Life in Chicago

Irrevocable Changes

Sure, maybe it's just because I miss him. Or maybe it's that they really do have the same eye color. Or perhaps it's simply that my little daughter with her jowly cheeks and practically-bald head actually looks like an old man. Whatever the case, sometimes I look at Veronica and I get a flash-sense of my father.

It's surely not impossible that she could resemble him in spirit or even features, but the apathetic 17-year old in me tends to discard any such notions, insisting that it's just that I miss the man. I have to admit though that if there's anyone in my family whom I would want Veronica to be like it would be my father.

And I do miss him. Profoundly.

My father was 57 when I was born. He and my mother had been married for three years. She was forty and they had met late in life and had both been married twice before each other. My father had three grown children who were in their thirties and my mother had none.

My Dad grew up in Michigan during the depression. He was a bomber pilot in WWII, a prisoner of war in Germany and he came home a changed man. He made a lot of mistakes in his early life, wasn't always a great father or a great husband and he tended toward the self-important. But by the time he met my mother, he'd owned up to a lot of those faults and was well on his way to being an incredibly good man.

My mother helped him with that. She demanded that from him. And he from her. They made each other better people. The best marriages do that, I think.

My father loved to tell me how it was him who convinced my mother to have a child. He would lean back in his chair, swirling a glass of scotch and peering out over the bridge of his nose at me, his daughter, as he would tell me that he knew, just knew, that having a baby would irrevocably change my mother's life. 

Thinking back on those moments with him, the resolution in his voice, as my own little daughter entwines her fingers in my hair, I can't help but gasp with emotion for this great gift he gave her. And how wild that he would be up for having another child after he had already raised three.

But here I am.

It wasn't until after my mother died that he and I truly became close and that I really came to know him for the man he was. Oh, I loved him so much. He was such a good man by then. When my mother died I was eighteen and he was 77. We made an unlikely pair, but sometimes those are the best kinds of anything.

About a year after my mother died was when he moved to California from Atlanta, where we had all lived as a family. I was living in New York by then but I flew out to visit him often.

It was funny to see him living alone. Sometimes it was sad but a lot of the time it was just interesting. My mother had been such a force, dominating the household in all areas. It was her taste in art and furniture that filled the rooms. It was her cooking that found our table and her hobbies that took precedence over my father's.

He was living in Garden Grove,  a patch of Southern California about 45 minutes south of Los Angeles. He was familiar with the area having lived in Pasadena in the 1950s and the climate was good for his health. The modest, 2 bedroom condominium he took over from his deceased sister suited all his needs and was the place where I stayed and thought of as home in a way, when I visited from New York.

The condominium was in a little gated complex, a pool at its center, with a plethora of young families living all around him. In the mornings and afternoons the place was noisy with the sound of 7 and 8 year olds going to and from school. My dad often kept the front door open out of loneliness, and he would wave to the families from his perch at the kitchen table where he scanned the LA Times and sorted through catalogues.

When he moved into the condo he got rid of my aunt's outdated, avocado green sofas and heavy curtains and replaced them with slick blinds and a set of black leather couches. He hung modern art on the walls and put up large, framed photos of my mother everywhere. He even picked up a couple of lava lamps for the credenza, their place there by the front door never ceasing to make me laugh.

One month, after I'd sent him some essay I wrote in a college creative writing class about not having a home to go home to after my mother's death, I arrived for a visit to find that he had completely redecorated the guest room. A sign hung on the door that said, "Claire's Room" and inside he had put a pretty feminine comforter on the bed and had dug all my old stuffed animals out of storage to put in an armchair in the corner.

I was also surprised by how much my father suddenly began to cook. He looked up recipes on the NY Times website on a regular basis and was always trying out something new on me or his neighbors. He made apple pies and marbled breads, he made meaty lasagnas too and he even canned a bunch of strawberries one summer. Those seven years we had together after my mother died were unexpected and as each one slipped by I found myself more grateful for this time allotted to us, even if I wasn't always up for admitting that it was my mother's death that granted it.

I loved my father, loved him like I hadn't loved anyone before. I think as children we all love our parents unconditionally, but as we grow older and come to know them for the people we are we get to love them in a way of our choosing. It's a different kind of love than the obvious one we first feel. I never really got past that adolescent love I felt for my mother, not with her dying before I escaped adolescence.

I've been thinking about my father a lot lately. And maybe it really is because sometimes I look into Veronica's eyes and see his. She has the most remarkable blue eyes, but they're not the same blue as mine (a greenish-grey-blue or Greg's, a pale seagreen blue) and when I look into them long enough I get this inexplicable flash of my father.

But maybe it's something else entirely.

This morning I slipped quietly out of bed, careful not to jostle her milky, warm little body still curled under the covers and I tiptoed into the kitchen to pour a cup of coffee. It suddenly struck me that a little over a year ago I was waking up in the mornings with a feeling of ennui, with an unexplainable flatness. My life, even with all its love and adventure still felt dulled and heavy.

And I thought about that again this morning, after she had awoken and I was holding her in my arms, her little hands clasped around my neck, her face nuzzling into my neck as I spoke in soothing morning tones, my cheek brushing against her soft, downey head. The flatness has gone away. It's been gone for a long time. Life, these days, feels the opposite of flat.

And it was then that I knew, just knew, that my father, wherever he is, is happy for me.

Slowing Down

I can't believe that the wedding is over. That it all actually happened and is said and done for now.

I don't mean that in a mournful way. I think if we had waited a year, it still would have felt immense and swirling and over faster than we thought. I mean more that I almost can't believe that it happened at all. That I got to get married, that I made it this far into my life, that such an unbelievably good thing was able to happen.

The last couple of years have been filled with a lot of good things. There have been graduations and writing accolades, huge life moves and falling in love, new jobs and beautiful places to live, incredible friends and a proposal from the person I love the most.

But for a long time in my life things were hard. My days were full of knotting tension and anxiety about the well being of people I loved. Then they were filled with loss and painful memories, loneliness and self-hatred. I think most of my adult life, so far, has been spent in a realm of fear and sadness and inner isolation.

When things began to turn around a couple of years ago, in large part to the work I was doing on letting go of those ways of being, it was like entering into a whole new world. Everything felt different, temperatures and textures, sounds and tastes, all evolved to suit this new way of looking at the world: a way that wasn't so much about holding onto the past and all the sad things that happened but that was much more about consciously moving forward into the life I wanted to create for myself.

Easier said than done though. I've said it before and I'll say it again: falling in love with Gregory was one of the scariest things I've ever experienced. I was so afraid to invite something into my life that could have the potential to also become one of the greatest losses I'll ever experience. In the beginning I could only think about how painful it would be to lose this person whom I already knew I would love more than I had ever loved anyone.

I still think about it a lot. I have a constant murmuring in the back of my head that says, please let me have this. Please let me have these days, these moments, this love. Please let me marry this man and start a family with him. Sometimes I find myself calculating how long would be enough. I think of my mother, who died when she was 58, and I think, that might be enough. If we had children in the next few years then they would be young adults by then. If I could only have that long, please, please let me have that.

Truthfully, all this time, throughout my twenties, I don't think I thought that I'd ever get this far. Losing my parents and going through all that I did really did a number on my sense of mortality and the movement of life.

But now.

Now things are changing. Tears are in my eyes as I type this. I got to get married. I got to fall in love, to have this wedding, to go to sleep night after night next to this beautiful man whom I love and who loves me. All things I was so terrified would never happen. But they did. These facts and experiences, these moments and truths, they all stand just as as tall and as real as my parents' deaths. The gain is beginning to equal the loss in the most profound way.

Realizing this forces me to continue reconfiguring all the things I thought about life. And it calms me and allows me to begin to release this urgency I carry around. It's like an equation. If I was able to fall in love and get married then it suddenly seems quite possible that I could be able to have children one day and live a long and happy life. Whereas before, the equation read more like, if I can lose one person I love then I can lose another.

All this to say that for the first time in a long time, I have this feeling that I can slow down, that, if even for just a little while, I can stop obsessing over whether or not things will happen. That I can simply breathe and be in my life. That I can finish this post by simply saying how grateful I am for everything that my life is.

Sitting

Last night I went to the first session of my three-week meditation workshop.

I tried meditation for the first time last year, and for a while I was going to private sessions with a wonderful instructor at LA Dharma in Westwood. The experience I had in the couple of months that I was practicing was profound. I had no idea that there could even be space between the constant stream of thoughts in my head.

You would think that since it was so profound I would have been working away at regular meditation, but all I've really done is read about it. And I've loved reading about it and it always sounds so good in the books. Wow, I'm always thinking, I really need to get back into this. And then I never do. I just keep reading about it.

Needless to say, it felt really good to actually meditate in class last night. Walking home I thought about how far I've come in the last couple of years. It's been just over two years now since I began doing yoga and, pretty early on into my practice, I went on a retreat to a place called Casa Barranca in Ojai. Looking back at this time in my life, I can hardly remember what was driving me to do these things -- they were all experiences that I'd been resistant to for years. I think I'd simply become desperate in my attempts to change the way I was feeling about life and was willing to try anything, even yoga.

Anyway, about a year and a half ago, I found myself at this retreat with a bunch of practiced yogis whom I'd never met, and as scary as it was, it felt really good. After dinner the first night I took a walk up a trail nearby and found a hammock strung between two high trees overlooking a vista and I sat for a long time. And as I sat there, looking out into the dusky night sky, listening to the trees rustling in the breeze above me and feeling the gentle sway of the hammock, I began to cry.

In one simple moment I realized how very long it had been since I had let myself sit and be. I realized how, over the previous three years since my father died, I'd become very adept at filling every single space in my life. I'd constructed my days so that not one moment remained in which I had to sit alone and be with myself. I was amazed to suddenly see it all so clearly, to recognize how and why I'd been doing this for so long.

I realized that I'd been unable to sit still because of all the sadness and the pain I carried around with me. There was so much of it that, even if I sat for just a few minutes, it would bubble up through me so quickly that I felt like I would drown if I didn't push it back down and cover it up.

That night, at the retreat, marked the beginning of the transformation I've undergone in the last couple of years. After that weekend I went home and I began to work at just sitting. For months I took a bath every night so that I was forced to just sit. At first it was so hard. I cried every night. I cried over my parents and all the sickness and death I'd seen. I cried for being alone and I cried for all the things I hated about myself. I cried in fear of all the pain that just kept coming up, night after night as I sat in the bath.

But eventually, (and I wasn't even banking on this happening) the tears started to dissipate and I realized that all these things I'd been crying about simply needed to be let out and acknowledged. That all this time that I'd been filling up my days and pushing these feelings away, they weren't actually going away -- rather, they were just waiting to be let out.

If you're interested, you can go back and read through some of that time period. Start in January of 2007.

Anyway, I thought about this a lot last night coming home from the meditation workshop and I felt really proud for seeing myself through all that misery. We all have it, to a certain degree. And it's really hard to sit with. Now, when I sit quietly, the only things I battle are grocery lists and article deadlines, benign little reminders that don't carry nearly a tenth of the punch that old stuff did.

But I really believe that had I not forced myself to sit, night after night, in that bath for three months and really let go of all of that pain, I wouldn't be where I am today. And I am so grateful for where I am.

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(On a completely unrelated subject, please feel free to read about the chili-cheese dog I ate on the 4th of July in a new post on She Wrote, He Wrote.)

Aloneness

Last night Greg went to dinner with his uncle and cousin and I opted to stay in by myself.

The second the door shut behind them, the house quiet except for the spatter of rain against the window panes, I realized that I couldn't remember the last time I spent an evening at home alone. Greg and I have been living together for 4 months now and we haven't spent a night apart yet. The night before our wedding will be our first. We've certainly gone out independently of each other but I just haven't stayed in alone...not since I lived in my old place in Lincoln Park.

I sat for a while on the couch just being quiet and looking around the house. A home always feel different when you're alone -- the walls expand, the silence increases, the hours stretch on quietly before you. I thought about how sometimes this feeling used to strike fear into me, about how I could feel the whole world shifting out from underneath me when alone for too long a time. I thought about how, for so very long, I've felt disconnected and untied.

I remember those first moments after my father died. Letting go of his hand and walking away from his bedside, walking down the hallway of his condo, the carpet shushing underneath my feet. I walked outside to the little patio on which he always stood on Sunday mornings, watering his flowers. And I gently turned off the oxygen tank that sat in the corner. The machine hissed to a stop and the silence that was left was like a thing. I looked out across the rooves at the dusky California evening and I felt the whole world drop away from me.

Ever since that moment I've been struggling to regain myself. To at once reconnect in a meaningful way and to find a way to exist alone. I think that's what this blog has been about all along. What my life these past five years has been about.

And last night, sitting on the couch alone in the quiet house, I realized that I wasn't alone anymore. That Greg would be home in a couple of hours with members of his family and that the house would fill again with light and noise and love and that none of that is going away, that it will in fact, only increase. And that in a matter of weeks, I will commit myself to this man and this relationship -- to this deep meaningful connection that has been so deftly missing for so long.

Another Life Lived

I'm back to the thinking about the present moment. I'm generally pretty good at staying present but sometimes I really forget about even trying.

Yesterday I went to visit one our patients who lives in an apartment building by the lake. She's in her 90s and lives all alone and has no family. She's quite content. She was married for many years and very in love with her husband, so much so that she let her family disown her without putting up a fight when they decided that she shouldn't be with someone outside of her religion of origin. And now he's gone and she's all alone and has no children or other family to speak of.

And she's incredibly open and present and gracious. She sits softly across from me in her favorite chair when I visit, her hands folded in her lap, her ankles crossed like a little girl, and she tells me that she tries to remain open to everything that comes into her life. She reasons that there must be a purpose for her still being here at this age. She tells me that she simply chooses to spend her time in the present moment.

Sitting across from her, not at all in my own present moment, I tried to imagine myself in 60 years, all alone in a high-rise condo somewhere. It doesn't seem lonely. Just far away. 60 years sounds like a lifetime. And I guess it is for some people. I've only been alive for 30 so to think about living for another 60 sounds kind of wondrous. I already feel sometimes that I've been through so many incarnations of self and life. Sometimes when I look back on some of the things I've done and places I've lived it seems as though I'm thinking of someone else, not myself, another life lived entirely.

I struggle sometimes to grasp this concept of the present moment being all there is. It simply makes sense and when I really sit with it I can understand it quite well but I find it challenging to hold on to for but moments themselves at a time. I found this quote last night in A New Earth:

On the surface, the present moment is "what happens." Since what happens changes continuously, it seems that every day of your life consists of thousands of moments in which different things happen. Time is seen as the endless succession of moments, some "good," some "bad." Yet, if you look more closely, that is to say, through your own immediate experience, you find that there are not many moments at all. You discover that there is only ever this moment. Life is always now. Your entire life unfolds in this constant Now. Even past or future moments only exist when you remember or anticipate them, and you do so by thinking about them in the only moment there: this one.

Sometimes I think about this when I'm in an elevator standing next to a strange man that I don't know, or at work filling my cup of water in the kitchen next to a woman who works downstairs in billing, or when I'm all alone on an airplane with my temple resting against the edge of the window, and I think to myself this is the only moment and sometimes that makes life feel so lonely and so quiet.

Right now, in this present moment, I can hear the leaves rustling outside the window, a breeze shifts my hair and the faint sound of a lawnmower whirs in the distance.

The Opposite of Lonely

I had the loveliest weekend. Really, it was one of the best in a long, long time.

One of Greg's older brothers was in town from Cleveland with his wife and their 3 1/2 month old baby. They arrived on Thursday and stayed with us until yesterday morning. I made goat cheese enchiladas on Thursday night and they were so sweet in giving us a bottle of nice champagne and a stack of wedding magazines and organizers.

On Friday, while Greg was at work, I took them to see a space downtown where Greg and I will probably get married. We just fell in love with this beautiful and modern event space and Kristin and Eric loved it too. We're probably going to put a deposit (fully refundable in the next 5 months) down this week and see if we can work out all the other logistics in the meantime. Friday night we went to one of our favorite neighborhood spots, Spacca Napoli, for pizza and then took a long summer evening stroll through the park.

Saturday morning found me accidentally trying on wedding dresses. I say accidentally because that wasn't something I was planning on doing anytime soon but boy, was it fun! My friend Stacy (who has a brand new blog) is getting married next summer (I'm a bridesmaid!) and she was getting a second fitting of a dress she's having custom made at this fantastic shop called Dame Couture.

Stacy finished up with her dress (which is amazing) and suddenly there I was slipping into this gorgeous satin '40s number. It's a surreal thing to see yourself in a wedding dress in a dressing room mirror. I always thought it might make me sad not to have my mom there. She would have ADORED doing just such a thing. But I wasn't sad at all. I loved being there with Stacy and can't wait to try on more dresses as the months go on.

Saturday continued on to be such a fantastic day. We relaxed on the deck, reading and chatting. Greg's sister Sara who lives here in Chicago came over with her two year old and while Julia napped, Sara graded papers on the deck and Greg and I went for a run. When we came back Eric and Kristin had returned with the baby and it was suddenly a full house. Sara's husband showed up not long after that and I busied myself in the kitchen getting ready for a deck party we'd planned that night for my birthday.

Eric and Greg set to work putting together a grill out on the deck and the girls went to the park up the street with the kids. There were Pack n Plays in both bedrooms, toys everywhere and little socks and spit up rags here and there. Music was playing and I was marinating chicken and shrimp and I suddenly had this feeling of fullness, of light and love and deep contentment.

I was filled with this feeling that is so opposite of how I've felt for much of the last ten years -- the opposite of loneliness. The opposite of wanting. The opposite of sadness.

It brings tears to my eyes even now to write that. I feel so incredibly lucky and so grateful to be this in love with the most wonderful man who happens to have the most wonderful (and enormous!) family.

That night they presented me with a birthday cake and everyone sang Happy Birthday and I blew out the candles and I couldn't think of anything to wish for because I have everything I could ever want.

[Check out She Wrote, He Wrote for a hilarious new post about the Ravenswood Manor annual garage sale.]

Monday Afternoons

This afternoon I went to see a new patient who was admitted over the weekend. She was in her eighties and dying in a nursing home. That was pretty much all I knew. I had received a voice mail from my supervisor telling me that the patient's family was struggling with the impending loss and was not able to be bedside during the day and could I please go out to see the patient.

So around noon, I drove in Greg's little green Honda to a nondescript nursing home in a nondescript Illinois suburb. Inside I was directed to the third floor and on my way to the patient's room the elevator doors opened onto a view of the nursing station, around which were seated in wheelchairs over a dozen of the home's residents, most of them nodding their heads in slumber or simply staring, open-mouthed, at an undetermined horizon. Muzak tinkled out over the scene from speakers in the ceiling.

I quietly walked past all of them and down a hallway where I found my patient unconscious and unresponsive and alone in her nondescript room. She was dying and her breath rattled with each rise and fall of her lungs.

I took off my coat and put down my purse and I pulled up a chair and I simply sat with her. I looked at her face and I gently placed my hand on her arm and I wondered at the kind of life she had led. I wondered who she loved, who she cared for. I wondered what the best day she ever had was and I wondered what moment in her life she was most proud of. I looked at the wrinkles in her forehead and the curve of her lips and I tried to imagine what her smile was like and what the exact moment was in her life was in which she felt most loved.

After a while I just closed my eyes and breathed in and out. Just being.

We are not these bodies.

I'll say it again. We are not these bodies.

Fulfillment

This morning I met one of our volunteers at a nursing home so that I could introduce her to one of our patients. It was bitterly cold today, the wind whipping down across the lake, chilling me through in seconds each time I got out of the car to hurry to my next destination.

I stopped to pick up some hard candies at the grocery store before going to the nursing home because the last time I was there, the nurse told me that this patient has dry mouth and just loves hard candies. He lit up when I handed them to him and seemed surprised and delighted to see that I had a second visitor with me -- one of our new volunteers who also happens to be a nursing student.

The volunteer, who had just spent 18 hours in our training over the weekend and then spent a full day in school yesterday seemed tireless and immediately began caring for this patient -- an elderly dying man who only has a nephew to visit him once a week for ten minutes or so. My volunteer fussed over him, helping him with his breakfast and wiping his chin without hesitation.

And when I left after 45 minutes the two of them were practically old friends and his cheeks had turned a rosy pink from all the attention.

Walking home tonight, again in the bitterly cold with my scarf wrapped up around my face, I checked my email on my phone and read one from this volunteer saying that she stayed with him for over four hours, just talking and taking care of him and listening to his stories. She talked about how lonely he was and about how much this time together meant to both of them.

After I finished reading her email I clicked off my phone and buried my hands in pockets, my face back into my scarf, and walked on, my heart fuller than it's been in a long time.

If just this--this moment, this day, this patient's loneliness abated for a short time--took all the pain I went through over the loss of my parents, then it was worth it.

2007: Year in Review

And I thought 2006 was a big year.

It's Sunday morning and I'm sitting at my desk in my little apartment in Chicago, on the very edge of a new year. January of 2007 held no fortelling that over the next 12 months my life would lead me in such vast and varied directions...that I would write a book, fall in love, move to Chicago, travel to Taiwan and the Grenadines, and find a job that may very well turn out to be a life calling.

So, sitting here at my desk, my two cats curled around me, Arcade Fire on the stereo, the coffee pot ticking in the kitchen, I can't help but wonder at all that 2008 is apt to bring. There are things I hope will happen, things I know will happen, and things I cannot imagine.

Before beginning that journey I can't help but reflect on what's led me here so far.

2007: Year in Review

January found me coming off a challening set of months of learning how to live on my own for the first time in my life. I'd spent the fall of 2006 really struggling to figure out who I was and what I was doing with myself and by January I knew something really needed to change. I needed to learn how to be quiet.

I slipped out from beneath the covers, unlocked the doors to the patio, stepping out gingerly in my bare feet, the wind instantly lifting my thin t-shirt, reaching up to remove the hanging plants, quickly transplanting the cactus to a less precarious perch. The sky was a bright indigo, white clouds rushing across its depths. The palm trees whipped back and forth, I could see waves in the canals beyond the rooftops.

I scurried back to bed, pulling my knees to my chest, my hair threaded into ribbons and cooled by the breezes. I listened to the wind, could faintly hear the waves breaking on the beach. The world loomed immense and dark outside my little home and I curled tighter into myself, grateful to be alone.

January 1st was spent in my home in Venice with several close friends cooking one of the most memorable meals of my life to date. Timbre and Brian took over the kitchen frying catfish while I tended to my new year's batch of hoppin' john, jalapeno cornbread and individual chocolate puddings. Will brought over some of the best collard greens I've ever had and Rhonda, Liz and Doug joined in as we ate and drank our way into the first evening of 2007.

On January 2nd I quit drinking. At first I didn't really have a plan but as the days stretched into weeks and the weeks became months I realized how necessary and profound it was for me to take a look at my methods of quieting myself. The process wasn't easy but it was definitely healing.

Januray 24th marked ten years since my mother died. I'd been imaginging that day for a long time, what it would feel like to say that my mother had been dead for ten years, what it would feel like to not have spoken to my mother for ten years. But it was different than I imagined.

Ten years. Ten fucking years. It's hard for me to even think about the last ten years in one gulp. I get fragments and moments and phases and it seems like forever and it seems like a week. Flashes of such random things...a hotel bed in Maine, the cold inside a parked car in Vermont, a bar on the corner of Avenue A and 7th Street, the slums of Manila, the 405, my shaved head, my tattoos still scabbed with fresh blood, yoga, and the ocean, the feel of someone's hand on the bare skin of my lower back, a boiling pot of water, the plants that hung in the window of my 5th St. apartment in New York, a pair of shoes I used to wear to my old bartending job, my breath in plumes as I walk up Third Avenue, driving a U-Haul out of Atlanta, a book propped open on a futon mattress, myself doubled over in tears, another me drunk stumbling home, and another me laughing, laughing. Ten years.

On January 31st I got into a car accident. I was on my way to school. My car was totalled. I was unhurt but shaken. But suddenly sitting there in the car, my phone in hand, it all came crashing down, this thing that I'm fighting every day, all the time.  In that moment, phone in hand, sitting there, 28 years old on a cool Los Angeles night, my thumb ready to press a button, the button that will connect me to that person, that person that you call when something like this happens. Except I don't have that person anymore. They're all gone. I'm nobody's most important person and I don't have a most important person.

As awful as that realization was, as hard as it was to face, as much as it sucked the very breath out of me, it was the thing all along that I'd been running from. That very moment, that very truth, that very feeling of utter aloneness, was the thing I'd been running from for years. And finally sitting with it enabled me to move forward.

In February some sort of calmness settled over me. I felt myself relax for the first time in a long time. It was as though there was nothing else to be afraid of. I'd been sober for a month and felt better than I had in a long time. I'd faced the thing I was most afraid 0f -- being truly alone -- and I'd survived.

I was still in school full-time, finishing my Master's degree, attending four classes a week. I was also working full-time in a mental health center and on top of that doing a part-time internship as a therapist in a clinic. My days were full but also full of light and space. I went to yoga several times a week. I went to dinner with friends. I took a lot of baths. For Valentine's Day I went to Cape Cod to visit my grandmother. Snow blanketed the quiet seashore and my grandmother's hands were soft and papery in mine. Returning home to Los Angeles I drove myself home, alone, and it felt good.

It's wonderfully windy this morning. The whole world feels full of possibility, dark silver clouds scudding across the sky, my little home yellow-lit and cozy. I woke up at 5:30 and lay in the dark, warm under the covers, listening to the wind whip down off the ocean and around the corners of my little house. I listened to the doors rattling out in the living room and I stretched long and lean through the sheets. As I lay in the dark, listening to the sounds of my little world, it seemed entirely possible that everything has changed.

February flowed into March like a warm breeze and I continued relaxing into my existence. Not only had I begun to figure out how to slow down but I started working on being present.

I've been trying to focus on right now. This moment. In this moment it's about 10:30 and I'm sitting at my desk in my little home. The double doors are flung open wide to the warm Los Angeles night. Chet Baker is on the stereo, candles flickering all over the house. Being here right now means not thinking about all the things I did today or all the things I have to do tomorrow. It means not thinking about all the things that make me me, all the things I've done or seen or been over my life. It means not thinking about what I'm going to do this summer or when I turn thirty or some even more distant future.

It means just being here right now. It means knowing that I am everything that I have ever been and will ever be right now, in this moment. It means thinking about my life as though this moment is all there is...because really it is.

And it's really a lovely moment. The taste of an apple in my mouth, a saxophone gentle through the room, warmth and light and the dusky evening, me at 28 on a balmy March night in Los Angeles.

Throughout March, every night when I came home I set down my purse, my yoga bag, and instead of pouring a drink, I drew a bath. And every night I sank down into the bath and I closed my eyes and I thought about what I wanted for my life. I thought about all the things I want to do and be and see and touch. And at the end of March, on the night of my last bath that month, I opened my eyes and I knew what I had to do.

I needed to quit my job and write a book. My book. The book I'd been thinking about and talking about for years.

On April 2, much to my boss's surprise, I gave two weeks at my job and I got to work preparing for this monumental task. I told everyone I knew that I was going to begin writing a book. I cleaned and reorganized every inch of my little house, got a new desk, and stocked the fridge with lots of healthy brain food.

On Monday April 16, I woke up, made coffee, opened the doors to the deck and sat down to write the first 1220 words of my now completed book. It was a tremendous feeling.

For the next two weeks I got up every morning at 7:30 and began writing by nine. By the end of April I'd written over ten thousand words. My entire life had changed. I was writing every morning and then running to the clinic to see clients or to my last quarter of grad school in the afternoons. At night I met up with friends for dinners and shows. And without fail, the next morning I was up at 7:30, my fingers poised over the keyboard by 9.

Also in April, something else very significant occurred. In late March I was asked to become a contributing writer on a site called The Nervous Breakdown and in April my first post went up. But before that post even went up a long contributing member of TNB contacted me. His name was Greg Boose. We began emailing each other every day. We wrote about all kinds of things...what it was like to be young and living in a big city, about writing and books and music...we wrote to each other about our families and we wrote about our days. He was very funny and clever.

Every morning when I woke up to begin working on my book I went out to the living room, opened the doors to the deck, made coffee and sat down to read the latest email from Greg who lived in Chicago and who had already been at work for two hours by the time I got up. I'd write him back and then I'd close my gmail account and get to work on my book. When I was finished writing I would lie on my back on the deck in the sunshine and when I checked my email again there would always be another from Greg.

By May I was deep into the writing process of my book. I was writing a whole new chapter every morning and the whole thing just felt like it was flowing out of me. I began uploading audio clips of my progress, all of which can be found in the About section of this blog.

On May 13, Mother's Day, I completed the first section of my book, the section about my mother. I wept, sitting at my desk, as I wrote about the moment I heard that she was gone.

The next morning I woke up and wrote the first chapter of section two, the section about my father. I wrote all through the latter half of May, delving into those days and months following my mother's death, the days in which I got to know my father. On Sunday May 20, just as I finished writing a chapter about my parent's engagement on Nauset Beach on Cape Cod, my uncle called to tell me that my grandmother was in the hospital. She died the next day, on May 21st, my 29th birthday.

Waking up that morning, alone in my little house, on my 29th birthday, before I even heard, I knew that she was gone. And there was something lovely about it happening on my birthday. My grandmother was 96 years old and had lived a long wonderful life.

I flew back to the East Coast the following weekend for her memorial service. I stood in the church, in front of the hundred or more people who were in attendance and I talked about how every time I visited my grandmother she would always take my hand, tears bright in her eyes, and she would say, I've been thinking about you. And what it meant to me to know that no matter where I was in the world, I always knew that my grandmother was thinking about me.

That afternoon, lying on my back in a hammock at my Aunt Pam's house, the warm May air rustling through the trees above me, I thought about my life. I reflected back on the last two months since I had quit my job and begun writing my book. I thought about all the words I had put down and I thought about all the interactions I'd had over those eight weeks. I had opened up my entire world in a way I never had before. For those two months I had said yes to everything that came in my life, meeting all kinds of people and experiencing all kinds of places and moments and breaths that never would have been possible without all the work I'd done throughout the year.

As I thought about those things I realized that the one person I hadn't honored was Greg. We'd been writing every day for two months. We'd talked many times about one of us visiting the other but I always shook my head at the last minute, deciding it was silly and pointless. But lying there in that hammock on Cape Cod, I decided that before I went back to Los Angeles and continued my whole huge life, before I returned only to get swept back up into it all, perhaps I should just see.

I texted Greg from the hammock. What if I change my flight to stop in Chicago tomorrow afternoon? It was Memorial Day Weekend. I'd never been to Chicago. He responded immediately. Yes, please do it!

The next morning, boarding that flight to Chicago, as my feet crossed the threshhold of the airplane I had the distinct feeling of setting something in motion. I knew that I was forever altering whatever path I was on. But even so, sitting there, my forehead pressed to the window as we touched down at O'Hare, I didn't think it would be this. I didn't think that the moment I saw him waiting for me in baggage claim I would feel this strange familiarity come over me, this feeling that we were always going to meet one warm May afternoon just past my 29th birthday.

I flew home the next morning utterly confused about everything.

But before I could even think about anything June was warm and flush upon my doorstep. I went to the final classes of my grad program -- that program being one of the best things I've ever done with my life. I learned more about compassion and humility and kindness during that year and a half than I ever imagined. I'm so incredibly grateful for my experience there.

The second week of June, just after I finished my classes, and just before I formally graduated, Greg came to Los Angeles and asked me to move to Chicago. I knew he was coming to LA to ask me just that and I also knew that I would say yes before he even got off the plane. After dropping him off at the airport the following Sunday afternoon I cried the entire way to my friend Abby's house where I sobbed softly in her backyard under the palm trees, trying to explain what it felt like to let myself love someone as much as I knew I loved him. After the amount of loss I've experienced in my life, it's been terrifying at times to let myself love someone this much.

In mid-June I formally graduated at the Orpheum theatre in downtown Los Angeles. My Aunt and Uncle and cousin had come from Cape Cod and I wore a cap and gown and held a yellow rose and I didn't feel sad that my parents weren't there. Instead I felt more secure and more present to my life than I ever had, the past something I didn't need to carry around as much anymore.

On June 17th, Father's Day, I completed the second section of my book -- the section about my father. Again, I didn't plan it to happen that way but it felt strangely appropriate to do so. The next morning I immediatley began work on the third section, which quickly proved to be the most challenging section.

I plugged away at it though and on July 1st I finished my book. Well, the first draft at least. What an immense day. That afternoon I went for a long walk on the beach, reflecting on everything that had happened over the last ten weeks. It had truly been the most magical time of my entire life.

I waded out into the great swelling Pacific and floated on my back for a while, the blue sky curving overhead. An era was coming to a close. My time in Los Angeles was ending. I took a deep breath and plunged beneath the water, the world hushed and swirling deeply around me.

Greg and I met on Cape Cod for the 4th of July so that he could meet my extended family and we could continue planning my monstrous move. It was crazy to talk about -- me upending my entire life in Los Angeles, five years worth of friends and jobs and homes and memories and favorite restaurants and neighbors and ocean paths. But I never hesitated.

After that trip I went home and spent most of July officially beginning the moving process. I turned down a job offer from the clinic where I was working and informed my clients that I would leaving at the end of August. I gave notice on my apartment and I told all my friends.

In mid-July I went to Chicago again and found an apartment, the very one I'm sitting in right now. I met Greg in the Loop where he works after I signed the lease and we ate lunch together on a high up floor of his big office building. We stared out at the buildings and the lake and I felt quiet inside, overwhelmed by this huge thing we were doing.

When I returned home from that trip it all began to feel very real. I was really leaving Los Angeles.

August brought with it a mad flurry of a hundred things to do in order to get ready to leave. There were moving trucks to book and friends to see one more time. I had to terminate with all of my clients at the clinic which was very stressful and painful and I began to pack up the little home in which I had lived for four years. As excited as I was about my new life in Chicago a certain sadness and a tinge of anxiety began to creep over me.

Everything seemed to be happening at once. Mediabistro ran an interview with me about my book writing process and two days later marked my father's four year death anniversary and the day after that Travel Age West sent me to Taiwan to cover a culinary exhibition.

It was unbelievably strange to suddenly be in Taipei, seemingly a million miles away from everything and everyone, looking back on my life that was ending in Los Angeles and my uncertain but sparkling new life in Chicago. I came home on August 14th and had exactly two weeks to finish packing and begin my journey to Chicago.

Greg came out one more time and we spent a lovely day driving up the coast to Los Olivos, tasting wine all day and then floating on our backs in the wide Pacific in the late afternoon. At Beckman Vineyard Greg took this hilarious video of me in which he pretends to be trying to take a picture, asking me to pose with a glass of wine but then saying that the camera isn't working, all the while taking a video.

I spent my last week in Los Angeles amidst a maelstrom of moving boxes and last minute details. My amazing friends came over one by one and in groups to help me pack dishes and tape boxes, load my moving truck and carry matresses. At night I sat on my porch with my neighbor Rhonda, drinking wine and expounding on our swiftly moving lives.

On August 28th I climbed behind the wheel of my 14 foot moving truck with my car on a trailer on the back and I drove myself out of Los Angeles.

I awoke in my new apartment on September 1st and thus began my life in Chicago. I spent most of that month orienting myself with my new city and neighborhood, unpacking boxes and applying for jobs. Those first few weeks went by quickly.

I began my new blog, Life in Chicago, started making friends and found myself thrilled by the changing weather and the beginning of the first Fall I'd exprerienced in years.

October proved to be a harder month. My money had run out and I still hadn't found a job. I was missing my friends and my apartment in Los Angeles. Greg and I were doing really well -- almost better than to be expected but nonetheless it was a challenging time for both of us. I was trying to keep my head up but I continually felt like I was drowning.

I felt so displaced. I couldn't find a job and couldn't figure out what it was I wanted to be doing with myself anyway. My book was finished and I was working on a proposal for a second one but my days spent endlessly alone in my house were driving me to tears on a regular basis. I wrote here constantly about plans to start over, to start fresh, to come up with a new plan, but each morning I woke feeling even more disheartened than the next. It was such contrast to the Spring when my days seemed filled with nothing but light and possibility.

At the end of October, in a strange twist of fate, I went to the Grenadines on a last minute travel writing assignment. That trip renewed the light and possibility that had been quickly evaporating from my days. I was finally able to slip out of my depression long enough to remember what it was I wanted from my life and I came home refreshed and invigorated.

I began November with a renewed sense of purpose and slowly, over the course of the month, things began to shift. It was still a hard month though. I felt like everything I had learned in the Spring had disappeared. I knew, I knew that things were on the verge of changing, that if I could just hold out and breathe, breathe, breathe, that it would all come together. But I couldn't stop the tightening anxiety. I was still crying every day, still waking in the night with feelings of dread and despair, still fearing being alone, and still feeling unable to help myself.

Again the end of the month brought respite in the form of Thanksgiving spent with Greg and his family -- a warm and relaxing week in which I felt able to breathe again. And also in mid-November I was offered my current job as a bereavement counselor in hospice.

Coming home from Ohio with Greg I felt one last deep pull of despair as I returned to my lonely little apartment. I knew I was beginning work in less than two weeks but I could hardly bear much more of the isolation and solitude I felt in my days. I realized I had truly become depressed  and spent the beginning of December trying to pull myself out of it before I began my new job. I talked with close friends for hours at a time and cleaned and rearranged my house.

And on December 10 I finally went to work. I don't want to say that everything hinged on me working...but in some ways it did. Having a job to go to gave me a sense of purpose and place here in this new city. It also alleviated my serious financial anxiety and it gave me something to focus on other than my depression and solitude.

And on my second day of work, in some neighborhood in southern Chicago, leading a group about coping with loss during the holidays, I could literarlly feel light and hope breaking through me.

The rest of December was a busy mixture of work and holiday activities. Greg and I got our first Christmas tree together and drank champagne while we hung the ornaments. We spent Christmas in Ohio again with his family and it was the first Christmas in a long, long time in which I didn't feel sad.

And now it's the day before New Year's Eve and I've been sitting here all day at my desk in my little apartment, writing and reflecting on this last year. It's truly been the most magical year of my life. I've learned so much about life and love and myself, about being kind and about being quiet -- two things that are immeasurably hard to do sometimes but which, when done with intention, can be deeply healing and rewarding.

I know that 2008 will bring a new depth to all I've established this year. In May I will turn 30 and I already know that I will do so with presence and with light.

I'm so grateful for the people in my life. I'm astounded sometimes by how much goodness is in them and by how generous they are.

I wish everyone a new year filled with light and love and all things possible.

It's wonderfully windy this morning. The whole world feels full of possibility, dark silver clouds scudding across the sky, my little home yellow-lit and cozy. I woke up at 5:30 and lay in the dark, warm under the covers, listening to the wind whip down off the ocean and around the corners of my little house. I listened to the doors rattling out in the living room and I stretched long and lean through the sheets. As I lay in the dark, listening to the sounds of my little world, it seemed entirely possible that everything has changed.

February flowed into March like a warm breeze and I continued relaxing into my existence. Not only had I begun to figure out how to slow down but I started working on being present.

I've been trying to focus on right now. This moment. In this moment it's about 10:30 and I'm sitting at my desk in my little home. The double doors are flung open wide to the warm Los Angeles night. Chet Baker is on the stereo, candles flickering all over the house. Being here right now means not thinking about all the things I did today or all the things I have to do tomorrow. It means not thinking about all the things that make me me, all the things I've done or seen or been over my life. It means not thinking about what I'm going to do this summer or when I turn thirty or some even more distant future.

It means just being here right now. It means knowing that I am everything that I have ever been and will ever be right now, in this moment. It means thinking about my life as though this moment is all there is...because really it is.

And it's really a lovely moment. The taste of an apple in my mouth, a saxophone gentle through the room, warmth and light and the dusky evening, me at 28 on a balmy March night in Los Angeles.

Throughout March, every night when I came home I set down my purse, my yoga bag, and instead of pouring a drink, I drew a bath. And every night I sank down into the bath and I closed my eyes and I thought about what I wanted for my life. I thought about all the things I want to do and be and see and touch. And at the end of March, on the night of my last bath that month, I opened my eyes and I knew what I had to do.

I needed to quit my job and write a book. My book. The book I'd been thinking about and talking about for years.

On April 2, much to my boss's surprise, I gave two weeks at my job and I got to work preparing for this monumental task. I told everyone I knew that I was going to begin writing a book. I cleaned and reorganized every inch of my little house, got a new desk, and stocked the fridge with lots of healthy brain food.

On Monday April 16, I woke up, made coffee, opened the doors to the deck and sat down to write the first 1220 words of my now completed book. It was a tremendous feeling.

For the next two weeks I got up every morning at 7:30 and began writing by nine. By the end of April I'd written over ten thousand words. My entire life had changed. I was writing every morning and then running to the clinic to see clients or to my last quarter of grad school in the afternoons. At night I met up with friends for dinners and shows. And without fail, the next morning I was up at 7:30, my fingers poised over the keyboard by 9.

Also in April, something else very significant occurred. In late March I was asked to become a contributing writer on a site called The Nervous Breakdown and in April my first post went up. But before that post even went up a long contributing member of TNB contacted me. His name was Greg Boose. We began emailing each other every day. We wrote about all kinds of things...what it was like to be young and living in a big city, about writing and books and music...we wrote to each other about our families and we wrote about our days. He was very funny and clever.

Every morning when I woke up to begin working on my book I went out to the living room, opened the doors to the deck, made coffee and sat down to read the latest email from Greg who lived in Chicago and who had already been at work for two hours by the time I got up. I'd write him back and then I'd close my gmail account and get to work on my book. When I was finished writing I would lie on my back on the deck in the sunshine and when I checked my email again there would always be another from Greg.

By May I was deep into the writing process of my book. I was writing a whole new chapter every morning and the whole thing just felt like it was flowing out of me. I began uploading audio clips of my progress, all of which can be found in the About section of this blog.

On May 13, Mother's Day, I completed the first section of my book, the section about my mother. I wept, sitting at my desk, as I wrote about the moment I heard that she was gone.

The next morning I woke up and wrote the first chapter of section two, the section about my father. I wrote all through the latter half of May, delving into those days and months following my mother's death, the days in which I got to know my father. On Sunday May 20, just as I finished writing a chapter about my parent's engagement on Nauset Beach on Cape Cod, my uncle called to tell me that my grandmother was in the hospital. She died the next day, on May 21st, my 29th birthday.

Waking up that morning, alone in my little house, on my 29th birthday, before I even heard, I knew that she was gone. And there was something lovely about it happening on my birthday. My grandmother was 96 years old and had lived a long wonderful life.

I flew back to the East Coast the following weekend for her memorial service. I stood in the church, in front of the hundred or more people who were in attendance and I talked about how every time I visited my grandmother she would always take my hand, tears bright in her eyes, and she would say, I've been thinking about you. And what it meant to me to know that no matter where I was in the world, I always knew that my grandmother was thinking about me.

That afternoon, lying on my back in a hammock at my Aunt Pam's house, the warm May air rustling through the trees above me, I thought about my life. I reflected back on the last two months since I had quit my job and begun writing my book. I thought about all the words I had put down and I thought about all the interactions I'd had over those eight weeks. I had opened up my entire world in a way I never had before. For those two months I had said yes to everything that came in my life, meeting all kinds of people and experiencing all kinds of places and moments and breaths that never would have been possible without all the work I'd done throughout the year.

As I thought about those things I realized that the one person I hadn't honored was Greg. We'd been writing every day for two months. We'd talked many times about one of us visiting the other but I always shook my head at the last minute, deciding it was silly and pointless. But lying there in that hammock on Cape Cod, I decided that before I went back to Los Angeles and continued my whole huge life, before I returned only to get swept back up into it all, perhaps I should just see.

I texted Greg from the hammock. What if I change my flight to stop in Chicago tomorrow afternoon? It was Memorial Day Weekend. I'd never been to Chicago. He responded immediately. Yes, please do it!

The next morning, boarding that flight to Chicago, as my feet crossed the threshhold of the airplane I had the distinct feeling of setting something in motion. I knew that I was forever altering whatever path I was on. But even so, sitting there, my forehead pressed to the window as we touched down at O'Hare, I didn't think it would be this. I didn't think that the moment I saw him waiting for me in baggage claim I would feel this strange familiarity come over me, this feeling that we were always going to meet one warm May afternoon just past my 29th birthday.

I flew home the next morning utterly confused about everything.

But before I could even think about anything June was warm and flush upon my doorstep. I went to the final classes of my grad program -- that program being one of the best things I've ever done with my life. I learned more about compassion and humility and kindness during that year and a half than I ever imagined. I'm so incredibly grateful for my experience there.

The second week of June, just after I finished my classes, and just before I formally graduated, Greg came to Los Angeles and asked me to move to Chicago. I knew he was coming to LA to ask me just that and I also knew that I would say yes before he even got off the plane. After dropping him off at the airport the following Sunday afternoon I cried the entire way to my friend Abby's house where I sobbed softly in her backyard under the palm trees, trying to explain what it felt like to let myself love someone as much as I knew I loved him. After the amount of loss I've experienced in my life, it's been terrifying at times to let myself love someone this much.

In mid-June I formally graduated at the Orpheum theatre in downtown Los Angeles. My Aunt and Uncle and cousin had come from Cape Cod and I wore a cap and gown and held a yellow rose and I didn't feel sad that my parents weren't there. Instead I felt more secure and more present to my life than I ever had, the past something I didn't need to carry around as much anymore.

On June 17th, Father's Day, I completed the second section of my book -- the section about my father. Again, I didn't plan it to happen that way but it felt strangely appropriate to do so. The next morning I immediatley began work on the third section, which quickly proved to be the most challenging section.

I plugged away at it though and on July 1st I finished my book. Well, the first draft at least. What an immense day. That afternoon I went for a long walk on the beach, reflecting on everything that had happened over the last ten weeks. It had truly been the most magical time of my entire life.

I waded out into the great swelling Pacific and floated on my back for a while, the blue sky curving overhead. An era was coming to a close. My time in Los Angeles was ending. I took a deep breath and plunged beneath the water, the world hushed and swirling deeply around me.

Greg and I met on Cape Cod for the 4th of July so that he could meet my extended family and we could continue planning my monstrous move. It was crazy to talk about -- me upending my entire life in Los Angeles, five years worth of friends and jobs and homes and memories and favorite restaurants and neighbors and ocean paths. But I never hesitated.

After that trip I went home and spent most of July officially beginning the moving process. I turned down a job offer from the clinic where I was working and informed my clients that I would leaving at the end of August. I gave notice on my apartment and I told all my friends.

In mid-July I went to Chicago again and found an apartment, the very one I'm sitting in right now. I met Greg in the Loop where he works after I signed the lease and we ate lunch together on a high up floor of his big office building. We stared out at the buildings and the lake and I felt quiet inside, overwhelmed by this huge thing we were doing.

When I returned home from that trip it all began to feel very real. I was really leaving Los Angeles.

August brought with it a mad flurry of a hundred things to do in order to get ready to leave. There were moving trucks to book and friends to see one more time. I had to terminate with all of my clients at the clinic which was very stressful and painful and I began to pack up the little home in which I had lived for four years. As excited as I was about my new life in Chicago a certain sadness and a tinge of anxiety began to creep over me.

Everything seemed to be happening at once. Mediabistro ran an interview with me about my book writing process and two days later marked my father's four year death anniversary and the day after that Travel Age West sent me to Taiwan to cover a culinary exhibition.

It was unbelievably strange to suddenly be in Taipei, seemingly a million miles away from everything and everyone, looking back on my life that was ending in Los Angeles and my uncertain but sparkling new life in Chicago. I came home on August 14th and had exactly two weeks to finish packing and begin my journey to Chicago.

Greg came out one more time and we spent a lovely day driving up the coast to Los Olivos, tasting wine all day and then floating on our backs in the wide Pacific in the late afternoon. At Beckman Vineyard Greg took this hilarious video of me in which he pretends to be trying to take a picture, asking me to pose with a glass of wine but then saying that the camera isn't working, all the while taking a video.

I spent my last week in Los Angeles amidst a maelstrom of moving boxes and last minute details. My amazing friends came over one by one and in groups to help me pack dishes and tape boxes, load my moving truck and carry matresses. At night I sat on my porch with my neighbor Rhonda, drinking wine and expounding on our swiftly moving lives.

On August 28th I climbed behind the wheel of my 14 foot moving truck with my car on a trailer on the back and I drove myself out of Los Angeles.

I awoke in my new apartment on September 1st and thus began my life in Chicago. I spent most of that month orienting myself with my new city and neighborhood, unpacking boxes and applying for jobs. Those first few weeks went by quickly.

I began my new blog, Life in Chicago, started making friends and found myself thrilled by the changing weather and the beginning of the first Fall I'd exprerienced in years.

October proved to be a harder month. My money had run out and I still hadn't found a job. I was missing my friends and my apartment in Los Angeles. Greg and I were doing really well -- almost better than to be expected but nonetheless it was a challenging time for both of us. I was trying to keep my head up but I continually felt like I was drowning.

I felt so displaced. I couldn't find a job and couldn't figure out what it was I wanted to be doing with myself anyway. My book was finished and I was working on a proposal for a second one but my days spent endlessly alone in my house were driving me to tears on a regular basis. I wrote here constantly about plans to start over, to start fresh, to come up with a new plan, but each morning I woke feeling even more disheartened than the next. It was such contrast to the Spring when my days seemed filled with nothing but light and possibility.

At the end of October, in a strange twist of fate, I went to the Grenadines on a last minute travel writing assignment. That trip renewed the light and possibility that had been quickly evaporating from my days. I was finally able to slip out of my depression long enough to remember what it was I wanted from my life and I came home refreshed and invigorated.

I began November with a renewed sense of purpose and slowly, over the course of the month, things began to shift. It was still a hard month though. I felt like everything I had learned in the Spring had disappeared. I knew, I knew that things were on the verge of changing, that if I could just hold out and breathe, breathe, breathe, that it would all come together. But I couldn't stop the tightening anxiety. I was still crying every day, still waking in the night with feelings of dread and despair, still fearing being alone, and still feeling unable to help myself.

Again the end of the month brought respite in the form of Thanksgiving spent with Greg and his family -- a warm and relaxing week in which I felt able to breathe again. And also in mid-November I was offered my current job as a bereavement counselor in hospice.

Coming home from Ohio with Greg I felt one last deep pull of despair as I returned to my lonely little apartment. I knew I was beginning work in less than two weeks but I could hardly bear much more of the isolation and solitude I felt in my days. I realized I had truly become depressed  and spent the beginning of December trying to pull myself out of it before I began my new job. I talked with close friends for hours at a time and cleaned and rearranged my house.

And on December 10 I finally went to work. I don't want to say that everything hinged on me working...but in some ways it did. Having a job to go to gave me a sense of purpose and place here in this new city. It also alleviated my serious financial anxiety and it gave me something to focus on other than my depression and solitude.

And on my second day of work, in some neighborhood in southern Chicago, leading a group about coping with loss during the holidays, I could literarlly feel light and hope breaking through me.

The rest of December was a busy mixture of work and holiday activities. Greg and I got our first Christmas tree together and drank champagne while we hung the ornaments. We spent Christmas in Ohio again with his family and it was the first Christmas in a long, long time in which I didn't feel sad.

And now it's the day before New Year's Eve and I've been sitting here all day at my desk in my little apartment, writing and reflecting on this last year. It's truly been the most magical year of my life. I've learned so much about life and love and myself, about being kind and about being quiet -- two things that are immeasurably hard to do sometimes but which, when done with intention, can be deeply healing and rewarding.

I know that 2008 will bring a new depth to all I've established this year. In May I will turn 30 and I already know that I will do so with presence and with light.

I'm so grateful for the people in my life. I'm astounded sometimes by how much goodness is in them and by how generous they are.

I wish everyone a new year filled with light and love and all things possible.

Coming Home

I was crying before I even walked in the door yesterday.

Thanksgiving was absolutely wonderful.

Could I write two more contradictory sentences?

I had the loveliest time in Ohio with Greg and his family. It was the most relaxing four days I've had in a while (yes, even more relaxing than the Caribbean somehow). We ate constantly—his mother is a fantastic cook and seemingly always in the kitchen whipping something up. We watched a lot of movies (Ratatouille, Blood Diamond, and We Are Marshall) while sprawled across big, comfy couches. We played games (dominoes and Wii) and we took a nice walk in the woods.

It was really heavenly. I slept for long hours, got started on my Christmas cards, read several People magazines and looked at a thousand wonderful pictures of Greg and his family growing up. One afternoon Greg's dad toured us all around Norwalk, walking through the impressive market his family used to run and pointing out the vast acres of land they used to farm. The town itself is incredibly quaint with its maple trees and church steeples, lovely old cemeteries and sweeping farmland.

And it was so much fun to be with such a big group of people. Going out to dinner we were a party of nine. And two of the siblings weren't even there! On the last night, going to sleep by myself on a pullout couch in the computer room, I listened to bathroom and bedroom doors opening and shutting, various siblings calling out goodnight to each other. Then I heard one of Greg's brothers knock on his parent's bedroom door. "Mom? Dad?" he said, and tears instantly welled up in my eyes, spilling over to the pillow beneath my cheek.

I miss my parents so much.

And it was hard to come home to my life here in Chicago. I'm lonely these days. I truly didn't realize what an incredible support network I had created in Los Angeles for myself. Following my father's death four years ago I surrounded myself with a firm amount of amazing people. In my old life in LA, if I wasn't in class or seeing clients, I had a dinner date every night. I rarely spent an evening alone and now I remember why.

I just feel like I've spent enough time alone in my life. I'm so ready to be part of something more than just myself. Going to sleep that last night in Ohio, goodnights being called out across the hallway and doors being pulled shut with soft clicks, I felt a sense of community and family and belonging...something that's lacking for me right now in my city life here in Chicago.

And that's why I was crying before I even walked in the door yesterday.

But.

All of that said, I know that things will begin to get better soon. I've only been here for three months. I'm about to start work (more on that soon) and I'm beginning to make friends. It all takes time and the life I had in Los Angeles wasn't something I built in a day.   

And I couldn't be more grateful to have met such a wonderful man and to get to know his equally wonderful family.

Onward!