I was unsure at first how my life would come together in another new place, in another climate, while I worked another brand new job with new responsibilities and managed fluctuating creativity and resolve. But I left the house with a mission one day, and ended up with friends across the country who have inspired me to keep following the direction of what I love, that it’s worth it, and that I’m worth it too. 

Whatever you do this new year, resolution or not, go into it with curiosity and see what happens. As a friend of mine says about her dating journey, “I’ll either come out of a date with a new relationship or a good story.” 

May 2024 bring you both. 

Life is inconvenient. Love and relationships are inconvenient. But life and love and memories just aren’t going to happen exclusively on the couch, in my favorite pajamas, after being freshly showered.

Life and love and memories happen when you have other things to do. All of it happens when the weather is shit and your mood is also a bit shit and you forgot to brush your teeth that morning and your boss sent you an email without exclamation points or smiley faces and you are second-guessing your career and the city you live in and whether to rent or buy.

Life and love and memories and relationships happen when you are overwhelmed and underwhelmed, when you have to mail that Amazon return and when you need to pick up that prescription for the dog and call your mom back.

Life and love and memories and friendships happen when you have to drive far or take a plane or book an Uber, when you have to plan and when calendars are too confusing and the only option is an on-the-fly FaceTime that you hope gets picked up.

Making the good stuff happen is annoying, and couldn’t be more worth it.

There will never be a “New Year, New Me.” There will only ever be the same me trying to learn the lessons that tripped up the former me a million times, and that continue to do so.

How do I know if I have ADHD or just a zest for life and desire to learn everything there is to know about bees but also screenwriting but also the eight limbs of yoga?

Is it ADHD or is it subconscious task avoidance if I cannot organize and sustain a daily routine, but I can retain and recall fun facts I learned from my middle school planner?

How do I know if I’m a grouch who doesn’t like to try new things or if it’s perfectly reasonable to not care about how different bourbons taste different (even though this is a lie and also they are all gross?)

“I just want to get away from it all and stay in a cabin in the woods,” is a thought I regularly have.

I have this thought as I reach for my phone three feet from me at all times and scroll Pinterest to drool over A frames with a glow of chandelier lighting against a black sky.

“I want to get away from it all and breathe some fresh air and hear nothing but silence,” I dream, forgetting that even thirty minutes of unscheduled time or a blank Google calendar for the day makes me itchy.

“But a lake” I think, as if mosquitoes don’t exist.

“But a vintage hot stove” even though if the car vents are even one degree too toasty or the air current is a little too on me my contacts shrivel as if I am weathering a county-wide drought.

When we moved from Ohio to Michigan, we said we were from Ohio.

When we moved from Michigan to Arizona, we said we were from Michigan.

When we began the drive back to the Midwest after selling our home in Arizona, we told people we were from Phoenix - “The Valley.” We did this partly because Arizona had been our most recent home, and partly to explain why we were wearing beanies and winter jackets in Moab, UT and Breckinridge, CO while the locals sported T shirts and wind burned smiling faces.

I recently finished my last full week with my current employer, at least - last in-person full week. An email went out last week to all the staff at my school to let them know that I’m leaving. It took me nearly an hour for me to draft the email, even though it was only about four lines. The responses started coming in right away:

Subject line: “SAD!!!.”

Subject line: “You can’t leave!” Body: “You can’t.”

People knocked on my office door and stopped me in the halls and gave hugs and made offers of their guest rooms. I took it all in each day and cried in the car on my way home every afternoon.

How could I have only lived in this place, worked with these people, made a life, in only a year and a half? How is it true that I’m leaving and moving on to the next thing already?

Sometimes jobs don’t work out or houses don’t work out or being across the country from your family doesn’t work out, but sometimes when your mindset is “this is a temporary place, a 3-5 year place,” your life still manages to explode around you in an incredible and unexpected…something.

As if you take a step back and look around to see skyscrapers when you only intended to put up a parking garage, or a tent. Life got built here, in only a year and a half.