Arriving in Big Bend

The wind whipped wildly around us as we drove deeper into the desert. The clouds hung in a low, fluffy line along the top of the towering mountain range before us and the striations in the rock blended with the textured cloud-line so that the flat top edge of the mountains could almost pass for a bank of clouds in the setting sunlight.

With the sun sinking lower behind us, the colorful landscape gradually grew more muted. After a long day of driving we were all eager to reach our campsite and settle in before dark. A fresh gust of wind hit us as we came to a bridge crossing and I was reminded of a weekend camping trip more than 10 years ago when we were the only campers atop a small bluff. The wind blew violently all night long. The tent flapped so loudly that sleep was mostly impossible. We rose the next morning and broke camp right away instead of staying through the weekend as we planned.

This memory brought up a fresh surge of love and gratitude for out little home on wheels - our steadfast shelter since we left Seattle last October. The strong winds won’t concern us or cause any loss of sleep tonight thanks to our sturdy home-away-from-home.

The last year has been a challenging time for us as I’ve learned to navigate new health needs in addition to all of the life transition we’ve undergone. As a result, I’ve felt intensely private about this phase of life and haven’t known how (or even wanted) to write about it. But these last few months have created space for mental and emotional healing. Even as I continue to work on physical healing, I’m finding rhythm and routine with it and finally gaining some ground there too I think. In my abundant joy over being able to continue our exploratory travels again and in my gratitude for our lovely little home, I realized I was finally ready to introduce y’all to her.

A Car for Camping

It’s been a dream of mine for years to have a vehicle I could sleep in - something to take on weekend campouts without the hassle of a tent and all its related gear (the only part about camping that I don’t enjoy). In 2016 we scaled back our expenses so I could quit my job. After a year of rest and recovery I sought employment once again with the singular purpose of saving up for a vehicle. We’d been car-free for a couple of years at that point and the absence of a vehicle had significantly impacted the frequency with which we got out of the city. We both missed those excursions and I was still set on my dream of a car to sleep 2 humans and one small dog - so I went to work at a temporary summer job to save for a future vehicle yet to be determined.

Two weeks after my summer job ended I was offered a full-time temp position at a local bakery where I’d done temp work before. After a few months at the bakery, having saved more than I’d originally hoped for, I began to dream bigger dreams.

For two years we’d talked of leaving the city but always found reasons to stay. But as we were about to be ousted from our rented home for the second time in two years due to renovations (with substantial rent hikes to follow), we were finally and truly done with renting in the city. We always thought we’d leave once we knew where we were headed next - and for 2 years we visited communities in western Washington looking for a spark that might let us know where we should settle next - but no such spark ever came.

So we were ready to leave before we had a plan, we hadn’t been on a vacation together in six years, and with continued employment throughout the summer, I was well on my way to saving up a year’s worth of living expenses (so long as we found ways to live small). We were ripe for dreaming big.

One year ago this week (March 22) we sat across from one another at a lovely Thai restaurant on Capitol Hill and began discussing our extraction plan from the city. I suggested that we buy my dream car (still yet TBD) and take time for extended travel.

Not the Car I Expected

In the weeks that followed we dreamed, planned, and learned together. Benjamin diligently researched vehicles for weeks. Together we narrowed down our desires for a vehicle and he found one in our price range. Seven weeks after we planted the seed of our idea, we gave move-out notice to our apartment and bought our chosen vehicle - a vehicle unlike anything I would have imagined or dreamed up for myself! I’d always imagined something like a hatchback or SUV with fold-down back seats. Instead, we bought a 15 passenger van!

It’s no exaggeration to say that I was alarmed at her monster size the first time I saw her. On the day we brought her home we just happened to find parking on the street across from our apartment. We both kept peeking out of the window through the trees trying to convince ourselves that she really was ours to keep and that we’d really and truly taken this crazy and unimaginable leap.

Build-Out

Benjamin gutted her interior the week after we brought her home and by the first weekend in August we were ready to take her out for her first weekend campout. Though her interior was an unfinished shell at that point, it gave us a chance to get to know her better - it was evident that she was perfect both in how she handled and in the enjoyable livability of her spacious size.

Throughout the rest of the summer and into autumn, Benjamin worked hard to create a custom buildout for us. He did all of his work curbside while parallel parked in the neighborhood streets surrounding our apartment. Working atop piles of building materials (the van was the only place we had to store them) and with only a jigsaw and drill (both battery powered), he built a beautiful interior for us to nest in. With the help of a friend Benjamin got her wired with rechargeable electricity (our house-battery recharges from our engine-battery when we drive!) and finished up her trim-work. We rolled out of town by the end of October.

Travel Time

For a month we explored the coasts of Washington, Oregon and California before heading east into Arizona and New Mexico. We arrived in Texas in time to spend the holidays with our families. We enjoyed our time with them so much that we delayed further travel for an extra month. By February we were ready to travel again and then my health took a nosedive. So we stuck close to home, enjoying extra time with family while I worked on getting better. An attempt to leave at the first of March was met by new health problems, delaying our travels once again!

Photo in Arizona by Benjamin.

Finally, today, we put every plan into place that we could to ensure comfortable travel for me and we hit the open road. I’d managed to score us last minute campground reservations at Big Bend National Park (during the busy season no less!) and we were eager to make our dream of camping there come true. It’s my first time here and was the #1 thing on my wishlist for our Texas travel time.

So after [what feels like] endless discouragement with my body and all its challenges these last few months, being here is truly a special gift. It feels so good to be back in our lovely home-on-wheels. I feel so nurtured in this cheerful, cozy space. Even as the rushing wind blows about around us, I will fall asleep peacefully tonight to the songs of crickets chirping just outside my curtained windows. I’m deeply grateful to be here and eager to see what this wild landscape holds in store for us in the days to come.

Photo by Benjamin

Low Key Optimism for the New Year

The best way to describe my approach to 2019, and the summation of my feels about it, is “low-key optimism.” When 2018 rolled around, I made all sorts of lofty goals and declarations. They were all well-intended, things I value, and reasonable (I thought). But just one month into the year everything fell apart. It wasn’t just my goals that fell to the wayside, all of my thoughts about the future started turning on their head.

By the beginning of February 2018, I was having chronic arm pain in my writing arm. So my plans for sending letters on a regular basis were put on hold. By the end of February 2018, we started asking ourselves the tough questions: what were we doing and why? We weren’t headed quite in the direction that we wanted to be going, our apartment would be ejecting us in some upcoming month yet to be determined for a remodel (and subsequent rent hike), and for the past two years we’d talked about leaving Seattle but hadn’t made any concrete plans. It became apparent that the time had come to make those plans.

The challenge was that we hadn’t settled on where we wanted to move yet. Despite spending two years traveling to neighboring communities to seek out the place where we might like to make our new home, not a one felt like the right fit. So we kept staying in Seattle. But by the first quarter of 2018, I was asking: “if not now, then when?” We’d been looking for two years without a lead and yet we were ready to move on, so where did that leave us?

We decided the time had come to leave anyway. So we made plans to go on a quest to learn more about what our future path could look like. As ideas began to emerge it was decided that we would hit the open road and put our belongings into storage, taking only what we needed for extended travel. From March through October we worked on executing a plan that often unfolded itself as we went, with plenty of twists we couldn’t have anticipated.

By May, after 2 months of research and discussion, we’d bought a vehicle and secured a storage unit. By June we’d moved into our storage unit and secured temporary housing to bridge the gap between our terminated lease and our scheduled departure. We began demolition on our vehicle’s interior and over the course of the next few months, Benjamin crafted a beautiful buildout using what we already had: a handsaw, a jigsaw, and a drill. He did all of the work himself, curbside, in whatever parallel parking spot he could find in the neighborhood.

On the first weekend in August we took our vehicle out for her first overnight. We back-country camped in the North Cascades. She had a floor installed by then, but no walls, ceiling, or built-in storage. That trip helped us problem-solve not only ideas for the rest of the buildout, but also safety and preparedness.

By the time September rolled around we were entering our final stages of preparing for our long travels. We were tying up all manner of loose ends and finishing up all the details of our buildout and prep. One night we pulled an almost-all-nighter as we sewed all of the curtains we’d need for privacy in our vehicle. The first season of Queer Eye kept us cheerful and awake as we worked into the night.

On October 21, eight months after our initial assessment and decision to leave the city, we turned in the keys to our micro-unit, dropped the last stuff off at the storage unit, put our plants in foster-care with friends and left the city with a general direction in mind but no idea where we’d stop to sleep for the night.

Since then we’ve traveled through six states and seen a long list of beautiful natural wonders. We’ve enjoyed even more time with family than we’d originally planned or hoped for, with more to come. We’ve celebrated holidays with friends and family and have both reconnected with each other’s families for the first time in a few years. We’re indulging in creative problem-solving projects that have presented themselves to us that were inaccessible to us in Seattle (helping out on our families’ properties and a few refurbishing projects Benjamin’s taken on to name a couple). We’re savoring a winter interspersed with warmer days and lots of sunlight and for the first time in years we’re entering the new year without low-key seasonal depression.

But all of these blessings we’ve savored these last couple of months came at a cost. Not only did we carefully plan, work really hard, and save our finances for a full year to make all of this possible, but we also endured terrible bouts of debilitating anxiety, fear, and stress. (I say we, because when those things engage with me and my brain, it most definitely affects both of us). It was a very difficult year for me. All of the change, the unknowns and unanswerable questions, the living on faith, the lack of routine, the unknowns (yes, they’re worth mentioning twice), the necessary and ongoing changing of plans, moving out of two apartments in the span of four months… well, it was a lot. And I didn’t handle it well at all. It got to me so deeply that I spent July-October working with my doctor on restoring balance to my body, which was messed up with stress related illness. I’m still dealing with that fallout now as I enter the new year and currently find myself relapsing with symptoms.

There’s no way I could have predicted any of that. I never dreamed I’d leave Seattle without a concrete plan for my future next-steps. I never dreamed of all the change and uncertainty that would come my way during the year. I couldn’t have predicted all of the stress and stress-related illness that would manifest for me and throw me into the necessary reality of being diligently focused on long-term healing. Through it all I couldn’t find my voice to write about any of it. Everything in my life felt like a tossed salad and I had no perspective whatsoever. It was an all-consuming year of life transition that I never saw coming until I was in it but then found myself actively planning for on an ongoing basis.

It was a messy, painful, empowering, frightening, exciting, exhausting, hopeful year and it was nothing at all like what I expected for 2018 as I entered into the year last January.

So this year, I’m entering 2019 exhausted, relieved, and grateful. I don’t have the gall to make even one plan for this year because there is too much uncertainty afoot. We’ll be on the road through March? Or June? We don’t really know. We’re figuring things out as we go. We’ll settle in a new home that’s yet to be determined by this summer perhaps? Maybe? We’ll live as frugally as we can on the savings we have and find work to earn more as we need to and trust that we’ll have what we need when we need it. 2019 is all about flexibility and faith.

So that’s why I have low-key optimism. We’re birthing something really exciting. There’s no way we’ll remain unchanged after all of the work we put into shifting things in 2018. We are in the process of being transformed and we’re still waiting to find out what that might look like on the other side. I’m hopeful and optimistic about what’s to come, but I don’t really have an idea of what it might be. So I’m staying low-key, not over-thinking or over-planning anything and learning how to lean in and let it be. It’s a valuable life-lesson for this gal who likes to over-control everything, have a plan, and have all the answers. Perhaps it’s precisely because I’ve always been wound up tight in those areas that these life lessons found me and are teaching me to live with more uncertainty and ease.

This year, in all honesty, my hope is for peace, joy, and health. Because after a year like 2018 where I was full of unrest, fear, and subsequently waning health… my priorities have majorly shifted away from task-oriented goals or resolutions. In that vein, my focuses for the year will be on gentle exercise, art, baking, and writing. Through exercise I will treat my body tenderly and compassionately with movement. With my art I will prioritize my creative self to live my greatest dream which is to grow as an artist. Baking, especially at holidays, is a self-care ritual for me that soothes my mental-health. Writing helps me make sense of the world and has lately also been integral to practicing gratitude.

Even as I’m grateful for all that 2018 taught me, I’m so grateful to have it fully behind me. i’m ready to watch 2019 unfold with a tempered hope. May each of you reading this also find peace, joy, health and hope in the new year, in whatever ways those things manifest for you.

We celebrated Samhain with shrimp soup and a lovely fire.

Not Quite Christmas Memories

A recent acquisition for my vintage Christmas photo collection.

Yesterday wasn’t one of our many Christmas gatherings, but it was filled with lovely memories that I want to record and cherish, so it gets an entry all the same!

Yesterday Benjamin and I shot our little sister’s senior photos. She’s the only child I’ve yet had the privilege of watching grow up from infancy to adulthood and it’s been a true gift to watch her grow. She’s a bright, funny, wonderful human and we had so many laughs yesterday during the shoot.

Later that day Benjamin cut his finger and when he asked his dad for a bandaid, his dad came back with one and told him to stick his finger out. He proceeded to put it on Benjamin’s cut finger. It was the cutest.

Our second home as newlyweds was the pool house in his dad’s backyard. We fixed it up and it was such a darling space. It remains one of my top 2 favorite places we’ve ever lived. After we moved out, a couple of tenants didn’t take such good care of it and it fell into disrepair. Recently it’s been refreshed and renovated and we saw the remodel yesterday.

The tree at Christmas 2 of 4. While the day itself didn’t get its own blog post, the lovely tree still needed to be featured!

I stood in the bedroom looking into its little backyard and cried big fat tears for all the good memories there. I thought of our rabbit Millie, who lived just outside that window. I thought of our sister when she was still a kid and would come over. Pepper was young and Benjamin and I were newlyweds. The light shone through the trees outside the bedroom window in just the same way that I carry with me in my memories. It was good to see new life in it, but the part of me that cherished my time there so much will never stop missing and savoring the sweet moments we shared there.

After the tour, we had lunch with Benjamin’s dad, step-mom and sister and we laughed and laughed together. Then we joined his dad to go visit his Grandma. Gosh she looked great. It was so good to see her! I had the great pleasure of watching Benjamin walk into the community room where she and other residents had gathered to listen to a Christmas string quartet. I watched as he surprised her and her face lit up. It was beautiful.

After the quartet and visiting, she invited us to dinner. We sat with her at her assigned table and enjoyed the company of her lovely tablemates, Sally and Dolly. Benjamin’s dad shared stories with her friends about Grandma. It was such a pleasant meal with truly lovely company.

These are the reasons we’re here and I’m so grateful for all of these opportunities to reconnect.

A Traveling Sick Day

Photo courtesy of Benjamin.

In March through October, as we were planning for our travels, I knew that the time would come when one of us would be sick while traveling. At the very least, autumn and winter usually bring at least one seasonal cold to our home. I’m glad I knew to expect it so that I could file it in my mind as part of the natural rhythms of living life instead of seeing it as an inconvenience, disappointment, or interruption to our travels.

On the tail-end of Day 12 I felt the foreboding feeling of the pre-symptoms of a cold. Sure enough, Day 13 rolled in with a sore, scratchy, swollen throat and drainage.

Of course I’d prefer if it hadn’t happened during the one week I’d been anticipating more than any other week during Phase 1 of our travels. But, in truth, as I write this I’m still in bed where I’m warm and cozy, it’s rainy and windy outside (so I’d be indoors today anyway), and if I sit up I can see the ocean from my bed, which is heaven.

The ocean. It was my first request as we started planning our itinerary: one week on the Washington coast. It’s been too long since I’ve been here, and even then those visits have only been stop-offs as we drove through. This is my first time to sit and soak it up over a period of days.

I love the ocean. We arrived just before nightfall last night and I headed straight out onto the beach with Pepper. I stood and watched the water and cried. It felt like such a relief to finally be back with it. Pepper chased billowy balls of golden foam as it blew across the wet sand and he sniffed at piles of bullwhip kelp. The fog hung low over the foothills lining the shore and the sea stacks in the water. Everything felt gray except for the luminous foam pushed ashore by the rolling waves. Pepper and I ran along the beach and for one brief glorious moment, I released him from the confines of his leash and he flew across the landscape with the youthful exuberance of a pup.

The Pacific Ocean is my favorite. It’s raw and wild and powerful and it frightens me in a way that fuels my love and respect for it all the more. It stretches from Hawaii and my treasured memories there to the Pacific Northwest that I call home, tying the two together.

So here I lay, hot tea beside me, blankets piled high. I’m taking a resting day to give my cold the best chance I can to move through without too much fuss. I’m grateful for the cooperation of the weather so that I don’t feel like I should be up and out and ‘doing something.’ A rainy, cloudy, wet and windy day is the perfect day to curl up with a book or take a nap, so I’ll take advantage of the serendipitous alignment of my body’s request for rest and the hibernation-conducive weather we’re having.

As I lay here I can hear the roar of the ocean not far behind me, and the rain on the roof above. If I’m going to be sick, it’s not a bad way to wait it out.

- - -

Postscript:

As I finished writing this, I received notice that it was time for my morning constitutional. This meant digging out pants, coat, and damp sand-covered shoes and walking a short distance in the cold rain and wind (20-30mph) to a porta-potty where I proceeded to have an experience that had the germaphobe in me low-key-asking, “Am I going to die?” Then walking back in the aforementioned weather to declothe, hand-sanitize and get back in bed.

So, in an effort to keep it real... yes, being in a warm bed just a stones throw from the ocean is a dream come true. But being sick is never fun no matter how you slice it and especially on a sick-day it sure would be nice to stay pantsless and in my houseshoes and savor the comfort of a clean, private bathroom instead of dressing to brave the elements and the germs. So I’m counting my blessings and savoring the heck out of them. But I’m not only going to paint a rosy-picture for y’all, because that would be so inauthentic to our lived experience. :)

A Missive From the Road

This past week we shared our salt-watered, forested neighborhood with a pair of nesting bald eagles, a barred owl, an American mink, a gray squirrel, a Douglas squirrel, large red slugs, garden slugs, a chatty frog and a wide array of birds (for the sake of my own personal record-keeping they were: pacific wren, brown creeper, dark-eyed junco, gulls, Brandt’s and double-breasted cormorants, and possibly a great blue heron which was scared off by an incoming dog).

We’ve heard the squirrels chatter, the eagles chirp, the frog croak, and the owl hoot and we watched the birds flit about, the squirrels fuss and the slugs munch. We’ve enjoyed the company of our neighbors.

We’ve stayed warmer this week than last since we’re close to the water and away from the mountains. But it’s been cloudy and rainy much of the time. Although it’s been no trouble and is just what we expected, we are longing to head south and savor the sunshine we know is coming!

In addition to all this loveliness, just to keep it real and paint a full picture, here’s the other side.

Based on some inquiries we’ve received, I think some expect that this whole ‘getting back to nature thing’ is one big vacation. But the truth is that it was a tremendous amount of work to prepare for (both practically and emotionally) and it takes work to maintain daily (where will we sleep each night? Where will we buy our next round of groceries or find a bathroom?) because basic activities of daily living are always changing with the weather and as we move from one place to the next.

On top of that, there’s the baggage. My beloved pieces of furniture, books and mementos? I put those in storage for some hoped-for future time. But my brain? I can’t put that in storage. It comes with me and it brings all its baggage.

I’ve been losing sleep due to worry and stress about a matter yet to be resolved back in the city that keeps me preoccupied. I’ve also had vivid and strange dreams every single night since we left. Nothing in my life is actually calamitous, these are just things my brain does when something is worrying it.

So rather than a vacation, it’s better described as a lifestyle change. We’ve traded human neighbors for animal ones, and just like our old neighbors, our new ones are sometimes funny, sometimes stressed, and sometimes shocking (I’m looking at you, slugs!). We’ve traded one kind of survival for another. In the city we earned money to have food and shelter. Now we conserve money and find shelter (or rather a new place to set up camp) and cook as the weather permits.

We still don’t find as much time as we’d like for creative pursuits (although we do find more than we did before) and we still putter around doing chores as a means of procrastinating and avoiding the difficulty of sitting down and beginning creative work. We still struggle with motivation and mental blocks and mental stress.

So, we’re working hard to maintain our routines from before and adapt them to our new life. We’re establishing new routines and holding each other accountable to taking care of ourselves and each other. There’s still plenty of additional self-care routines that I could be doing that I haven’t made space for yet. So it’s all a work in progress.

Sometimes I have to remind myself that a move is a move, whether you move to a new apartment or move into your vehicle. Sure, there’s less stuff that needs to be sorted or arranged, but it still must all be stored and organized and it takes a while to figure out what systems work and which ones don’t, just like in any new home.

So there it is in a nutshell. Overall, I can say that I am less stressed. Just being closer to trees and water has helped with that. It’s also helped to be distracted with the daily survival routine. Things that I might let slide at home (hello dishes!) are essential now. Dishes must be washed after each meal. Food must be made before it spoils in the cooler. I’m eating more regularly and healthfully and snacking less and doing chores regularly because there’s no other option. This infusion of discipline is so good for me because it keeps my mental chatter at bay. But the chatter is still there and I’m working on it. You can put your stuff in storage, but you can’t leave your brain behind. All of that stuff comes with you. 💛

So Long, Seattle

Last night at a local drawing meet-up, I knew I wanted to contemplate our upcoming trip by drawing the vehicle that will be our home for the next many months. After nearly 8 years, we’re leaving Seattle, not because there’s somewhere else we want to be more (if so, it would be easy because we’d just go there to that place and continue our daily lives), but because it just hasn’t been working out with Seattle for the last couple of years or so. As I begin the descent into the backside of my mid-thirties I can no longer ignore that the life that I dream of (although modest) is completely beyond my reach here in the city. And after some discouraging turns, we just don’t want to keep building a life here.

When we arrived in January of 2011, we were filled with optimism and excitement. We drove in from the south on I-5 with ‘Hello Seattle’ (by Owl City) playing on the radio. Seattle was the place of my dreams and I was so in love. Since then, Seattle has been everything we hoped for and more. But the challenge of rising rents has also been pressing in and we’ve watched the culture of one of our favorite neighborhoods change, and even turn violent. Over the last few years we’ve felt ourselves letting go and have watched doors close as city ‘progress’ displaced us once, then twice from our homes.

As I drew, I thought through many common break-up phrases and considered which ones might be appropriate for my parting with this city that I once loved deeply, but which also increasingly disappoints me again and again:

Seattle, we need to talk.

Where is this going?

I can’t do this anymore.

It’s not you, it’s me? or It’s not me, it’s you! - In truth, Seattle, it’s both of us. Rampant growth and development at the expense of harming and/or displacing local communities? That’s you. Wanting different things out of life now that I’m moving into the backside of my thirties? That’s me. I could go back and forth with the ‘it’s you, it’s me’ stuff, but what it comes down to is that we just aren’t compatible anymore. You aren’t who I fell in love with. And to be honest, I feel like I’ve put in the bulk of the work at trying to make things work out in this relationship. Living here has been one big compromise (studio apartments, no yard for a garden or our dog), and until now it’s been worth it. But it’s never enough, you keep asking for more, and I’ve reached my limit (I really can’t go any smaller than the space I’m living in now, Seattle. I’ve downsized all I can).

So this isn’t working and I’m not willing to do what it takes to make it work anymore.

I just need some time to think about things. I need some space. So I’m hitting the open road to clear my head and re-evaluate. I’ll be back in the Spring for my stuff, and with any luck to move into a hoped-for co-housing situation with some friends. Seattle, if it works out between us it will be because of the generosity, friendship, and community that we’ve found here, not because you’ve changed your ways. Actually, it’s always been because of the generosity of community that we’ve found a home here as long as we have.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s so much that’s still lovely about you and I wouldn’t mind spending more time together. But when we return next Spring, it won’t be because of you. It will be because of the supportive community that we’ve carved out here that we love. Despite the challenges you pose to my family, my friends, and my neighbors, community continues to flourish and thrive here. Seattle, if it works out between us, it will be because of them. Until then, so long.

Chaos & Panic

I went to my first Creative Mornings gathering today and the topic was Chaos. I froze when I saw the question on my name tag. I wanted to write something bold or creative, but ‘panic’ was honestly all I could come up with.

My world’s been turned upside down this year. Although I chose all of it, I sure didn’t see it coming. Benjamin and I have been talking for a couple of years about someday leaving the city. Living here has been such a rich experience, but it’s not a place we can build the future we dream of.

But leaving has always been somewhere in the distant future. It’s perpetually been 1-2 years away. So when we sat down in February and had the same old conversation we’d already had so many times about ‘what next and when’ it honestly surprised me that the time had come.

See, I’d always thought we’d have everything figured out by the time we left. That we’d know where we were heading next and what we’d be doing there. Instead, the time to leave became real and necessary before the next pieces fell into place. So we decided to do some extended travel during that in-between time. We’ve been saving for some time for this trip, I just thought it would be next year. When it became apparent it was happening this autumn instead, I felt unprepared.

Despite years of conversations and planning, the fear, uncertainty, and grief in this shift gripped me hard. During the height of the transitional turmoil (through May and June) when we were finalizing all of the details, my anxiety skyrocketed. I still can’t put words to it although heaven knows I’ve tried. I’m still very much in recovery and management and working diligently to avoid a relapse so as to be physically and emotionally ready for leaving the city in five weeks time and then traveling for 2-4 months.

People ask if I’m excited about our trip. Yes, I’m excited about seeing wondrous things, getting out of the city and spending time in forests and oceans, and seeing friends and family. But right now I’m mostly just focused on survival: on all the loose ends and projects that need to be tied up before we can go, and on diligent self-care that keeps me grounded during this time of upheaval.

So yeah, there was really truly only one pressing answer to the question on my name tag because it’s been the story of my summer. I’m Hilary. My life feels like a tossed salad. And when I’m tossed into chaos, I will panic. But I’m also working hard to manage that. And this morning’s awesome talk had a lot of really helpful, relevant, and encouraging stuff to share about navigating chaos. It couldn’t have come at a better time.