Crying to Belong

I have found that in life, often it’s best not to stop and think. As anyone who has ever gone through a painful breakup knows, sometimes the best course of action is just to keep swimming along at a frenetic pace and eventually you’ll arrive at the other side. My psychologist friends (of which there are many…not sure if that means I’m exceptionally sane or a raving lunatic) would probably advise that this avoidance tactic isn’t ideal per se, but sometimes, in my humble, doctorate-less opinion, it’s the only way forward.

Take my recent move, for example. (It is, after all, why we’re all here. Haha.) On January 5th, 2008, I sat down with my tirelessly hyper-organized mother in her kitchen in Dallas, and we made a list. No, I’m sorry, we synchronized the calendars she’d bought earlier that day. With her help, I outlined the many steps I would need to take to emerge relatively unscathed from my life in Baltimore and subsequently arrive in London, life’s necessesities in tow. Sitting in that kitchen with our matching lime green appointment books, the many months stretched out before me, all of the logistics and tasks didn’t seem SO bad. I figured if I took things day by day and followed my mother’s lifelong mantra of “keep moving” (seriously…you’d think she been running from the Feds all this time, haha…hmmm…), I’d be okay. And most of the time, I was.

I am.

But then there were / are the other times. What you can’t write on a calendar or predict months in advance is what happens when you stop for a minute, in the midst of all the limitless crap you have to get done, and let the gravity of what you’re doing wash over you. You can’t really prepare in any easily definable way for how you’re going to feel leaving one life behind for another. You can assume that there will be moments of panic (“WHY DO I HAVE SO MANY COLORFUL CLOTHES WHEN EVERY BRITISH PERSON WEARS BLACK AND GREY??” note: this, however, turned out not to be true in the summer. In fact, the London ladies are quite liking the colourful flouncy skirts and dresses this year); loneliness (“I’M THIRRRTY. NO ONE WANTS TO BE NEW FRIENDS WITH SOMEONE WHO’S 30.”); fear (“WHAT IF MY RELATIONSHIP FAILS AND I’M ALL ALONE IN LONDON SURROUNDED BY ALEX’S FRIENDS?”) and of course, excitement (“I’M LIVING LONDON. YIPEE!”).

But you can’t truly know what mélange of emotions await you until you’re standing in the middle of Ikea / your boyfriend’s bedroom / the garbage dump bawling your eyes out.

My point in all of this is (and I promise I have one) is that in the past six months of packing, cleaning, unpacking, moving, packing, cleaning, moving, unpacking, moving and on and on, there were many high points....but the low ones arrived swiftly and unexpectedly. There was the time I was painting my basement floor (long story) and banged my head on the vent for what must have been the 200th time that day. I was so frustrated to be stuck in one of my least favourite (sorry, it spell-corrects automatically) places on earth, doing taxing and utterly ridiculous manual labor for eight hours, and so aggravated that I kept. hitting. my. damn. head. that I flipped out, screamed and in a moment of sheer hysteria, punched the vent back. Then I burst into tears (the dent from my fist remains…let that be a lesson to low-hanging ductwork everywhere). After about twenty minutes of feeling sorry for myself, lamenting to the mice about how ridiculous it was that I had to deal with all of this stuff on my own, I got up and continued painting.

Then there was the time at the garbage dump, when I had arrived unprepared to contend with just how high up the dumpters are (I had pictured a Heathcliff the Cat junkyard scenario...I was so wrong). I was heading down to DC that day, so I was business casual, and had a car full of oddly shaped trash from the aforementioned basement to haul over this 15-foot wall. To add insult to injury, it began to rain just as I pulled up. So I’m standing there, hauling and jumping, literally jumping, in heels trying desperately to clear the top when suddenly I feel something slip from my hand. My car keys. I had thrown them over the wall and into the dumpster.

It took about 10 seconds for me to totally lose my shit. Five minutes, 10,000 superfluous heartbeats, and several vivid mental images of me dumpster diving in my dryclean onlys later, I found the keys lying in a ditch to the left of my car. Apparently, they had spared my emotional stability by taking their own course from my hand to the parking lot rather than into the dumpster. I drove to DC, sobbing the whole way.

And then there was this week. First, a nervous breakdown in the car on the way home from Ikea about the fact that I still don’t have any access to money. Alex actually laughed at me: “You cry about the most ridiculous things!” which made me laugh too because he’s probably right. What I didn’t explain is that, as in the basement and junkyard situations, sometimes it just takes a ridiculous trigger to tap into the just-beneath-the-surface anxiety, fear, sadness etc. The act of stopping and thinking about how something just sucks becomes a portal to what I'm starting to think might acutally be raving lunacy after all. (Women are complicated, okay??).

Which brings me to last night—-the first time I’ve just BEEN HERE. Nothing to do. No one to see. Nowhere to travel. I was alone in my new flat, absent of any sound due to lack of TV/radio/stereo, just hanging out, and thinking about how incredibly annoyed I am that some raging arsehole stole my bankcard...when suddenly the fact that I’m so far away from my friends and family finally hit me like a ton of bricks. I don't know why then or what it had to do with bankcards (or raging arseholes for that matter), but frankly, it was a sad moment.

But really, that’s all it was. A moment...a slight snare in the tapestry of this experience, which far more often than not, is everything I want it to be. The high points too come often and in forms I didn't expect--how content I feel when I hang out with Alex knowing that I don't need to get on a plane tomorrow or the next day, or how invigorated I am by the almost palpable energy during my walk to work, or how hopeful I feel as I go to sleep in my new flat, knowing that all the hard work paid off in such an amazing way.

The truth is that this stuff--these blips--while scary to boyfriends, are all part of the process, I think. Anyway, that's my diagnosis. I'm ready for my PhD now please.