In a city where everything is constantly changing, it makes sense that you would, at some point or another, stumble across a street corner that you don’t recognize, but that feels vaguely familiar. So it was for me when I found myself on the corner that previously held the Gypsy House Cafe. I can’t even tell you that I remembered as I was standing there what it was I was supposed to be looking for. I only remembered when I was further down the road and things started looking more familiar and I could finally place myself by my first apartment in Denver and therefore by the cafe that became my third place of choice when I first moved to Denver.
Third place is a bold choice of words. It’s supposed to be the place where you are when you are not at work or at home. At the time, I was barely working. I had one shift a week at a Banana Republic in Colorado Springs. I moved to Denver when the opportunity arose because I wanted, very much, to believe that this was going to help me find a better career. I was politically involved and highly motivated. I was so ambitious when I was young. I would apply for anything and everything, writing meticulously crafted cover letters to go along with every job listing. I was naive enough to believe that this was going to be enough to get me on the fast track to success, and that all of my other dreams were waiting just around the corner.
I have to tell you the saddest thing you’ll ever hear about ambition. No one ever told me this when I was young and maybe it would have been better if they had, or maybe I would have gone on believing that I was special anyway. Ambition without opportunity is nothing. It’s nothing. It’s a folder full of old resumes and cover letters–hundreds upon hundreds of them–all unanswered. I wrote a good deal of them while sitting at the Gypsy House Cafe, surrounded by other people with their own broken dreams. The lawyer who graduated into an oversaturated market and was now doing freelance bankruptcy law. The belly dancer who was going back to school while trying to support her young children. The photographers–there were many of them. All of these people were an example of the future that I would probably have–something that still held traces of what I originally wanted, but that wasn’t quite it. Sometimes I feel so disappointed by everything. I feel like a failure.
I’m trying to be better at accepting my failures. I failed at writing this essay. This is version 7897. I failed at making this linoprint. I tried something different and I don’t think it worked out. About a year ago I committed to making bad art. It was supposed to be a way for me to let go of my own desire for perfectionism and to start writing again. My writing doesn’t have to be perfect. I should know this by now. Why am I still holding onto the idea that it has to be something other than what I can create now? My lino prints don’t have to be perfect. I’m not a trained artist. I don’t know what I’m doing. Why am I still so sad about this one in particular?
This is something I’m constantly working on in therapy. This week I’m supposed to be addressing my “stuck points.” I don’t know how to explain stuck points to you because I don’t really understand them most of the time anyway. I feel like they might lead to a kind of toxic positivity–an idea I’m so glad to see more people embrace. In the days when I frequented the Gypsy House Cafe it wasn’t really a thing. I firmly believed that things weren’t working out because of me. If I just wrote a better cover letter or built a better resume or was a better person, then someone would surely call me back. This is a stuck point and I don’t know if moving past it means that I’m getting better or if I’m just trying to find a new way to think positively about a bad situation.
What I didn’t realize when I was a regular at the Gypsy House Cafe and what I still struggle with now, is that life is trial and error. You try law school and maybe it doesn’t work out the way you want it, so you do some freelance bankruptcy law while figuring it out. You try belly dancing (or whatever it was she was doing [there’s no way she could have supported herself as a belly dancer]) and maybe go to grad school while figuring it out. You take photos and try to understand the world while trying to figure it out. It’s all a game of figuring it out.
The Gypsy House Cafe shut down for a while, but my understanding is that they’ve moved to a different place. I found them on the internet and it looks different but a little the same. I’m different but a little the same too. I’m figuring it out.