Last weekend marked the first Thanksgiving I shared with my youngest sister Miri, my only sibling in the U.S. and on the West Coast; interesting that we’ve both lived in this country for around a decade but have never celebrated this iconic Yankee holiday together. It’s also her first Thanksgiving as a U.S. permanent resident, further amplifying the day’s significance.

Garnering a foothold in this country was a challenge for both of us, fraught with many hits and misses as we fought our way through the gaping maw of U.S. immigration. People are often astonished to hear this — “but you’re Canadian!” — but the system is no less complex or inscrutable for we America-lookalikes as it is for the innumerable Patels and Gomezes that arrive on these shores. Though the cultural similarity no doubt helps in many subtle ways.

After a weekend of highly successful turkey gorging (picture-perfect plate at left), I ended it off with a reunion with an old Chicago friend, now living in New York and heading up a successful technology consultancy. This fellow was always a go-getter and something of a prodigy: the son of a prosperous Midwestern businessman, he graduated high school at fifteen, college at eighteen, worked on political campaigns in his youth, bought a co-op in an up-and-coming part of New York, and now heads up the building’s co-op board. Through it all he’s segued from a conservative Young Republican to a progressive Jew — a transition I could relate to, having made a similar conversion (politically at least) at the same period in my life.

Not everyone starts out a liberal at twenty only to turn establishment by thirty.

But one thing this friend let slip, now that he’s about to turn twenty-nine, haunted me: he finds birthdays depressing. And not due the usual “oh fuck, I’m turning thirty — my life is over!” melodrama that haunts so many of us gay men (myself included at that age). No, his anxiety takes a different form.

He feels he’s accomplished too little in his life.

Yes, really!

In my early days in this country some fourteen years ago, angst-ridden by career uncertainty (a movie career that was going nowhere), financial uncertainty, immigration uncertainty, and coming-out uncertainty (a situation exacerbated by some decidedly douche-y L.A. queers), I scribbled something in a journal about what I termed “the American Nightmare,” the dark corollary to the American Dream: that one’s accomplishments are never “enough” in a country where it’s drummed into us every day that “the sky’s the limit,” and “you can be everything you want to be.”

While I revere and applaud this country’s relative openness toward creative business endeavors and new technologies, I worry that it imposes commensurately grueling expectations toward its young: in a land where anyone, conceivably, could be Bill Gates or Steven Spielberg or Barack Obama, there’s always the nagging feeling that it’s one’s fault if one hasn’t achieved the commanding heights by a certain age and stage.

I think this is part of the reason career-break-style travel is so important: it allows for a personal inventory, a stock-taking of one’s life and one’s goals… and hopefully, at the end of it, a greater understanding of oneself through exposure to the world’s multitudes. This is, of course, a central theme in Wander the Rainbow. It also made up the focus of a discussion I had at a recent meeting of the San Francisco Book Club & Lecture Series, where I’ll be speaking sometime early next year.

Judging by the healthy attendance of this meetup, I’d say many of us are feeling the same vibe… and I can only hope more of us find the balance between ambition and satisfaction that often seems so elusive in these crazy times.

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