Elizabeth C. Haynes

This past Monday night I did something I’ve wanted to do since I was probably six years old – I went to my first pottery class. Why it took me until almost age thirty-nine to get there I don’t know, but I suppose it was a mix of ambivalence and fear. And a poor sense of priorities as I battled against my obligations. You know how that goes.

When I was in elementary school my dad bought me a mini pottery wheel that I’d asked for at some point in the fall, either for my birthday (in November) or for Christmas. It was just a little toy that probably couldn’t make anything worth anything, but I was so excited to finally have it as my first introduction to ceramics. The problem was, it required clay or some other part that I didn’t have (and that my mother couldn’t afford), so I waited for a few days until I was to visit my dad for the weekend. He could fix my problem and I could be on my way.

I remember only a little bit about this particular day – one that is so poignant in my life story. I remember my dad coming to get me as he always did. I remember gathering a few things and bounding out the front door, my new pottery wheel in hand. I wanted to be extra careful with it by holding it tight, my young brain reasoned. I didn’t want to put it back in the box.

And then I remember that before I even made it to the burglar bars enclosing my mother’s front porch, I dropped that pottery wheel onto the concrete in a dramatic smash. It cracked. It wouldn’t turn on anymore. It was irreparable and I knew it immediately.

And then I cried heavy, heavy tears.

I never got another pottery wheel, so I just filed my interest away somewhere and let it simmer as I moved through adolescence and young adulthood. I would go on to try different things like decoupage and photography and crochet before being lost in the drama that is being a teenager. And as an adult I’d learn to cook and bake, and to create beautiful (and mostly edible) things out of nothing but a few bare ingredients. But I never forgot about pottery.

​”Some day,” I would say to myself.

When I had a complete and total meltdown a few weeks back (about my life and my career and my struggle with time), my husband eventually asked me what all I still wanted to do that I didn’t seem to have time for. And one of the first things I’d said was that I still wanted to take a pottery class. I’d also said I wanted time to watch my handful of shows on Netflix (The Kominsky Method, Grace and Frankie), and to watch my old black and white movies on TCM, and to have a garden, and to learn how to sew again.

“Let’s start with the non-TV stuff,” he said.

Within a day I’d looked up pottery classes near me, but the problem was that most of them took place during the day – and I’m the sort of person who has to, you know, work a job during the day. I finally found a school that had evening classes but was disappointed to see that they were all waitlisted. Okay, I thought to myself, as soon as the next paycheck comes in I’ll pay my $50 to get put on the waitlist.

Two weeks or so passed. I could have paid the $50 before the paycheck, by the way.

In the midst of yet another breakdown, which I’ve been having on the regular lately, I decided that this was it. No more stalling. No more fear. It was a Sunday evening and I went to the website to sign up. I looked at the calendar and clicked on the Monday night option (ages sixteen to adult) so that I could get on the list. “This class has one spot open,” it read. I blinked. Really? It wasn’t waitlisted any longer? ALL of the pottery classes were waitlisted. Maybe it had opened up to me because it was time?

But when I submitted my information to try to pay for the class, the nice computer rejected me with a message that said I was going to be put on a waitlist. Disappointed, I clicked “OK” and prepared to wait until my time came. Then I put down my smartphone and stumbled backward into the blackness that I’d been swimming around in. It had been so, so heavy lately.

The next day, with the fog of those emotions still heavy on my heart, someone from the school emailed me to apologize for the incorrect system message – there was, in fact, an opening. And would I like to go ahead and pay? I would have 48 hours to decide or they would release the spot to someone else.

I hesitated for a moment. Isn’t that the silliest thing we do as humans? We long for something and then we’re at the cusp of getting it, and we shrink backward in fear or self-doubt. It took me about an hour to overcome that discomfort but I pushed through, paid the first month’s tuition plus a $50 deposit in case I bailed mid-month, and timidly called the number to ask if I was to show up that night or to wait a week.

“Oh yes you can come tonight if you like,” a nice man told me in a slight accent. “Or you can wait a week. It’s up to you, but we have you signed up.”

“Okay. Well I guess I’ll come tonight. What do I wear? What do I do? I don’t know what to bring with me.”

“Let me forward you an email the teacher sends out for her new classes. It’ll give you more info about what to bring and when to show up. I definitely wouldn’t wear any clothes you’re attached to! And bring an old towel and an apron if you have one. We have some here but they’re first come, first serve.”

I read the email he forwarded me. I got my old clothes together, and my old towel. I paced a little bit until it was time to go and then I hugged my husband, who told me to at least act excited. But coming into situations where I’m the only new person is extremely uncomfortable for me. I feel like there’s a spotlight on my head and the old shyness of my youth comes back as if it had never left. My immediate reaction is to panic and want to flee.

I drove through the cold and rain to that rickety old 150-year-old house that had been converted into an art school. I parked my car, fumbled my way inside the door, figured out where I was supposed to be, and did okay in the end. The teacher – probably in her early twenties – got me settled in a corner and I plodded my way through my first experience with clay.

And it was glorious.

Now, I don’t think things are glorious very often. I don’t use that word ever. But the experience I’d built up in my head since the day I’d smashed my mini pottery wheel was pretty much exactly what I thought it would be. The feeling of the clay between my hands was exactly as I’d imagined. It was as difficult as I thought it would be, and as easy as I thought it would be, too.

And so what I see now is that I came into that studio depressed, lost, cold, sad. And as I sat there and let the wet clay run through my hands, my fingers depressing it in the middle and then later pulling up the walls, all of those feelings just melted away. I even lost track of time.

Two of my balls of clay ended in a collapsed mess, but one of them became something more after about 45 minutes of slow work. I, Elizabeth, had made a legit saucer in my first class. It was symmetrical and beautiful and ever so gratifying. Mostly because I’d turned a ball of clay into something else.

I think this is symbolic of a theme I’ve had lately in my life. It’s a new word that I’ve learned and it’s called “transmute.” To transmute means to turn something into something else, like turning negative emotions into positive change. And I think this clay was part of my current experience of transmuting old pain and trauma into something beautiful, which is expressed in one way via my upcoming book. Turning clay into a saucer was just another way. I not only changed the clay, but I changed how I felt inside.

This experience (and others) have taught me that you should follow those ideas that you have been “thinking about doing” for a long time. If something keeps popping up in your psyche, it’s probably something you ought to do to achieve some sort of transformation. Maybe it’s just to help you get through your life in that moment, or maybe it’s to move you to your next stop in your journey. Sometimes, I think, it’s to help you discover a hidden talent that you didn’t know you had and that is part of your purpose here on earth.

After ping ponging my way through a career, I still believe the only way to figure out who you are and what you’re meant to do is to try things – especially the things that nag at you. Teaching was another one of those things for me. So was photography. So was copywriting. So were novels.

I’m glad I tried them all.

And I’m sort of hopeful that I’m a closet potter and that this experience will end in my own home studio one day in my spare bedroom. I imagine the second half of my life as me writing my books and speaking/teaching a bit, but also creating art and tending to a garden and taking pictures of nature. It’s good to dream, because you can only achieve things that you have actively identified and strive toward.

But even if that doesn’t happen, that’s okay. For now I’m going to use those Monday nights to let my feelings dissolve into the spinning clay. The transmuting of a ball of stuff – in my hands and in my heart – into something different. Something better.

This is an excerpt from my book, Halfway There: Lessons at Midlife. I hope you enjoy this sample! The book was released on August 18, 2020.
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Life Shows You Your Calling
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Finding a calling or purpose (or in some circles “dharma”) is a struggle many of us wrestle with on a daily basis. It’s certainly been something I’ve actively fretted over for a large part of my adult life.

I first knew there was a serious problem when I hit my junior year of college. I ran out of general education classes, hadn’t selected a major (and didn’t have any inclination toward one), so I took an entire semester of random courses simply to try to figure it out. I enrolled in art history, sociology, technical theatre, environmental science and a career planning class. These were all interesting, but “interesting” does not a major make.

The career planning class was the one I put a lot of energy into, because it was supposed to help me find some sense of direction. I remember slogging through test after test to try to create labels for my personality and inclinations. We took the MAPP test, which was probably one of the most insightful, as well as a number of other personality and aptitude tests. Then we spent the remainder of our class time talking through the results and about different career paths. I remember feeling like I still had no sense of direction despite all of that chatter and analysis. In fact, I’ll never forget the day one of my tests said that my number one career path was as a mortician. I was horrified that something about my answers matched me up to a career working with the dead. Clearly these tests couldn’t tell me the things I really needed to know.

I ended up becoming an English major in the eleventh hour, and I had some very logical reasons for doing so that had nothing to do with hopes and dreams. First, I liked reading stories and learning about people. Second, I would much rather read stories than textbooks if I was going to have to do so for a few years. And third, my eleventh grade English teacher told me I was a strong writer, so I figured I’d go where my talent supposedly was. The decision felt right and I never regretted it, so for that moment in time I believed I was going in the right direction.

But when I graduated with my plain ole Bachelor of Arts in English, I found myself parked on a dark road that I thought I’d be driving down in the sunshine. I hadn’t planned to be a teacher so I didn’t get the certification. In fact, I hadn’t planned anything at all and was just hoping to be shown some sort of direction when I got there. After I walked across that stage and moved back home to Texas, I found myself with no concrete career plan as I was stepping timidly into my first years of true adulthood. Things were challenging for a long while.

I honestly never thought I would become a writer of any kind—not when I was growing up, not when I was an English major, and not even in those early years of my career when I was struggling to put food on the table and keep a roof over my head as a technical writer. I used to bemoan how much I disliked it, mostly because I was writing about computer software and that was the least important thing on my radar. But I look back with my hindsight goggles and I see that the universe had me there so that I could practice the craft. I would not have had the motivation to write anything on my own at that time in my life; I just had too many obligations and too much stress. So those jobs that I felt like were all wrong for me actually were helping me hone my skills. Something knew more than I did about what was to eventually come.

When I reached my late twenties and my life imploded, I expended enormous amounts of effort repeating those same career tests, thinking about what I was good at, trying to understand what kind of options I might have, and reaching for some sort of direction about where I was to go. I got divorced, I lost everything I had (including my home, twice), I had to rebuild a new life on my own with a future that no longer was written in the way I’d expected it to be. I even lost my technical writing job and couldn’t get another one. In fact, I couldn’t get a job as a copywriter either. So I assumed I was completely off course and needed to redirect myself. Clearly, I said to myself, I’d been lost all along or things would have turned out better.

Sometimes life surprises you with your calling. Sometimes you fall into it even though you’ve been trying to avoid it, and sometimes you just don’t even see it coming at all. Maybe you’re fumbling around in the dark and a light appears in the distance, so you start walking in that direction just to get away from where you are.

While I stumbled around grasping at air, I wrote in my journals and in a blog—for what ended up being about nine years. I say that I wrote, but I more vomited onto the page anything and everything that was bothering me. I considered it something anyone might do to work through their crap—not something a writer might do—so I didn’t pay much attention to it. I find that people often ignore these small clues in their lives.

The first time I even recall thinking I might like to be a writer was when I started trying to pen the story of my first marriage. It was a sad, war-torn experience that went down in flames, but I thought it might make a good story (or at the very least get it out of my system). I never finished that book, or the next book, or the one after that. And this is because right about the time I was finally building momentum and thinking I was getting somewhere, I got sick. Really sick. Like, I almost didn’t exist anymore sick. I had a couple of surgeries and was down for the count for a few years.

As you might imagine, being sick was like stomping the brakes on my life again—on my motivation, on everything. I did try to write another novel during that time in an effort to not waste my life any further, but I crashed and burned harder on that novel than on any before it. Clearly I was wasting my time. Clearly this was not meant to be. I then abandoned writing entirely for a year—a whole year—until one day, almost as if being pushed by something outside of me, I trudged back and sat down at my computer.

Maybe everything that happened needed to happen, just like maybe everything that’s happened in your life needed to happen. Maybe your “thing” will come when it’s time, like a river rushes down a mountain only when the spring comes to melt the snow. This is one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned from being sick and almost signing off of planet earth—you’ve got to let things flow. Stop fighting, just ride along.

From the sum of my experiences came this book. And when I look at my life I can see that it’s been there all along but was waiting for the right time to emerge. I can’t write fiction very well because perhaps that’s not what I’m supposed to do (yet). I couldn’t write nonfiction very well because I’d told myself that it wasn’t “real” writing and therefore I didn’t consider it a valid purpose. In my mind my purpose had to be something real. It had to be something that was less silly than sitting here writing about my life.

But I’ve learned that we all have a purpose that may seem trivial to us, and that actually is not trivial at all. Some people would say that what I’m doing now is ridiculous. Who cares about my life and what I’ve learned? But then someone else might care. And a few people might care. And that means what I did meant something to the world because it meant something to some of the people in it.

It’s the same thing if you’re a cook on a line. Or maybe you’re a lawn guy, where you trudge in every day not understanding why your lot in life is to mow lawns. But you know what? Someone is happy to see that lawn looking beautiful. An elderly woman who cannot take care of her landscaping is thrilled to be helped by you. A single mother who was abandoned by her partner has one less thing to worry about because you took care of the lawn. You see what I mean?

Life will show you what you’re meant to do, you just have to pay attention and have some patience. My life has been training me for about four decades to do what I’m doing now. It’s been filling my head with experiences, wisdom, life. It’s been making sure my skills have stayed sharp by placing me in jobs that required me to write and to practice my craft, even when I hated the jobs and felt like I was squandering the days I was given. It then moved me into a life position, eventually, where I could sit down and do this thing I’m doing without the pressures I used to have on a daily basis.

Give life credit and allow it to show you what you’re supposed to do. Flow along a little bit. See where the road takes you. When you get there, you’ll bop yourself on the head because it will all seem so stupidly obvious. But that’s okay.

I think some people know what they want to do when they are ten years old and are prepared to do that thing. Others of us have a journey to take before we can do the thing we’re supposed to do, so we don’t understand it until later. If you don’t know what your purpose is yet, take heart. You are already living it. You are already on the journey you are supposed to take. Your purpose exists, whether you can see and verbalize it yet or not.