Year One: Still Figuring it Out
Yesterday was the year anniversary of Ben and I moving back to NY. It’s been a weird year. So much has happened and yet it feels like we’ve only been here for a short time. Sometimes I still feel like we’re only visiting and that our apartment in LA is where we actually live.
Being back in NY has been bizarre and surreal and uncertain. It's also been beautiful and good and fun. But mostly it’s been weird.
Maybe it's the fact that the anniversary just came up, but both Ben and I have been having major heart pangs for LA lately. We are still figuring it all out here. Re-building our east coast lives. After three years of building our west coast lives, doing it all over again feels exhausting and frustrating at times.
We’ve both been dealt opportunities and major changes recently. Which is both exciting and scary. It is also truly because of moving back that these things are happening for us. There is no denying that, no matter how much we miss warm weather, palm trees, our friends, and a city you can drive in.
With that said, we’re ready to move forward and move off of this island, out of my childhood home/hometown. We don’t know where we’re going to live. We don’t know where we even want to live. We don’t know much of anything right now.
Long Island was a safe landing spot for us when we got back. I am so grateful to my mom for lending us her home to make ours while we needed it. But you know what makes writing about your past hard to separate emotionally from? Living in the house where you lived half of that past.
You’d think that the seventh time writing this book would be easier. That the emotional response to writing about the past that I’ve been writing about for close to a decade wouldn’t be so intense, no matter where I lived. I sure thought it would be. Boy, was I wrong.
It’s been a challenge not to get sucked into and overwhelmed by the feelings that come up while I’m writing when I’m sitting in the corner where my first suicide attempt took place. Seeing all the landmarks from these life stories on a daily basis is tough. Tough but necessary.
It’s clear to me that I am meant to be here while I do this, for now at least. There are issues and people and places I need to handle my shit around. Heal. Clear out. And in order to do that I had to be in the thick of it.
I couldn’t do this accurately if we still lived in LA, or even if we lived in the city. I needed to be in it completely. It’s taken a lot for me to come around on that.
But now that I am more in the editing stages of things I’m about ready to go. It’s not healthy for me to live here. I am pining for a true shedding of these events and places. I know one thing for certain-- wherever and whenever this next move takes place it must be to move forward not to run away.
I don’t know where we are going to land next. To be completely honest nothing in NY feels right to either of us. Maybe that’s just because it hasn’t been the right time to move yet. It still isn’t the right time, but it’s getting close. Going back to Brooklyn feels off, moving to Jersey city, or uptown, or any of the other neighborhoods that we can realistically afford feel weird too.
I have no idea what is going to happen and that’s okay. I know that when it is right I will know. I don’t need to worry or stress. I just need to be. Another important lesson for me to learn.
I have spent so much of my life living in the past or grasping for my future. At different times both of those things were necessary. I needed to be vividly dreaming about my future in order to gain one, I needed to be sitting in the feelings of my past in order to heal it.
It’s no longer useful for me now. More than ever it is time to truly learn to be present. To use my tools. To get back into my meditation practice. To take care of myself. Move my body. Journal. Remind myself that I am here and okay and good in this exact moment. Trust trust trust and know that everything happens in divine timing and I don’t need to fight so hard to figure things out.
The time has come again for me to soften and just do.
As for my past, it will of course still have a bit of a hold on me while I finish up this book. I truly hope it’s for the last time. At least at this level of intensity.
I’m ready to close this chapter. For the story, my story, to be just that. For my story to be used in order to help others begin to heal their past or start their future. Or to finally find a connection they’d been missing.
I’m ready to release my pain around my past and transmute it into something beautiful and useful.
In the meantime I am excited to get to know and accept myself more. To learn how to be present and enjoy my present. Right now, as is.
This is a tough one to learn but as always I am ready and willing to do the tough work. It is always worth it.
To those of you out there struggling with this as well, all my love and support forever and ever.
xoxoxo