Soulmates by Jessica Grose Page A

encouraged me to take a break from the bar and focus on my writing full-time.
    At the time I didn’t know it, but Dana’s unyielding support had a time limit. When we turned twenty-seven, I’d been writing full-time for a year and hadn’t produced a single play. The pressure to write was paralyzing. Then Dana started dropping hints.
    â€œBoth partners in a relationship should pull their own weight,” she’d say.
    Or, more pointedly, “Why don’t you take a graphic design class? You’ve always been so artistically oriented and it’s something you could do for work to supplement your playwriting.”
    And finally, after she came home one too many nights to find me sitting in my plaid easy chair, drinking a beer andreading Howard Zinn or Robert Pirsig, Dana said, “You need to get a real job.”
    I can’t remember what I said to her in response. Probably just “Okay.” I have never been into big blowups; I’m nonviolent to the core. But I was deeply wounded by her pressuring me about work. I do remember that I slept on the couch that night, totting up all the stray comments Dana had made over the past couple of months. They weren’t addressed to me, but the subtext was glaring. Comments like, “Everyone in a household needs to make his own money.” Or “I can’t imagine sponging off someone else.”
    That was the first time I realized there was a fundamental misunderstanding between us. When we were in college, I thought Dana understood me, that she respected my art as an extension of myself. But it seemed like she couldn’t comprehend that all of my studying was part of my process. Everything I read tilled the ground of my brain so that I could have a fallow space for deeper thought.
    After that first entreaty for me to get a job, Dana didn’t let up. She left the house before I was awake most days, and when I got out of bed I would find job listings already queued up on my computer. I didn’t say anything, though I wish I’d had the inner courage to tell her to back off and let me do it in my own time. I just started setting up interviews.
    I would trudge into various Midtown offices in the suit that Dana bought me and pretend to be eager about travel guides, or business websites, or pharmaceutical copy. After years as an unsuccessful playwright with an English degree from a liberal arts school, proofreading and copyediting were the only marginallylucrative jobs that I was remotely qualified for. I chose the job at the ad agency because it offered graveyard-shift work, and I thought that working at night gave me the best chance of playwriting during the day. It was also the only place that offered me any kind of job at all, but I tried to look at the positives of the situation and not the negatives.
    Sometimes I want to go back to that moment and tell 2006 Ethan that he should fight back against complacency. That he should not take that job, because proofreading sentences like “Side effects may include clay-colored stools, decrease in urine output or decrease in urine-concentrating ability, and unpleasant breath odor” is soul-deadening work. But part of my current practice is about radical acceptance of circumstances beyond my control, so I have tried not to let myself wallow in regret.
    And besides, if I hadn’t taken the job at Green Wave, I would never have met Amaya, who has introduced me to Lama Yoni and a new way of living.
    I met Amaya on 6/6/06, which in the Judeo-Christian universe has dark connotations. But in numerology, six is the most harmonious of all single-digit numbers. It can symbolize perfect balance, which now makes complete sense both physically and psychically. I believe that my meeting Amaya was in some sense preordained. She started work at Green Wave about a month after I did, and she told me later she was drawn to me immediately. She sensed that I would be open to Lama Yoni’s