Five Years Ago

Five years ago today, my friend Kristi and I set out from my parents' condo in Ohio with a packed 2001 Volkswagen Beetle. We were destined for Boston with a stopover in Niagara Falls, both on our own journeys: Kristi, to Canada and Boston for the first time; me, to a semester-long internship in Cambridge. 

I told everyone that this trip was an opportunity for me to get experience and make connections in the publishing world. I told them that I needed my own adventure before coming back and settling down. I told them this would be temporary. I told myself it would be temporary. But I lied. 

When I had left Michigan a few days earlier, I left that life: a husband, two dogs, and a person who I barely recognize now as me.

It wasn't a bad life. On the surface, I had a lot to envy. The economy was bad but we were doing okay, Tom having just started his emergency medicine residency and me working part-time at a bookstore. We had friends. We had a new house.

What I didn't have was a sense of self. I was just starting to figure out what I wanted to do after years of unsettled decisions: the recommendation letters my undergrad professors had written to apply to an MA program in literature went unsent, and the LSAT registration fee I paid, refunded. Twice. I had finally decided to continue my studies in creative writing, something that had always brought me joy. But instead of making me feel more settled as myself in the life I already had, it made me more anxious to get out. This internship was the perfect opportunity to see what it was like on my own, and if I didn't like it, I could always come back.

At first, Kristi and I had a great time being tourists. We wandered the crowded sites of Niagara, we rode the Maid of the Mist, and we sang embarrassingly loud songs as we drove on to Massachusetts. When we got to Newton, where I was renting a room for the semester, we unpacked my Beetle into the first place I would ever live completely on my own. We rode the commuter rail into Boston, ate at Fanueil Hall, and wandered the Public Garden. I TA'd my first course at school. We ate Indian food and drank Guinness in pubs. I knew the city was already affecting me in a way that would make moving back to the middle of nowhere, something my ex-husband and I had always agreed upon, nearly impossible.

When Kristi left a few days later, I came back from dropping her off at the airport and took a look around my rented room, a strange mixture of freedom and loss filling my chest. I started realizing what it meant to be me, totally alone. I was there less than two months before I admitted to myself, and then to my ex, that I wasn't going back.

The next few months were hard. I missed the stability, my friends, the dogs. I learned how to manage my own finances, something I'd never done before. I learned how to cook for one and eat at my desk every night. I learned what it really meant to be lonely. I learned how to live by myself. But I also learned how to live as myself.

On October 13, 2008, I wrote:

I hope I never regret any of the changes I make to my life. I hope that throughout it all, I can still look back and see that I became happier, or wiser, after it all. But it is the nature of change to blind you to all but hindsight. And I cannot say how any of it will turn out.

Me in 2008 would have never guessed that by this time, I'd be employed doing something that I love, that I'd have so many amazing friends in my life, or even that I'd be dating not one but multiple people who care about me. But I was right about having become happier and wiser. If I could time-travel, I'd have to try really hard not to tell past me what mistakes to avoid. But I would definitely tell her it would be all worth it to make them anyway.