The liminal spaces

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The view out of my window, the one on the left side of my couch, is incredible. Nearly every evening the sky is pink, orange, and white over the tops of the middle-distant San Francisco skyline. Below are restaurants and bars and murals.

My apartment is slowly emptying, between mailing a few boxes home, selling, and donating. I’ve been thinking a lot about these liminal spaces. How it feels oddly disloyal or something to my future life to enjoy what I have now. How if I’d known I was going to be moving soon I wouldn’t have ordered approximately 800 bars of soap. Wondering how my relationships would have changed if I’d known earlier that I was leaving.

I’m bereft to leave this life and these people. And I’m also excited to be embarking on a new adventure. I feel like I’m living on pause. I’m catching up with people and seeing them before I leave. I have this urge to do and see everything one more time while I can, or for the first time. But I’m also exhausted, and there’s still so much to do.

“No one does this,” a lover told me while we were rolling recently. No one leaves their comfortable lives in their late 30s and moves across the country to pursue their dreams with no romantic relationship to spur them. I mean people do that all the time. But not most people. Not most of the time.

I’ve wondered if I could do it. I’ve wondered if I had another big risk in me. I wondered if I was finally settled and comfortable enough that I had too much to lose.

I’m really relieved to know that I do. These big changes are what change me the fastest. I grow more and learn more when I uproot myself than at any other time. Every big move has made me a very different person. And every time I’ve become better, fuller, and more interesting (at least to myself) as a result.

Of course I’m afraid. But I finally got more afraid of wondering what could have been if I’d tried this than I was of trying and failing. I got more tired of the wait than afraid of the risk. I’m generally more impatient than I am risk averse.

But I also feel more at peace with the decision every day. In the past two weeks, excitement shifted to terror as I started thinking through everything I had to do and everything that would suck or could go wrong about my move. Then I remembered, there’s a reason I made this choice. Everything (except the man) I was excited about before when I made the decision is still true and still worth feeling excited about. I can acknowledge these risks and losses. I can feel sadness about what I’m giving up. I can feel sad about the breakup. But I can also remember that vision I had and everything that made me think this is worth pursuing.

I forget these feelings. These liminal spaces between my old life and my new one. It gets lost in the blur of change and getting shit done.

But they’re worth remembering. This was a beautiful life. It’s worth remembering, and worth mourning.

And I remembered, when I was in the anxiety, that there’s a reason I chose San Francisco. It turned out better and more interesting than I could have ever imagined. Everything I wanted (except the man) SF to give me, it gave me, and then a bunch of stuff I never expected (plus many more excellent men). When it comes to my big dreams, I’ve never gotten exactly what I want. But I’ve always gotten more and better than I could have ever imagined instead.

Which leaves me facing Alabama believing my dreams probably won’t come true exactly as I imagine them. But that, if trends continue, it’ll be better and more interesting than I can currently conjur.

At the same time, if trends continue, it’ll also be harder than I imagine. The challenges won’t be exactly what I expect either. Things that I don’t think of at all will be huge problems while what I am now worried about will often be no big deal in comparison. It’s always so, so hard. But it’s always worth it. Growth usually involves some discomfort. Big growth usually accompanies big pain.

I never thought I’d live alone in a beautiful apartment with gorgeous views of San Francisco. And I never thought I’d move back to Alabama except under duress. But here we are. Looking forward to living the next thing I never would have thought I would.