four seasons to a dozen months

In this moment right now, as I open my laptop at a local coffee shop, I am watching two groups of individuals, most of which are not actually hipsters.  One group has matching Macbooks and clearly works for some company that requires them all to wear a red polos, and the other group is huddled at the big table over blueprints; I find a tremendous feeling of thanks washing over me.  Thanks that something has worked out for me.  Maybe not in the way I thought it would, and maybe not in the way I'd have wanted, but it somehow worked out.  I woke up this morning and flipped through my Timehop, surprised that the first picture to show up was the "Welcome to Minnesota!" state marker, meaning that today is one year of living in the land of 10,000 lakes.

An empty truck and a full house.

I've always found time to be such an interesting thing.  Misery can make it crawl by, happiness can make it speed forward, and the rest leaves you caught somewhere in between.  I've experienced all speeds this past year, but I suppose an overall feeling of happiness made it go zipping by.  It's hard for me to realize it's truly been a year since pulling into the driveway and walking into my house, checking out the shoddy paint job and thinking I had been misled in the video tour of the place.  There was a weird smell, everything felt sticky, and there was a man laying tile in the basement that had flooded a few weeks prior.  Not the best first impression, but it was going to be home.

It was a fresh start.  It was a new start, a second chance at "getting it right" after moving away from home 11 months earlier.  There's a weird transient feeling that comes along with not staying in one place for a full year, and I had this feeling full-tilt.  I can only liken it to a sort of disorientation.  A week ago I had to call to change something with my health insurance and they needed me to verify my address, which was still listed as Texas.  For the life of me I could not remember what it had been down there, and ended up having to google it to jog my memory.

That's why you don't move cross country twice in less than a year.  I'm not saying... I'm just saying.

A chill in the air, some rain, and a solitary dried leaf mark fall's arrival.

I started back up with Pottery Barn and spent the first month sort of licking my wounds.  I was in my old position, square one, and wondering if that's all I was ever meant to do.  Getting comfortable again at a place of work whilst making new friends and allies and trying to find your footing while making your way in a city you've only been to twice in your life is... something.  Don't want to say it's miserable because it isn't, but it's also not the opposite of that.  It's a struggle.  You end up being more mentally worn down than you'd at first believe, and stressed constantly.  Worried about perception and people's thoughts of you, how you don't want to be too firm on your views at work while in the same instance knowing you need to assert yourself just enough.  It's a game of emotions and in the end I came out of it just fine, but going in was daunting.

One of the silent aspects of the move north came in the form of weather, or rather, the seasons.  I'm the first to admit I never thought weather played such a significant role in my life, and until moving to Austin this held true.  But Austin is a place where there is no fall and winter is just a big fat joke.  Spring was nice, admittedly, and then summer comes back and your skin wants to melt off but it can't because it's too swollen from humidity and Satan's laughter.  Here in Minnesota you have a place where, much like Wisconsin, the seasons are all quite different.  Arriving at this point in the summer I knew fall was just around the corner, and being my favorite season I knew it was going to start perking me up.

And it did, surprise of surprises.

There's something to be said about sitting outside in the early morning with a cup of coffee and watching fog as it lists through the trees in the backyards.  Not necessarily cold outside, but certainly not warm.  The day is filled with soft winds that rattle the drying leaves, a particular silence from kids back in school, and the crispness that promises such colder days.  I'm consistently a warm person so the cold doesn't really bother me; Elsa and I have that in common.

A snowy field of trees to capture the moment of the season.

Work was stressful as it tends to be, but there was an ease that came with it as well.  I got along great with the staff and had fun when I went in for my shifts, looking forward to them once more.  The Holiday season was upon us and like the yuletide joy it brings I was better.  Happy.  I'd had time to reflect on the year before, foolishly writing about having lost my voice and finding it again.  It wasn't foolish in the moment to say that, of course, because I believed it.  I had to believe it.  I had to feel there was some sort of control coming back to me even if in hindsight it really wasn't.

Love life, work life, personal life; these are the blocks we juggle on a daily basis.

I was incredibly focused on my work life in the fall and winter.  Acting GM again, trying to turn things around in the store and make my mark on it at the same time.  All this while not letting myself get burnt out and angry, letting go of the things I couldn't control and being "off" when I wasn't required to be "on."  That's one block.

I was incredibly focused on my personal life.  Making myself happy by starting to bake and cook again, getting back into writing my books and developing the creative side of my personality.  Painting projects and at-home projects, flexing what you can really only describe as a mental-muscle and hoping it continues to grow stronger.  That's a second block to juggle.

I was not focused on my love life.  Well... that's not correct, because I was; I was obsessed with figuring out why it wasn't easy, I just didn't know how to unravel it for inspection and so it kept crumbling.  I'd mentioned in a couple blogs that Derek and I had our issues.  They started in Texas, persisted through our tenure, and then unfortunately followed us to Minneapolis as problems tend to do.  I took things for granted and assumed they would just repair themselves as the other pieces of my life came into better focus, but they didn't.  And just because this had been a happy coincidence in my past, I think that piece of luck doesn't really exist for me any more.  The "ignore it 'til it's better" piece.

In January I tried breaking up with Derek.  I actually tried twice, for two consecutive weeks.  I've never written that before... and it's odd to admit it now that we really are done.  But that's where my head was at.  I was tired of trying to "fix" it, and that's not a fair word but it's the only one I have.  I'm a textbook example of an ENFJ, and it goes along with my personality type that I am overly idealistic, too sensitive, and that I struggle to make tough decisions.  Trying to break up with someone essentially out of the blue is a very difficult thing to do, especially when you aren't 100% convinced it is what you should be doing.  What if it was the wrong choice?  What if I was making a huge mistake?  I knew how I felt, I knew how it was eroding my mind, but what if my gut was wrong?

In my mind I had weighed the pro's and con's and to me it seemed to make sense.  I couldn't fix "us" with the usual ease I find in situations with other people, and after trying to half-ass it for more than a year and not seeing success I was turned off to it.  He pleaded for another chance, promising to change certain things I had always had a problem with about his persona, and I agreed.  And I'd be remiss to not say things got better, because they did.  Somewhat quickly.  I helped where I could, writing daily affirmations for more than a month on the bathroom mirror to build his confidence up and hopefully have something that would strike a chord in getting him to feel passionate about his life.  He didn't ask me to do this, I took it upon myself because to me maybe it would also help my own thought process.  And then that third block, the one of my love life, started getting juggled with the others once more.

When he proposed two months later on our vacation to Punta Cana, it just made sense for me to say yes.  It was a loaded yes, because I didn't feel we had reached an ideal relationship status yet, but it was still a yes and a promise of hope to greater things to come.

A few buds add credence to the arrival of spring.

Spring came with these new feelings of lightness and love, and the cold of winter gradually fell away.  The sun came out for longer hours, green popped up on the bushes, and I was reminded what is so great about living in the north.  You appreciate each season so much for what it is, enjoying the respective positives and negatives.  Fall for it's beautiful but deceptive lighting, as it may look hot outside but in reality it's a weird mix of hot/cold and you always end up wearing the wrong thing.  Winter for the lovely snow and heart-warming ideas of hot chocolate and cozy afternoons under a thick blanket, and then bitter-fucking-cold and ugly black/brown snow in the gutters.

With spring you realize you've made it through the hardest five months of the year and that it can only get better.  Of course, it did.  Work was good, I'd started writing Episode IV again so personal life was good, and my love life was good.  Spring was pretty uneventful, as it tends to be when you aren't sure if you want to be outside or if you think "nah, I'mma watch a movie instead," but it was still full of hope for the days of summer on swift approach.

The hours of sunlight continued to get longer, hotter, and unfortunately more humid.  You hit the summer solstice, a bittersweet day of realizing "it's all downhill from here," and then ironically a week later the shit actually does hit the proverbial fan.  I got sick, an affair was revealed, and then my engagement was over.  That block of my love life so happily soaring with the other two?  Well it hit the ground, tumbled away from my feet, and now rests in a corner on the wood floor.  Probably with some tumbleweeds of cat hair.

Sometimes I feel like it wouldn't be my life if there wasn't something going wrong.  A heavy thought, but a true one.  No one ever really has it all and if they say they do, they're lying.  Something can always be better.  Something can always make you more content.

July was a hard month, and like the summer solstice preceding it, a bittersweet one.  As my relationship ended and the months of doubt became justified and subsequently locked away, my career reached a new height and took off.  But it was still a hard month.  Rushes of sadness in my gut, confusion over what I want, and still a persistent pain in my throat when I think about where it went awry.

But I did try, didn't I?

I may not have given my all, and maybe I should have... and maybe it wouldn't have mattered anyway.  When someone asks for a second chance and you give it to them, is that all that is required of you?  Do certain things happen for a reason regardless of chances?  I have to believe they do.  If I hadn't moved to Austin, I wouldn't have moved to Minneapolis.  If I hadn't met Derek, I don't think I would have even moved to Austin.  If I hadn't given him a second chance, I wouldn't have been cheated on.  Sometimes life's just unfair and there is no way around it, though I like to think there is knowledge in the hurt.

You learn in your failures, right?  It might be the better way to do something, or it might be the way to never do something again.  You might realize that the city you held in such high regard really wasn't that special.  You might realize the man you loved is just a stranger with a known name.  Every time you fail you add another link to the chain of your armor.  But you still learn, and the day I stop learning will be the day I die.  You're never too old or too wise to not learn a lesson no matter how small.

Downtown view from the Minneapolis Institute of Art

Tomorrow morning I will fly to Scottsdale, Arizona for the annual Williams-Sonoma Inc. Leadership Conference, and it's the first time I've ever been invited as a perk that comes with my new title of General Manager.  I will be with my peers, meeting the heads of the company and everyone involved with making us tick as a corporation, and to put it mildly I'm really excited for it.  A year ago today I wouldn't have said I'd be going to this.  A year ago I thought I'd probably be with a new company, or even back in Appleton, still licking my wounds.  But time goes on, you keep your head down, and you juggle the pieces of your life until they make sense again.  And while I've lost one of those pieces, the other ones still make sense.  That gives me something to focus on.

I won't say I love Minneapolis, because it still feels too early in the relationship.  I will say that I thoroughly enjoy it, and as I continue to pull the covers back on this city and get into bed, so to speak, I find even more to like.  I'm starting to feel whole again, and somehow more complete.  Is that an odd thing to say, or can you understand that?  For so long I felt like I was missing something... missing out on something... and I don't know why that is.  I'm still working on it.  While I might truly have a missing piece now,  I'm okay with that.  Or as okay as I could be, I suppose.  I learned in 2012 that I can make my life as good as I want it to be, and that was a powerful lesson in and of itself.    I need to trust in myself again, and like the seasons, I'll see the silent changes as they come.

I need to believe that.