Something happened tonight. Well, I'm sure something has been brewing for a while - Gloria is always quick to point out that most of these things aren't accidents, they're a result of slow and persistent work producing desired results (with some lovely cosmic accidents for good measure). But it feels like it all just... happened. Windows down, Long Winters blasting through the speakers, practically crying from the relief and wanting to hug the entire world. It feels like everyone here can see the same things I can, and proposing a hug with a backstory of my situation to a stranger on the sidewalk would likely be well received.
I really fell apart a million different ways when I realized that there wasn't a "home" for me to go back to in the traditional sense, which I've written about at length, which in my mind means the home I grew up in, the home where my parents lived. With a lack of it also comes a lack of that safety-net feeling, which I had never experienced before. There was always a bedroom and a check, just in case. I rarely cashed in on either, but knowing it was there provided what I thought was freedom. And now what I'm realizing is that it actually held me back. Even though it's all how it was supposed to be, and continues to become. If it got too hard, there was a nest. But in that there was also a lack of the proper kind of self-reliance, of learning to fight, of consistent discipline, and of finding out the true fabric of my being. (It sounds extreme, silly almost to say it like that, but it's true.) By having that false sense of security, I wound up keeping myself from the very thing I wanted and needed.
Crazy.
Even crazier that I can put this together, right?
So, gone forever is the couch I napped on, the metered length of the hallway, the cool tiles on the bathroom wall, the view from the window above the sink. Aside from the obvious absence of my parents, of course, the physical things I identified with were permanently out of reach, even though said couch is in my sister's living room (which looks a little too much like the living room it no longer is for my taste, and I'm happy to be so far away so as to not have to sit in it). And so maybe it's my way of processing the loss and the grief, to feel like I was losing the home and not the people who used to live there. I don't know, and I don't care. But it hurt like hell, so bad that I thought it would never not feel like that anymore, thousands of miles from anything really familiar, a studio apartment in a (rad) part of Seattle, eating and crying and not understanding what was happening.
Then I threw up all over Kristin, and shortly after that things started to shift gears. As she had predicted, the job volatility passing freed up entire countries worth of real estate in my head... but a few weeks beforehand, in a slew of resume submissions and less than one percent in return contact save for temp agencies that never went anywhere, something shifted. Which I have also written about at length. I started trying on the pants of "baby, we'll be fine" instead of "you can't" or "you shouldn't" or "you're not." And things started to get fine. I'd wonder why I wasn't like someone else, or whether or not I measured up, and I supplanted that thought with a wave of gratitude to be funky disheveled ol' me. And when I stopped actively letting things go, things lost their grip on me. Kristin did a reading, and I started to try myself on. Then some karma happened. Then some dharma happened.
Then the flourishing started. And a few cosmic accidents combined with preparation and hard work decided to all collide at once, and I got gently delivered into the Greatest Job In America. Where I can work ten hour days and not notice, because it's amazing. And six days later, they invite me over for group eating, because everyone's all drunk on sun. And they all know each other, and they shared it with me. Me. All watching the busted sunset behind the mountains from a giant picture window, while a pleasant warm good-natured drunken-ness sprang up around me like little flowers.
Then I'm all crying almost, driving home from Queen Anne, from hanging out with my boss and all these nice people and their babies and all this... love. Legitimate, good, loving, caring people. Who are... nice. Really nice. Nice without anything behind it nice. Nice the way all of my Imaginary friends are nice. If it makes sense, and it's what I said tonight as well, it feels like if you could be adopted by a job, that I have been adopted by this job. By the people and the mission and the everything. The same way a fleet of Imaginary friends and I have all adopted each other. The way I love Kristin more than I love my parents, because though they tried their best, there are things we can see and communicate that they just couldn't, because that's how it is.
I had written a while back about being in a relationship with Seattle. And how I wanted Seattle to validate all these things and come and talk to me at night, and soothe me, and assure me, and take me out. Somehow, I stopped wanting that, and then I stopped needing that, and then the "let's just see if maybe I can be fine" happened. I don't know how each part led to each and what plugged in where to make things change the way they did... but they have. Meditations I'd kept meaning to do started to take place. I let things go and put things down and the proverbial cup started to runneth over. Like all the letting go, I actively stopped expecting Seattle to take care of me or give me more than what I was due. And I wound up with more than I ever could have asked for.
It seems so crazy, recounting this whole thing that's been happening over the last year, gearing up to leave, and the leaving, and the arriving, and the shifting. As Kristin referenced recently, I feel like Angela Chase on the bike heading down the hill, no hands, realizing her life figured out how to get good, right that second. Somewhere between Kristin and Angela and that bike is me. And my so-called life. And I'm really, really alright. I'm home. Like Janelle said to me the first time at Empire Way, when I was crying, about how it felt like that to be home, and how it was okay to cry, which made me cry even harder. It's just... I've found something. Something good, that may not mean anything to anyone but me, something I can't quite put my finger on besides a bunch of little things that have all added up to a big kind of amazing.
I've never meant it more when I say that it's all happening. It is definitely all happening.
Cut to me wanting to hurry up and go to bed, so I can go back to work in the morning, because I love my job. The job that's amazing in eighty different ways, driving to Fremont with the top down on the car. The car that's still running, and the photos are still evolving, and there's even Sean Nelson still popping up on the radar, but it's all so unbelievably and totally different. I'm approaching the next season. I think. Instead of the typo that ruined the draft, I'm the crossing out for the sake of coming up with even better things.
I'm home. I'll keep you posted on the unfolding, in PST.
Leave a comment