring really unusual circumstances like a recent death in the family, my unhappiness can be blamed not on my circumstances, but on my orientation to those circumstances. When I’ve written about this before, I’ve used the metaphor of snorkeling in the ocean: if you try to stand up or dog-paddle in your fins and snorkel, the ocean beats the crap out of you while you flail around looking ridiculous. Once you’ve oriented yourself properly to the water by floating on its surface instead, suddenly you’re a part of the waves, which lift you up and down without you noticing, and everything is beautifully peaceful.

Same circumstances. Different approach. Less work. Far better experience.

A more recent, even simpler example: I recently spent an hour cursing the violent side-to-side swaying of the BART train, which caused my upper body (and thus my line of sight) to jostle about wildly from left to right and back again while my laptop screen stayed put. I was … unflatteringly nonplussed, we’ll say, as a polite euphemism for the actual level of surliness involved. On the way home, it hit me: I needed only to sit in a seat that faced the side of the car, rather than the back or front, and my laptop and line of sight would stay perfectly aligned. I hopped up to test my theory, experienced the triumph of a proven hypothesis, and then typed merrily the rest of the way home as the sway rolled right through me.

Over time, I’ve developed a confidence that one can do this sort of thing with almost one’s entire life. The best part? The happier alternative is not usually any more work, and is often much easier.

It was time to design an OKCupid approach for myself that worked.

First, I reviewed whether OKC was really the way to go. Sure, OKC is largely populated by men who, to put it very politely, could not be trusted to realistically predict their compatibility with me, but so is the world; if you’re moderately attractive and have a vagina, walk into a bar anywhere and you will find this to be true. Sure, OKC allowed these men an uncomfortable level of access to me, but you can’t squeeze my ass through my inbox, so that’s a flat-out win for OKC. OKC also allowed me to form a crude prediction of intelligence and humor even after zero interaction with the person in question, which could potentially save me a lot of time even considering the margin of error involved.

When you consider its strengths versus the dog-eat-dog, guy-hump-girl jungle of the real world, OKC might just be the best filtration system there is. It is, by design, a brilliant tool, and yet I hated it.

So what was I doing wrong?

A huge myth in dating, and one that showed up both in my e-mail inbox and in the comments section in my previous post, is that, as someone who would like to have a relationship with someone, you owe it to yourself to explore every possible avenue. Dating is not for the weak or the lazy! Forget whether you’re becoming increasingly depressed, forget whether you’re becoming increasingly exhausted: you had better give everyone a chance, or don’t you dare complain about how hard it is to find someone.

Happiness is work, okay? So you get your skinny jeans on and you get your ass in that restaurant chair and you make sparkling conversation with every last potential suitor until your tongue wears through at the base and plops out onto the tablecloth.

After all, how can I expect to find a man if I walk around ruling people out?

The prevailing wisdom is that you’re doing yourself a disservice by reducing your chances of a relationship in any way, regardless of the quality of that relationship and regardless of whether anyone on earth with half a life really has the time to date with this level of gusto.

None of those comments or e-mails considered how much time I can afford to spend on dating. None of them consider whether it’s really healthy for me to devote my brainpower to giving 1,692 men the benefit of the doubt (and most of these men honestly could not be differentiated from one another in terms of quality, so unless my commenters have a rubric for choosing “hey LOL” over “hi whats up,” 1,692 is what I would be stuck with). All of them assume that being single is something I want to avoid at any cost.

If I have to earn love by spending all of my free time by offering chances to anyone who wants one, well, that’s just the price of finding a man.

The sad thing about this demoralizing, all-consuming effort is that it doesn’t even work any better. How on earth are you going to find the right person if you’re busy and tired and preoccupied? How are you going to find Mr. Awesome if you’re continually already dating Mr. Meh?

I also think that some of those comments echo this sulky bullshit sentiment that has soaked into society to the point that even WOMEN will criticize me for refusing to talk to total creeps: Heyyy, honey, you looking fine today. What’s up, baby? Oh, what, you’re too good to talk to me? You think you’re too good for me?

Thanks for the brainwashing, patriarchy.

Thinking you’re too good for someone. That’s this damning accusation somehow, even if I don’t really understand how; I’m choosing who gets to sleep with me, not cutting in front of people at the DMV. Of course we think we’re too good for some people—hell, most people. We are our entire point of reference regarding humanity; studies have shown that almost all of us will describe ourselves as above average. We have never been anyone else, and from where we’re standing, we are better than all kinds of people. That’s human nature, for God’s sake.

The good news is that the best of us grasp that we are making this judgment, this “who is better” judgment, according to our own extreme bias, not any sort of objective truth. The best of us realize that, no matter how superior we might feel from our perspective, it isn’t really about human worth, but about compatibility and the lack thereof.

Come on. I’m a raging intellectual do-gooder who loves poetry and literature and quantum physics. I am never going to love some guy who would hoot at me on the street, and so what?

I can want whatever I want. I can demand that my date pick me up in a yacht, wearing a banana costume, singing “Peanut Butter Jelly Time.” I can insist on a vegan, pro-life Republican Unitarian Universalist. I can demand whatever I want, with just one catch: I have to be willing to die alone if I don’t get it. I have to have performed a cost-benefit analysis that tells me that being alone is not the worst thing that could happen to me—not by far. I have to figure out where that threshold is, and as long as I do that with a decent degree of accuracy, being alone is guaranteed to make me happier than entering into a relationship that does not meet these terms.

Contrary to those commenters, I don’t think it’s in my best interest to sacrifice those standards, and I don’t want you to sacrifice your standards, either. Just be honest with yourself about what you can’t live with, and if the resulting list of demands makes you look like a prissy snob, so be it. Maybe most would say you are. Who cares?

It horrifies me that my dating rule about my own body, and who has access to it, could possibly be considered unreasonable or selfish, as if it’s my duty as a single person to remain as convenient and cooperative of a human being as possible even when it comes to sexual boundaries. Can dating, this incredibly personal process where you choose someone who will wield enormous emotional clout over you and your well-being, please be the one arena where you aren’t expected to sacrifice such things in the name of political correctness?

After thinking all of this over, I came to the exact opposite conclusion of those commenters, and I realized my error.

I, in my sweet innocence, had been looking for someone to date. The counterintuitive truth? I should have been looking for people to reject.

As inspiration dawned, I sat back down at my computer and opened a fresh OKC profile. Just like that, Operation Trapdoor Spider was born.

When I decided to return to my hometown for a year to build a roller-derby league, I only really had one social rule: Absolutely No Dating. I had good reason to avoid the dating scene; I had big plans to move to the West Coast once I had gotten rid of almost everything I owned, but knew I would get attached in the meantime and wind up in a complicated romantic situation.

You can see where this is going already, can’t you.

I’ve always avoided casual dating for a number of reasons. First of all, I just have no knack for sluttery. This is a shame, because it looks pretty fun–all those sweaty mascara-smeared strangers just sort of drunkenly flinging each other around against vehicles and cabinetry and appliances and whatnot–but I’ve never really been able to get into it. The only one-night stand I’ve ever had was very carefully selected from afar and then shamelessly pursued as such: My First One-Night Stand, as if someone were going to add it to my baby book or something.

And then that the whole thing accidentally went on for like eight months in a row as we dated some more and then became exclusive and then got pretty serious there for a while. I’m told that eight months is not at all typical length for one-night stands. Oops?

But hey, at least I tried. The road to heaven is, apparently, paved with my bad intentions.

Other attempts at moral decay include this one time, when I was seventeen, that I kissed a guy even though I had a serious boyfriend already (who was very glamorous on account of being one whole year older and who was probably going to marry me because we were in love, like Rose and Jack in Titanic). After said unfaithful kiss, I spent the next several hours vomiting with guilt. When I finally did manage to get my head out of the toilet, it was only to stare blearily at the clock, waiting for morning to come so that I could call my boyfriend to confess.

It would have been rude to call him in the middle of the night, you see.

Second of all, I was extremely jaded toward dating in general. The last date I had been on (excluding any breathtakingly choreographed eight-month one-night stands) had turned into an actual hostage situation after the suitor in question physically attached himself to me via his face and flat-out refused—and I do mean refused—to let me end the date. It would have legally counted as date rape if we were lampreys instead of people.

Where was I? Oh, yes. No dating. That was the rule.

But I had forgotten one thing: I was in Peoria, without the giant posse of amazing single and/or independent women I had played roller derby with. I loved my new derby league, and am friends with many of them today. But back then, they were first and foremost my skaters—it was my job to boss them around, and for a long time I felt I needed my credibility as a coach more than I needed friends.

So, as Saturday night after Saturday night went by without plans, my resolve weakened and then dissolved altogether, and I sat down one night to compose my own personal opus of an OKCupid profile.

Pleased that I had managed to represent myself pretty accurately, but bummed at all-too-real memories of failed Real Doll telethons (if calling officemates from your cubicle for comedic effect counts as a telethon), I fell into bed, dubious but hopeful.

I really might as well not have bothered with any of it, but I wouldn’t realize that until I had suffered enormously for your comedic pleasure.

If I knew how we got from there to here, I think I really would write a book about it. But as time has passed, the nights at the rink, the hours of board meetings, the legal paperwork, the radio interviews, and the photo shoots have mushed into a frenetic blur interspersed with beeps from my stopwatch.

I had never worked so hard in my life, I can tell you that. I doubt any of them had, either. I didn’t do any of this myself, of course; this is just my story.

Most people, even those who hit the gym regularly, have no idea what their bodies are really capable of. It takes a coach or a personal trainer to help you understand just how easy you’ve been on yourself and just how much work goes into that killer set of abs that is always going to elude you if you log your twenty minutes on the elliptical machine and call it a day. People don’t realize what they can do. Women, especially, don’t realize what they can do in an arena of life that didn’t make much of a place for them until Title IX showed up in 1972.

And as someone who has suffered mightily as both a long-distance runner and a rollergirl, I can vouch for the fact that it really, really hurts to find out.

In roller derby, thirty minutes of jogging is not exercise. Thirty minutes of jogging is a warmup. The three hours after that is exercise.

A lot of skaters dropped out, of course. On their way out the door, none of them said, “You want me to do how many jump burpees? ON SKATES? Bitch, you crazy,” but several of them were quite obviously thinking it. The exhausted, stubborn remainder of them gritted their teeth and stayed with me through jogging intervals, sprint laps, push-ups, wall sits, and endless other tortures. They would sing through the drills, or they would scream at each other to keep going.

One woman puked at every practice and still refused to quit. Two skaters broke their ankles, one shattering it so badly that the doctor couldn’t believe she hadn’t been skydiving.

But hey, it’s roller derby. You get your x-rays, you post them proudly on your Facebook profile, you let us pimp your walker for you, and you come back as soon as you can.

Meanwhile, I learned to build a derby track out of painter’s tape. I helped draft attendance policies, and disciplinary policies, and policies about how often we were allowed to change all of our other policies. I chased off creeps who wanted to hang out at the rink and leer at us. I spent hours on the phone talking individual players down off the ledge. I scrambled to come up with hurdles as quickly as my skaters managed to jump over the last one I had put in front of them. I sat up at night, coming up with drills and tests and rewards to keep people motivated, the most popular one being this magnet:

One of these would later be abducted, though we all still received updates from the stolen unicorn’s Facebook page until November of 2010, when the trail went ominously cold.

Along the way, those skaters, the ones who wore their mouthguards upside-down and their toe stops backward, learned to fall. Then they learned to skate. Then they learned to skate harder and faster and farther. They learned how to skate in packs until they could skate close enough to click wheels occasionally, all without kicking one another in the shins or reflexively grabbing one another’s shirts when they stumbled.

Then they learned to hit.

We lost a few skaters at that stage, but the rest of them? I couldn’t have talked them out of it by then.

We built it up, piece by piece. One on one. Two on two. Two on two with one jammer. Three on three with one jammer. Three on three with two jammers. Eventually, so predictably and yet so impossibly, the day came when we were ready to try four on four with two jammers …

… or, as it is more commonly known, roller derby.

They pulled on their pristine, sparkly helmet covers, which had just arrived in the mail and thus did not yet smell of sweat and fear. They lined up on the line, and I said “beep!” (we were not yet advanced enough to have a ref staff armed with real whistles), and off they went, around the track: game on.

Just like that, they were playing roller derby. They were rollergirls.

Don’t ask me what I expected. I imagine that people who spend months and months gestating a baby can relate. When it finally falls out into someone’s hands and screams for the first time in its life, I’m willing to bet that most people don’t think, Well, of course. Instead, I’d put my money on Holy shit, it’s a BABY!

I was no less astonished. Holy shit, it’s a derby league!

I can’t tell you how strange it has been to watch those lumbering, timid skaters develop to the point that any one of them could totally kick my ass. This must be what it’s like for parents whose children grow taller than they are, richer than they are, smarter than they are. It’s this strange mix of wistful jealousy and all-consuming pride, but mostly the latter.

If I had a wallet, it would be full of dozens of pictures like these (taken by the amazing David Vernon and used with permission), and I would point at each of them in turn while bragging about all of them to anyone who could listen, including innocent grocery-store patrons and anyone unlucky enough to share an airplane with me.

When we booked our first home game, we weren’t sure whether anyone would come. As coach of the entire league (which had split into teams), I couldn’t sit on one bench or the other, so I signed on as announcer, being the only person not already playing or reffing that night who understood the rules.

The night before the game, we hammered our sport floor into place with rubber mallets until two in the morning. The day of the game, our scoreboard broke, we couldn’t find the key to the venue’s bathrooms, we bought way too many concessions, the track we had laid down wouldn’t stick to the floor, and I carried my toothbrush around in one hand for forty-five minutes as a barrage of questions kept me from managing to stop talking for long enough to actually use it. (You will be relieved to hear that I did get to use it eventually, even if I was interrupted by a few nervous dry-heavers.)

Right before the doors were scheduled to open to the public, I decided to steal a peek outside to see whether any brand-new roller derby fans had lined up yet.

When I stuck my head out the door, my ex-husband (who had not only shown up to support me, but had gotten one of the first spots in line) was hugging me before I had managed to close my gaping mouth. The line behind him wrapped all the way around the building and out of sight.

My hometown, that place I had originally dismissed as being too small to offer me anything of interest in my life, had completely sold out its first roller-derby bout.

Way far away, a hundred people back, a tiny squeaky person was waving her arms and jumping up and down. It was my mother, and I’m sure the surrounding crowd was amused at the sight of their microphone-clutching announcer jogging along the line to get a hug from her mommy.

“Can you believe this? Can you believe this?” she just kept saying as we danced around. I really couldn’t. I kind of still can’t.

Holy shit, you guys. It’s a derby league.

A few days after my new roller-derby league’s first practice at the rink, I moved into my new apartment, a decrepit studio roosted atop the tiny row of shops on Main Street. My mother had been right: it was exactly the sort of outdated decor I’d find endearing, complete with hideous linoleum. (Floral and geometric? How exotic!) The place had no shower and a kitchen sink that sprayed water in three different directions (none of them “downward,” sadly). But my parents had kindly applied a stunning new paint job to it, and I noted its crystal doorknobs, arched doorways, deep cast-iron tub, and built-in cabinetry with approval.

I scored this wee residence for a pittance of $500 a month, including heat and water.

At the time, I was trying to take a picture of my bike, not my apartment. That’s probably obvious.

This felt like home, for sure. It was the realm outside those walls I was less certain about.

In the movies, smaller-town life is often portrayed as charming and quaint, and it certainly can be. Take the airport, for instance. You can just … park right there, in the lot in front of it, like it’s Target. Finding your gate shouldn’t be too hard, either—there are only seven of them, lined up in a row. The most awkward part will happen once you’ve been led outside to your plane, as it can be difficult to clamber up that funny metal staircase-on-wheels while clutching your carry-on. (It helps to pretend that you are the president of the United States, or perhaps a very successful 1960s musician.)

So yes, it’s quirky. It’s endearing. But sometimes, it’s also heartbreaking.

When I was young, someone I loved, someone I associated with sweet tea and summer and perfectly buttered mashed potatoes, turned away from her stove, looked me up and down, and asked me to promise her that I would not grow up gay. I sat there, perched on one of her kitchen chairs, and I promised.

She did not ask me to promise that I wouldn’t grow up black, but I’m guessing that’s only because I was a safer bet on that one.

I think it’s probably easier to pass judgment on the Midwestern universe if you don’t associate it with lightning bugs and pie, but trust me, I’m painfully aware of its shortcomings. The only two black kids at my high school dated one another in the most foregone conclusion in prom history. A few Latino kids roamed the halls as well, always together; we referred to them collectively as the Spanish Armada. I was in my twenties before I realized that Buddhists were not in the habit of worshipping a fat golden idol, as I had been taught.

And then there was the “hell house,” the Christian version of a haunted house offering its patrons a montage of all the misdeeds that can send one to eternal damnation, including the infamous abortion scene. Let’s not forget “Heaven’s Gates and Hell’s Flames,” a popular play I attended completely unironically as a teenager, which depicts Satan yanking people into hell, including small children who had died in a car accident after choosing to go fishing with their father instead of attending church with their mother that Sunday.

If none of that impresses you, I can tell you that when a bride I know chose an ivory dress for her wedding, she was asked, with great concern, how anyone would know she was a virgin. I guess she was kind of asking for it, though, strutting around in a color the manufacturer had labeled “Candlelight” like some kind of two-penny whore.

By the time I returned last year, things had gotten better, and yet.

I froze when I heard the phrase “openly homosexual” used to imply audacity, and I excused myself entirely when someone my age dropped the n-word at a party (though I wasn’t surprised; on a previous visit home, a young man at a similar gathering had explained to me it wasn’t that he was racist—it was that Mexicans were lazy). I just quietly hoped for the best when one of my skaters would acknowledge that her boyfriend or husband, the same one who would call her ten times an hour anytime she left the house without him, felt threatened by her desire to pursue their own interests. I tried to control my temper when people asked me whether any of my skaters were gay.

“Some people ask if we’re a bunch of lesbians,” one skater told me worriedly.

“The next time someone asks you that, ask them why it would matter if you were,” I responded, once I had managed to quell my inner rage well enough to avoid alarming her with the vehemence of my reply.

The question so common, they even made a T-shirt about it. (The “Yes, Mom, roller derby made me gay” shirt is even better, but alas, it no longer appears to be sold anywhere.)

The promise to not grow up gay, the one I made before I had any idea how horrified my adulthood friends would be to hear of it, highlights the paradox of Midwestern childhood. You want that woman at the stove to be evil, to be hateful, but she isn’t. She is profoundly lovable. They are profoundly lovable. They’ll pull the beaters out of the cake batter and hand them to you to lick clean before shooing you out of the kitchen. They’ll turn on the sprinklers for you to run through, and they’ll put the chain back on your bike even if you’re just the neighbor kid passing by. When the streetlights wake up and call you home, they’ll usher you in and bandage your scuffed knees and scrub your hands soapy clean.

And then, after they’ve passed the plates and broken the bread, they’ll share their wisdoms earnestly, with the pitch-perfect believability of people who have no idea they are wrong.

I was wrong, too, it turns out. I thought I would one day be able to look back on that promise I made as a child and see it as more intolerant than anything that happens anywhere else. I hoped to escape the suspicion and hatred that so many people around me expressed anytime they encountered someone different. These aspirations, of course, conveniently ignored my own capacity for widespread disdain and my own continual compulsion to sort everyone into an Us box and a Them box. Oops.

When I left to find this utopia, the inhabitants of my small town were the nicest people I knew. That’s not so strange; I hadn’t met anyone else. But it would have given me pause, back then, to know that this past year, sixty-nine cities and eleven countries later, I have confirmed that they still are.

I think I might owe them an apology.

These women, my skaters, worked so much harder than I expected, and with an astonishing level of humility and integrity. They weren’t too insecure to accept feedback. Having become used to dealing with the sort of identity-oriented fanaticism that can cause people to defend their choice of bicycle-gear style with rabid ferocity, I couldn’t believe how easily they would accept a suggestion, and even thank me for it.

And holy smokes, they made me laugh. Even their gratitude had a sense of humor, judging from the unicorn head on a stick I was offered as a token of their appreciation.

That picture was taken at a surprise birthday party they organized for me upon realizing that I knew hardly anyone in town besides them. Not a single one of them was vegan, but my birthday cake was. When I had decided to take the coaching position, I had been adamant that I would not tolerate bigotry or discrimination in my league, but in retrospect, I had little reason to worry about it. At practice, it was not unusual to see a Mormon skater standing next to a Wiccan skater standing next to a butch woman in a COUGAR BAIT T-shirt.

The Midwestern stereotype still exists for a reason, of course, but guess what? It’s just a stereotype, and it’s not the only one out there. On average, perhaps big-city folk are less likely to judge you for being gay than their rural counterparts, but an alarming number of them will judge you for almost everything else you can imagine, including visible pantylines and meals at chain restaurants. They are more progressive, but they can also be more shallow and almost exhausting in their hatred of any fashion trend or any style of tattoo or any other gesture that could be seen as conformist or contrived or played out.

I know Midwesterners who would not be caught dead at a gay wedding or at a rap concert. I know city dwellers who would not be caught dead eating at Olive Garden or wearing a scrunchie. In either scenario, the person in question has an overblown sense of impropriety. In either scenario, a sense of prim virtue is maintained. In either scenario, someone has to be inferior.

I mean, really, “the flyover states”? I know people who will defend the rights of animals and ethnic groups and drag queens but will still use that expression in mixed company.

Before the credits rolled on my cinematic year, I didn’t learn that home is where the heart is. I didn’t find where I belonged. I didn’t tear up any plane tickets or stick a SOLD! sign in the yards of any picturesque houses or make any other dramatic declarations that the Midwest is the place to be. Much to my regret, I did not deliver a baby cow and then name it Norman and adopt it, Billy Crystal style.

But I did confirm that kindness and positivity get more done than a subscription to any particular creed or belief system, and that intolerance and bigotry are both more widespread and less uniformly present in any given group of people than a lot of us enjoy believing.

“Man, I bet you’re glad to be out of there!” is a sentiment I hear frequently now that I’ve moved to the Bay Area–a subtle, sometimes anxious request for confirmation that I don’t have a Glenn Beck poster on my bedroom ceiling. I don’t really mind, but I can’t help but laugh at the irony: if I wanted to walk around promising people that I’m just like them and always will be, I might as well have never left home.

We’re not so different after all? Make love, not war?

I guess these do kind of sound like themes from a cheesy movie. I may not be Emilio Estevez, but I don’t call it my cinematic year for nothing. And I have to warn you … it gets worse.

(Ed. note: While a technical grasp of the game isn’t required to read this post, if you’re curious, you can find a quick explanation video here. Go ahead, I’ll wait.)

“I’m shocked you moved back,” my friend Sienna wrote me upon hearing the news. By then, I had grown accustomed to such reactions. Hardly anyone was neutral on the subject. The friends I was leaving behind were deeply skeptical. My childhood best friend, who had helped talk me into coming back home to begin with, was thrilled. My parents were ecstatic.

My soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend was … deeply unenthused, for reasons that I had to admit were obvious at the time, despite how innocently I had presented the idea.

Me, I was just concerned that I had lost my mind.

Have you ever built a roller-derby league from scratch? No? Well, it’s just like building any other sports league: no big deal once you’ve found a practice venue, established an organizational committee structure, secured sponsors, set up a board of directors, built a website, handed out insurance waivers, and so on …

… oh, except for the part where absolutely no one involved has any idea how to play the sport in question.

No one except for me, of course, which was why I had chosen to sign up as the head coach of a nonexistent roller-derby league. Nevermind that I had never taught a group of people how to play roller derby in my life; after moving away, I had played it myself, in an underwhelmingly mediocre fashion, for three years.

I was far from an expert. I just knew more than they did.

So I volunteered, the way I would volunteer on an airplane if some first-aid class I had taken ten years ago made me the closest thing to a doctor anyone could find on board: I didn’t raise my hand because I was confident in my ability to jam the shaft of my hollowed-out ink pen into someone’s blocked windpipe.

I did it because there was no one else, and I did it because roller derby saves lives.

Roller derby had saved my life, anyway. It had taught me not to settle, that I could do more, be more. It had taught me that women are some of the most underestimated, most beautiful, and toughest creatures in the world. It had purged me of prejudices and doubts accumulated over years spent in a local culture that undervalues women who don’t have husbands or families or supreme beings to call their own. It had dragged me down a long, winding staircase from the heights of that stagnant, airless turret of perfectionism that so many women spend their lives rabidly clambering into, and it had bounced me off the floor, over and over again, rattling my teeth in my skull and elbowing me in the throat until I was finally willing to concede that failure is not the humiliating dead end I had been so terrified of, but a necessary catalyst for growth.

I now held so very dear this profound, counterintuitive truth: nothing is better for you than getting the shit beat out of you in public.

I wanted that for everyone I knew: I wanted them to suffer, and to learn, and to grow. I wanted derby to break them open the way I had been broken open. And for once in my life, I saw a clear opportunity to facilitate that for a group of women I had grown up alongside, and I knew that if I didn’t say yes, they might not find someone who would.

So I rented my future apartment, sight unseen, based on a few dim picture messages from my mother. I stood on my boyfriend’s deck in Los Angeles, stared out at the palm trees, pressed the phone to my ear anxiously, and wondered just how huge of a mistake I was making as my mother promised me that she had picked out the perfect apartment.

“You’ll love it,” she told me. “It’s REALLY old.”

Having committed myself to the cause, for better or worse, I jumped from flight to flight to snag available seats and make it there for their first practice, scrambling from Los Angeles to Denver to Chicago and finally, with little time to spare, to Peoria, where I threw my luggage in my parents’ basement, climbed into the car, and proceeded to get lost as I searched for a rink that, judging from its elusive address, was surely located far from anything resembling a main road, in some sort of large barn that it shared with various livestock.

When I finally found it, after circling a few fields and cursing and wondering where everyone was hiding all the streetlights, I walked through the door, and I saw my skaters for the very first time.

This is where I confess something to you.

After expressing her initial shock, as related earlier, my friend Sienna had made an additional comment that stands out in my memory:

“It sounds like a movie. ‘Home is the last place she expected to find herself.’ Or some such voice-over announcement.”

Standing there in the rink, I realized with some dismay that I MYSELF had become that highly deluded voice-over announcer, having somehow erroneously decided I was the main character of some sort of feminized Mighty Ducks spinoff.

I had gotten divorced and was starting over from scratch, so this opportunity was, what, the sports team that would give me a reason to get out of bed again and put the meaning back into my life? Cue notions of myself as the grizzled character who greets the audience initially by rolling out of bed in some dingy motel and reaching for the whiskey on the nightstand, but who has redeemed herself completely by the end by resurrecting her past failures into a triumphant legacy, bringing out the best in humanity with a passion and finesse that makes the Stand and Deliver guy look like some kind of amateur.

Ooh, and let me guess, this character will also use her same old hometown as a lens through which to view the ways in which she has changed and the ways in which she remains ever the same, and then, for good measure, she’ll meet a love interest when she least expects it?

Who on earth was I kidding?

No matter how embarrassing it is to admit, I have to tell you that from the moment I had first considered the entire venture, despite my genuine anxiety at the enormity of the task, a certainty had been breeding among my less rational neurons that I was actually, deep down in my soul, Emilio Estevez circa 1992.

(You can sort of see the resemblance if you squint really hard, like “all the way” hard, while also picturing his face.)

This painfully optimistic notion had gained steam with every decision made and every mile traveled, building a momentum that had carried me here.

And as I stood there in the rink that first night, that certainty cackled at the absurdity of its own hubris and flew away, having plonked me down into uncharted territory and left me for dead.

Most of these skaters weren’t wearing helmets or any other protective gear. Some of them barely knew how to skate, hanging on to the wall as they made their way along. Their knees were bare. Their wrists were bare. They looked so strange to me, these wobbly and vulnerable apparitions, these Skaters of Shattered Patellas Future. (They flailed their arms dramatically, of course, like any self-respecting specter of my folly would.)

After I had strapped on my gear and buckled my helmet under my chin, I rolled out onto the floor. They gathered around me in a semicircle and waited for me to say something.

“Where’s your gear?” I asked them.

“In our skate bags,” one of them answered, gesturing to the benches that were piled with bags of their gear, which was presumably preventing compound fractures remotely, through the powers of inanimate telepathy.

“Well … go put it on,” was my astonished answer. No one moved.

“Go put it on now,” I clarified, at which point they offered the most lethargic human interpretation of “hustling” ever seen outside a nursing home, ambling over to their bags at a geriatric pace and swapping life stories with one another while they put their helmets on backward.

That gnawing doubt bit down even harder. I had abandoned Trader Joe’s, and so I could do what? Fail spectacularly, is what, doubt whispered around its mouthful of my poor tender limbs. And then die penniless and alone, probably.

Doubt is annoyingly prone to non sequiturs.

I breathed in, I breathed out, and I reassured myself that while I clearly was not 1992 Emilio Estevez after all, I had, at least, just figured out where to begin:

LESSON 1: Kneepads are for knees.
Hence the name.

LESSON 2: Hurry the fuck up.
You’re wearing wheels on your feet for a reason.

We started from there. Somehow, even without the benefit of a director or a script or our own team of hack writers, we started from there.