You’ll get a Dear Boston post eventually or maybe you won’t. Some things are too hard to say goodbye to. Rather than publish something that feels unfinished we are just going to skip ahead and we can always come back…especially to Boston. So let’s fast forward a little bit to the journey home. After I left Boston I took an entire week to make my way back home. It’s exactly 937 miles from door step to door step in the car one way. I’ve driven this distance 4 times. Twice with a friend and twice by myself. Sometimes I think I would make a really great truck driver. I love driving. I know that’s not a popular stance but I like driving and I like driving long distances. I even enjoy driving them alone. Nothing is better than a scenic drive by yourself. Windows down, music up (read that as country music up : ) ). I think some of my life’s greatest revelations have happened on the road like this. I’m usually struck with brilliant ideas like which friends should totally date but they’ve never met each other. A few marriages have come about like this and other great life decisions. As I was driving the last leg of my journey from Raleigh home, I had this epiphany. I ended up leaving Boston on the EXACT day that I moved to Boston in 2021. There’s something poetic and significant about that. My lease started in July 2021 and ended in June 2022. I extended my lease to the Tuesday after my program was over so I would have one last weekend and a Monday to get ready to move. It was arbitrary. There were no calculations on the calendar. My lease was up on day 363 but my friends wanted me last minute to come on a cabin weekend in Upstate New York. I had never been to Upstate New York and anyone who knows me knows I’m a collector of experiences. Maybe like the reverse of a bucket list. I’m about adding all the experiences I possibly can to my life. I want to experience and travel the whole world and all it has to offer.
On the Thursday before I was leaving, my friend goes you should come to the mountains with us. I said I’m homeless as of Tuesday and I have to figure out where to park my car and it’s probably not a good idea to park my car on the street full of all my worldly belongings. But my friends as they always do, stepped up and found solutions for all of my problems. I was able to leave all my stuff in an open bedroom between tenants in one of their houses and park my car tandem in his parking space behind his apartment. My other friend let me stay with her for the days between my apartment move out and leaving for the mountains. So the way this all worked out was just a stroke of luck that I got to leave Boston the evening of day 365. My last stop a drive down Commonwealth Avenue to pick up a friend and meet up with another who had a gift he wanted to give me before I left. My story, this story is riddled with the power of friendships, with the people who step up, with the people who made me feel like I don’t have to do life alone. But back to the point, I spent 365 days in Boston, 4 in Upstate NY, 2 in Baltimore and 1 in Raleigh. Quite a string of places marked by really good friends. I spent an incredible number of hours alone in my car. The transition wasn’t instant…it was the in between, the in between of my life in Boston and my life in the South. So as I drove the last part of my journey, I thought about how much had changed which really is more about how much I had changed as a person than how anything else had really changed.
The thing people tell you is a season can’t last forever but the truth is it can sure feel like it.
molly INclán
I’ve been noticing lately a lot of people talking and posting about a change in seasons both grounded in the true change from summer to fall and the start of a new school year and also metaphorically. I think we all operate on a school schedule years after we outgrow that or maybe just me since I always find myself back in school one way or another. I suppose maybe these articles and comments are always out there and I’m just noticing them because I find myself in between seasons in this moment. It’s been a really, really long time since my life transitioned seasons. This season I’m coming out of has lasted since at least 2016 but maybe earlier. That’s 7 years in a season which is great and awesome if you’re in a good season but terribly long for a bad one. I don’t think I ever thought my last season would end. You have to know that I probably thought hundreds of times when is this season over. When does a season become the status quo of your life? It felt like after 3 years for sure this season wouldn’t end. The thing people tell you is a season can’t last forever but the truth is it can sure feel like it. This summer I had so many things on my plate both good and bad that I was mostly just operating at my highest level one where I don’t have time to pause and really reflect or notice that major change is taking place. I think that’s often how personal growth happens. You hack away at it over and over and over and you don’t see progress and suddenly the culmination of all your efforts add up and you suddenly level up.
Boston was the pinnacle of my comeback story. I have lived for almost 5 years an incredible comeback story. That survivor and fighter mentality was woven like a thread into every experience. It’s like this small little gold thread hidden amongst a very colorful blanket. A thread you wouldn’t see unless you inspected the blanket very carefully, up close, really looked at the detail. When you step away and admire the blanket from a distance, you’d never see it, you’d be distracted by all the colors and the bold pattern, you wouldn’t see that thread unless I just pulled that one thread out and suddenly you couldn’t find a piece of the pattern that wasn’t affected by it. Often people talk about rose-colored glasses, mine weren’t rose-colored they were comeback-colored. I like to think comeback-colored glasses look a lot like fighter jet pilots goggles. I envision that internally I looked a lot like Maverick in Top Gun. It’s how I saw the world. On the drive home I realized I have exited my comeback season. I transitioned seasons. I don’t want to name my current season because it’s far too early for that but I have moved out of one season and feel like I’m in between seasons.
It feels strange and good and like a victory but also an era I will look back at with nostalgia. One of the hardest seasons of my life built me. How far I’ve come is something I’m proud of and a comeback season felt comfortable to me. It’s weird how you can become comfortable living in a life of struggle and extreme challenge but I know how to navigate it. Malcolm Gladwell says “In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours .” I know not everyone is a math person but for those that are. 168 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, 5 years puts you right at 43,680 hours. We will take out 8 hours a day for sleeping and that brings me down to 29,120 hours. Almost triple the 10,000 hour mark. I think that makes me an expert in hard circumstances. I’m joking about being an expert but I feel very comfortable in hard circumstance. It became my norm. I often times felt like a tackling dummy at college football practice. You know the one where linebackers line up and they charge straight towards the dummy and hit it with as hard of force as they can. They get up and go to the back of the line but as soon as that dummy pops back up from the last hit, it may still be vibrating from the prior hit and another linebacker is charging forwards and the dummy never recovers from the first hit before they’re met with the next hit. That’s how my life felt.
In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.
Malcolm gladwell
My first task when I reached my house was to clean out my house. I’ve been gone for a year. Most of the things in my closet have been there an entire year which means I don’t actually use them or need them so I started clearing out my house. As I was cleaning out my house, I had 2 sweaters in my main closet because in my house all the closets are my closets. The beauty of the single life. Those sweaters have the logo of a company I worked for many years ago. I have never, ever thrown a single thing out with the logo of that company. It was an incredibly cool job, most people will never encounter a job that cool, as a result I got SO MUCH merchandise. There was new merchandise for every event and in between the events and just because we thought this was cool merchandise and leftover promo items. It constantly was Christmas morning at this job and everything was branded. I held on to all of these items. For the things not on display in my house, there is an entire closet that holds all the merchandise. I held on to every ounce of merchandise because those physical items were manifestations of the glory days of my life. They represented one of the last times my life felt good, it felt like mine. I started a donation bag and I put those sweaters into the bag because I have a new best days of my life. I don’t need to cling to the past and hold tightly to a life I valued but gave up for a relationship.
I then moved to books. I will make a list of all the books I read. The books with words I clung to. Words that pushed me forwards. That carried me through a time of despair. Books who messages are inspiring and important and so necessary in that season. I pulled one of the books off of the shelf. There is one book I read at least 3 times and I’m not a rewatcher of movies or rereader of books type person but that book felt like rereading the story of my life. It felt like that author was the only person who truly understood what I had been through. I opened that book last time I was home because I thought it would be cool to read it from a very different place in life. I didn’t make it through the first chapter because it didn’t ring true for me anymore. It didn’t hit the spot. I moved past it. So I pulled all those books and I’m giving them away. Their message is just as important, just as powerful, just for someone else…someone who is walking into their own comeback season.
My mind is in a new place these days. Life is rarely linear. It rarely is contiguous and continuous. There are lots of spaces of “in between”. Those times used to be a very anxiety inducing place for me but not this time. Those spaces are a part of life. They are a normal part. They are the time between the ebb and the flow. One thing I’ve learned is life isn’t like monkey bars. Rarely are you able to have your hand solidly gripped on the next bar before you let go of the previous bar. That’s how we wish life was but life calls us to be much more courageous. It calls us to make space for what’s next. It asks us to let go of something before we know what will replace it. The changing of seasons isn’t quite as glorious as movies make you think. It’s met with a lot of uncertainty and anxiety and what if’s. I’ve learned to deal with the unknown by focusing on what I do have control over and that starts with filling garbage bags full of the past because it’s time to take the trash out (or actually to Goodwill). A new season is coming, we’ve made space for it and we’re ready, waiting with open arms.