Getting Through It: Leaving On My Own Terms

things are a lot easier

well, if you’re reading this, I am in the throes of packing for a move out of state into a home with my new husband. moving, along with all of the things that accompany it, is a headache. but somewhere between weeding through the drawer of manuals and mismatch power cords, I had a realization that is the first move i’ve made on my own terms in the last 5 years.

see, in 2019, I left Los Angeles after being ghosted by my ex-fiancé ahead of our wedding day. i’ll spare you the details as many of you have read that tale before (if you haven’t, it’s here and here) and moved to Northern California where my mother took me in and helped me come back home to myself. in 2020, I moved to DC for a new outlook on life/love/happiness and found myself more broken than before in the beginning. after all, I hadn’t moved for me, really, but more so to escape the version of myself I believed was, in some way, at fault for my heartbreak.

I moved to prove I was lovable. I moved to forget.

I did find things that made remembering less painful. and people to hold onto here in this city whose rhythm and energy was so vastly different than the place I’d spent my entire twenties. I was no longer spending my days with other creatives instead I was using my talents to write about them. I decorated home in a way that suited me and only me. I slept in. I finished the book I’d been writing for four years. I acted up and out when need be. but it all felt, at times, like one long reaction to the state of my heart.

today, I packed a box with the journals i’ve written over the last 4 years. I flipped through some of the pages and dog-eared the ones where I’d outlined what the healed version of me would feel like. watched my words spring from the page and spell out the makings of the woman I am now. marveled at the similarity, remarked upon the work it took to get here. this me, who is packing, this time, not to escape but to discover. to adventure. to sip warm coffee on mornings spent with my husband. to decorate a home…our home…in a way that suits the both of us.

though the impetus for this location is my husband’s job, it is so different than the move that brought me to the city where i’d inevitably meet him. it is not a move of seeking or hiding. it is not one attached to wishful thinking that “this time things will be different”. or hopeless whispers of “any place is better than this one.” I am not moving to become a stranger and buy myself anonymity. no longer afraid of being seen, I am already dreaming of the community that will find me in a new place. no longer in desperate need of a do-over, I am embracing what it means to simply continue writing the same chapter. what’s it like to build on what exists rather than rebuild from the scraps of what came before. how freeing it is to, for once, be simply leaving instead of running away from the all-consuming sting of having been left.

when the door of this place—that has been so refreshingly my own—closes, it will not be in response to anything or anyone. it will simply mean the time has come to say goodbye. and that feels so damn good.