Last week I posted several recaps of the Wisconsin Writers Association annual conference on my newsletter website. If you’re curious, start here.

I was delighted to learn there’s been a surge of interest in analog puzzle books. One of my pipe dreams is to construct crossword puzzles and get them published. Seems like a good season for such aspirations!

Ultreia et suseia!

Not long after I returned home in a state of inspiration and exhilaration from the WWA conference, I came to the uncomfortable conclusion that the little black pills that had been accumulating beneath my car for at least a week were not, in fact, bits of road tar. I guess this is the eventual price one pays for parking in an alley. First I alerted my landlady, who cleaned up the existing droppings and laid out traps. But fresh evidence continued to accumulate that my car had a squatter, so I resigned to visit my local dealership’s service center for a rodent exorcism.

There’s no evidence of incursions into the cabin or the trunk, thank God. To date my stowaway has remained in that no-man’s-land of the frame; that interstice between outside and inside. Still, I’m puzzled by the timeline and persistence of this problem, considering that I first saw hints of the rat before I went to Manitowoc. Did it hitch a ride beneath my car for those long highway drives? If so, did it truly spend two days foraging in completely unfamiliar surroundings and continually find its way back to my car in order to keep haunting it once I returned? Alternately, when I departed, was it forced to hole up in some rat halfway home in the alley until I came back? In that case, why did it return instead of sticking with its new domicile?

At the dealership I felt apologetic, embarrassed, even, when I described to the technician how the undercarriage of my vehicle seemed to have become a motel. He took it in stride and philosophically observed, “Rats gotta live somewhere, too.” Yes, I agreed—yes. I would really love for my life not to impede on anyone or anything else’s. Could we just not make my car the locus of that ideal, please?

But where ought a rat to live, then, and carry on with its right to survive? Where can it go where no one will mind its presence? What mutually beneficial rat–human solution will not, for example, cost me in disgust, potential health risks, and the specter of costly auto repairs? And what of the rat’s needs? My personal preferences aren’t the whole story, here—Mr. or Ms. Rat gets to make their case too, right?

Meanwhile it’s funny to think that a week and a half ago I myself temporarily burrowed into a shelter that didn’t belong to me, spreading out my clothes and notebooks and toiletries and relocating blankets from the unused double bed for optimal comfort and even, yes, bathing and performing various private tasks in that space during the two days when I attended the writers’ conference. Does that make me a pest?

Why can I go to someplace where I have never been and be confident I will secure shelter? Food? Civil treatment? What makes me so different from the rat that I get to go where I want and do what I want? Is it my credit card? Biological affinity to the owners of the hotel where I stayed? My talent for ingratiating myself to people? Or is it something more basic and unsettling: am I able to live and move in a way very similar to a rat without being loathed like one because I believe I have rights and I am fortunate—most of the time—to be places where people aren’t interested in contesting that belief?

For as often as life runs smoothly, there are moments when one collides with an invisible limit—an unspoken perimeter beyond which a person is expected not to stray. Within that circumference you enjoy all rights and benefits. Outside of it? Rat.

Where this line is can be hard to identify. Too often in my childhood it seemed like a cosmic surveying miscalculation had spray-painted the line right across my face. For a few years I was regularly punched; sometimes my things were broken; I loaned items to “friends” that never made their way back to me. And home life was often baffling (although I want to be clear here that this was pretty good in many respects, with my parents doing much better by me than theirs had done by them), raising a persistent sore question of whether I ought to be proud of myself or not, whether my company was desired or not, if I possessed dignity and the right to my own convictions and passions or not.

In college I dreamed I would escape all of this—that through overweening gregariousness and academic achievements I would be permanently liberated from these cosmic clerical errors and granted the full human dignity I had not yet managed to grasp. But in my ignorance of polite society I swung between over- and undercompensation. I strove for high marks, but while I earned them I did not apparently merit mentorship (one of my topically passionate yet impersonal professors later christened me a “non-quantity;” my advisor limply apologized in the final week of my senior year for not “paying me more attention”). I disqualified myself from every extracurricular I came across, ignorant of the benefits they might bring and assuming I didn’t have the time or aptitude to pursue them. And some of the most important collegiate lessons I gleaned from my peer group, which turned out to contain a surprising number of species of higher rank than me. All told, I graduated with an acute awareness that society has sophisticated tools for ensuring the rat–human frontier remains a wriggling mass of baffling civil barriers—and that I was usually on the wrong side of those barriers.

After a particularly painful confrontation with my vermin-likeness in grad school, I recanted my foolish pretensions to glorious personhood and skittered off into a life of concerted mediocrity. I became a useful pest, Adam-a-touille, hiding under the hat of my betters and helping them look good in exchange for treats and a hole in the wall of my own. I vowed to remain in the shadows, twitching, heart always racing, nose always to the wind.

Then, nearly ten years into this self-imposed life of misery, one of the best things happened to me: I was cast out.

It’s been a decade since society announced to me, in the form of a mass layoff of several thousand of us rats, that no, not even the little nest of unremarkableness which I’d assigned to myself in the undercarriage of the economy car of life—not even this hovel was safe from being condemned and fumigated. How brilliantly, ironically freeing this was!

For it dawned on me when this happened that there was no safety in clinging to mediocrity or submitting to the same. If the eviction notice could come no matter how small I made myself, then this rat may as well go big. Or at least go IDGAF.

So I set aside the societal obligation to immediately find another car to crawl up into. I began instead to travel. My hunger to write reawakened with force. And after a couple of years of fruitless job searching, I set that comedy of exasperation aside and began to freelance. I started to do what I loved, when I wanted to, rather than marching where the classical workforce permitted me to go; rather than limiting myself to the menial tasks which office bureaucracies decreed were suited to someone of my station.

I rediscovered along the way that one of the things I love the most is helping people. I’ve always loved helping people, but finally I was doing it on my own terms, helping others to achieve on their own terms.

First I lent my skills to an aviation education foundation, helping them gain visibility and support for their mission to teach teenagers how to fly. Then (and still today) I bent my talents to helping writers and small presses. And today my personal vision remains active: to help others experience something radically different from what I experienced, which is to say dignity. Compassionate attention. Practical empowerment suited to particular writing needs.

I love showering hope and enthusiasm on creators who need their own cautious hope and enthusiasm to be reflected back and amplified. I love pushing past the boundaries of a corporate publishing industry (which is distinct, I think, from the much more humane world of small presses) that presumes to dictate who may write and be heard. I love walking alongside others as they invade territory of creative connection—and discover to their delight they are already citizens there. I love lending my hand and the sweat of my brow to help writers dig deep into the rich loam of their artistic souls to unearth what remains to be discovered there.

And yet there are times like this week where those dreams, as vivid as they are, feel hard to grasp. Times when I’m dealing with vehicular intruders, and lower-than-desirable profits in my still-young small business, and the ever-ballooning cost of living, and a sociopolitical apparatus that seems hellbent on reclassifying as many people as possible as rats, then punishing them with prejudice for existing. (My hands are folded fervently in prayer for justice and sanity and compassion to surge this voting week and in all weeks which follow.)

Even when outside forces are not stalking me, the pressure mounts within now and then. A part of me would evict me from my hard-won life of free agency. Many of us suffer from this malady, I think, even after we begin to take our medicine of dignity. We just have so much practice paying in the currency of flattery, of humor, of silence, of high performance, of obeying orders, of following protocol. Maybe, like me, you’ve even tried to barge your way in with bluster. All these forms of dysfunctional overcompensation come to feel natural. Necessary. They’re not, but they often don’t feel like they’re not. They feel vital to our safety and flourishing. It’s tough to release that conviction.

All of this is meant to say that it was a long road into inner subservience—so it’s a long road out.

Another complication in my journey toward wholeness and self-esteem and effectively helping others to claim the same is that the economy of permission is not entirely a bad thing. I mean, metaphors and platitudes aside, I really do want that rat out of my car. And I’d feel irresponsible suggesting that I ought to be able to do anything that occurs to me to do or write anything that crosses my sometimes-uncivilized mind. And material reality seems to require that satisfaction is not always perfect and universal, seeing as no two butts can occupy the same seat in musical chairs, nor two books the same space on a bookshelf, nor two bodies the same pair of pants (unless, I suppose, you get those pants from a gag gift store).

Any of these realities sometimes causes me to feel confused and desperate. They tempt me to turn back and crawl into a hole. Then I remember how much of my life I squandered trying to bargain for permission in society, and how very little I gained other than stress, disappointment, and even humiliation. I remember that these trite medicines toward which desperation would drive me will not cure me. And I recall that difficulty is merely a condition, not an indictment.

When the fog of panic lifts, I always find I am faced with the same choice: to surrender myself to the caprices of the status quo or to politely decline, then resume embracing and doing what I love and believe in. Trusting that in time I will persevere; and that even if I do not, I am winning the more important battle of maintaining integrity.

And that is more priceless in my book than any fraudulent certificate of permission. Whatever else may trouble me in life, I sleep better most nights than I did for the first forty years of my existence. For this reason alone, I feel confident I’m doing something right.

And I daresay you’re doing something right, too.

Ultreia et suseia, my beautiful, estimable fellow rats,

Adam