I'm back!

I woke up on January 1 feeling happy and hopeful—already I know that in 2010 I will turn thirty, become a yoga teacher, and see Mariah Carey (for those who don’t know, she’s my favorite). And that’s just in the first five months. My last big transitional phase was extremely painful, but I have a good feeling about this one.

When I started this blog in May of 2007 it was a way of goofing around and communicating with friends. I had just turned twenty-seven. I had a newly minted MFA in Creative Writing and a whole bunch of anxiety about what would become of me. By June I had decided I would move to Chicago and see what kind of job I could find. It seemed like a good plan because I was familiar with the city but had never lived there. It was new without being completely foreign—a manageable leap.

I never moved to Chicago. Everything that happened that summer was foreign and unanticipated. In June, my mom, who was forty-nine at the time, nearly died because of misdiagnosed (and therefore untreated) colon cancer. I changed my plans. I would live at home and help her recover from her surgeries and take her to chemo and radiation. If I could find a part-time job, great. If not, I’d worry about employment when she was back in good health.

Unexpected event number two: a week before school started, I was hired to teach a full-time load at a university about an hour away. Stunned and happy, I rented an apartment and threw together a couple syllabi.

I decided that I could still nurse my mom through chemo while doing my first real job and living an hour away. By the end of the academic year my Mom was still alive and my students had done all the requisite assignments. But I was emotionally and physically exhausted, and the stress I carried around with me hadn’t helped when it came to making new friends or settling into the community. I joked with a couple students before class one day that I was looking for a reputable physician who would be willing to put me in a medically induced coma at the end of the semester. When I went to visit grad school friends that summer, I realized that my mantra, “I’m not myself this year” was an understatement. My personality had completely disappeared. Even though I had hated it, I decided to go back to my job for another year. I didn’t think I had the energy to find another position, and at least I would know what to expect.

I had kept up the blog because it was a way to feel like I was communicating with friends even though we were far away from each other and caught up in endless games of phone tag. By the time I started my second year of work, my interest faded and I left the blog un-updated.

Now it’s halfway through my third year at the same job, and those early days seem very far away. This isn’t the kind of thing you’re supposed to say about challenges, but if I could, I would change a lot of things that happened that year. My Mom and everyone who loves her suffered a lot. Despite the well-meaning people who try to make lemonade out of the situation, I don’t think the ways we learned or grew from the experience were worth it.

So here I am on the cusp of another transitional phase, and the blog is back. I’m comforted that I can see some of what’s coming, and I’m being optimistic about the parts I can’t anticipate.