snapshots of a happy summer + why i’ve been quiet

I’ve left this space deliberately blank for several months, but I think I’m ready to return to it.

I spent the last three seasons living my life. For years, since I was a teenager (maybe earlier), I had the sense that there was some fullness of experience that I wasn’t getting my hands on. I paired with a crippling fear of what may come should I try to get to wherever that fullness was, and I lived inside of small boxes. It’s hard to explain to people who have been less afraid to me how deeply joyful and fundamentally expansive and overwhelmingly delightful it is to say yes instead of no. It’s wild and full, and it’s oxygen to empty lungs.

I spent the better part of the year hacking away at all these vines that had grown up around my life. Light after darkness? When you can claw your way to it, it’s glorious. It shows up on your skin and in your bones.

One of my uncles said to me: You look happy in your eyes. And my mom said: You don’t look scared anymore. And countless people said: You just look different, in a really good way. I told them this is what good looks like on me.

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This summer, I saw things that I’d once clung to slip off my skin like water.

Between May and November, I read very little. It wasn’t an active aversion – books weren’t a struggle, but no longer were they a salve. One of the first warm afternoons in May, I took a blanket and a stack of books into the yard. I spent three hours moving my blanket to follow the sun, and not once did I open my books. Over and over, I found myself more content to sit quietly with my own thoughts, than I was to fill my mind with someone else’s. What little I did read, though, was brilliant, and radical, and healing.

Television, too, has lost some of it’s appeal. I’ve written before about how much I love well made TV, and while that’s still true enough, I don’t have the same stomach for it anymore. I still haven’t seen the new season of Game of Thrones or Stranger Things, and I haven’t even cared to give Mindhunter a chance. This is nothing intellectual or enlightening, I can still fritter away hours like a champion, I just don’t have the need I used to to anesthetize. Why would I, when all of a sudden, mine was so bright, and so beautiful, so equal parts terrifying and exhilarating?

I also wrote very little. Circumstance often left me without a laptop or without the paper manuscripts I work off. A notebook and pen were easy to carry with me, so I wrote extensively for myself and about extensively. But the littleworldsI’vespentyearscreating? I left them empty and untended to for months. I am coming back to these, but I’m finding it harder to slip into someone else’s skin now that mine has grown so easy.

Of all the changes I experienced this summer, losing my anxiety was most exciting. At some point this spring, it began to steam off my body the way fog burns away underneath a rising sun.

Do you know what it’s like to feel at ease in the world? For a long, long time I didn’t. I’ve writtena lotabout howmy anxiety is (was) a constant negotiation. I carried Xanex and apples with me, chamomile tea and a book in my bag. I was always bracing for what next thing would cause that awful, nauseous fear. And then I woke up one day, and it was gone. New people? Crowded rooms? Spending time with someone new? With several new people? With a whole room of new people? May, June, and most of July were one long rope of anxiety triggers, and not once was I triggered. When a friend asked me how I was handling all these social situations I was describing, I laughed. Afraid of being rejected? People have done worse to me than not like me.

At the beginning of November, I felt the first tremors of dread that I’d felt in six months. It took me a minute to recognize that particular internal shaking, but when I did, I breathed through it. It’s going to be okay. Not because it’s meant to be, or because it has to be, but because it always has been.”

I cried, one Monday morning, when I realized that I’d spent an entire weekend meeting new people. Not once, in three days of introductions, did I want to peel back my own skin and hide. (Big, big thanks also to the man I was with).

I am now at ease.

It may be gone for just this season, but I really hope it’s not. Of all the things that have rolled away from me this year, my anxiety is the one thing I most hope will never, never return.

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I spent much of June hot and in my underwear. I was living with people who were rarely at home when I was, and because of it, I spent most of my evenings alone, and on this beautiful porch. I’d set myself up with a book and maybe a glass of wine. The sun would set all pinks and oranges over the neighborhood. One night, I heard a little boy yell at this dad “no, you need to go to bed!” Another night, the pre-teens next door played basketball and worked on memorizing the lyrics to 1-800-273-8255. I listened The Weeknd (surprise soundtrack to my month of peace) on loop, and rarely opened my book. I was so much more content to lie on that sofa, and reflect on who I was. Who I might be. Life was (is, will always be) as astoundingly, fundamentally hard as it was ever, but the difference was (is) that it’s hard in ways I want to be awake for. I think that’s the reason why I’ve been foregoing so many of my old habits. I no longer want to be distracted. Comfort isn’t the endgame anymore.

When I was a freshman in college, I was far too deep in the throes of an anxious depression to experience that particular thrill of being on the precipice of that which you cannot fully grasp. June was me on that ledge. I called it an ecstatic explosion. I didn’t have any other words to explain the compounding joy of learning and relearning to live a life of my own choosing.

I know that I’ve rambling, and I know that a lot of this is vague, but this is my way of coming back. For two years, I found something hopeful and inspiring about writing here for an audience so small it could barely be counted. At some point, writing became another coping mechanism in my deep chest of survival tools. I’m ready to come back to blogging (I’m even giving this space a new name, y’all!), because I’m hoping it gives me a path back in to the fiction writing I’ve loved for so long.

Onward, right? Always, always onward.