“I am going home, I need to clear my mind and be alone” I told to my travelling companion. And right there, in the garden of the house where I lived with my life partner for almost seven years and where I watched my daughter grow up, I decided to write these lines whatever comes out of here.
Sitting in that frozen garden, bundled up to the eyebrows (I can't stand the cold) my mind relaxed and perhaps the cold also helped to inspire me and feel better about myself. I was facing something new and very exhausting like a move to a new city and a thesis defense. Too many things on my mind that didn't let me think clearly. The cold eventually helped to appease the ideas, the stress, and my frustration of feeling that time and desire were slipping out of my hands. And there again I found myself with my thoughts, with my own silence, a version of me that had been lost somewhere, perhaps in some corner of this house or this city. Maybe I got lost before moving here, to a foreign country where I came to get to know myself better and live a different adventure, but now I've become someone I no longer recognize (or maybe it's hard for me) even though I know I'm still there.
Closures entail their own griefs, and I don't handle them well (seems like). Over the years it happens to me that changing cities, jobs, environments and friends cost me a huge amount of energy (physical and mental) and I think that sometimes I cause myself unnecessary pain (but at the same time necessary, that great contradiction). After finishing my thesis, I moved to New York almost immediately, and even knowing that everything had been planned in advance, I felt that I did not give myself enough time to assimilate the change and live my own grief. I cried a lot when I saw my empty house, a house where I lived in the US for the first time, where I experienced motherhood, love, friendship, Christmas dinners, and good times that always make me smile. The emptiness of the house caused a terrible echo and suddenly I sat in the middle of the dining room, and I began to cry. A crying coming from my inner child. I couldn't stop even if I wanted. The mixture of stress and sorrow I was carrying was bigger than anything else. I asked my partner to take my daughter outside and wait for me, I needed a little time to say goodbye to the house. But my little one also started crying “Mommy it would be okay” she told me with her little voice while drying my tears, which made my heart break even more. When we started the process of cleaning the house I found it very contradictory and almost literally impossible to leave there. Every day we collected a box, threw away clothes, cleaned parts of the house and thanks to the help of our friends (family) and our beloved adoptive grandmother we managed to do it. But through the whole process I had a continuous bittersweet feeling that still walks with me to this day. And the thing is that I really didn't want to leave, I wanted to stay there, continue with my routine, it gave me a certain emotional stability and a sense of well-being to be in a familiar place, a place where I felt like home. And all of that is extremely difficult when you live abroad (I consider myself a very lucky person for achieving it), so leaving that place has been one of the most tremendous efforts (apart from motherhood) that I can remember.
Even today I have conflict and I tell myself why leave a place where I wanted to be, but then I reason it out and come to the terrible conclusion that I had to take this new opportunity. Then over time I have realized that getting out of the comfort zone is fine if you are good at getting out of there. And with age it bothers me more and more, it costs me more and more and I carry a terrible anxiety just thinking about “starting again”. Many times it is encouraged by yourself, all the parts of your body are telling you “Go!”, but I think that the desire must be stronger than anything else, the desire to change, to want to stop drowning where you are, it must be genuine and therefore, in my opinion, it will suit you well and you will be able to take pride in it. I'm not saying that New York has made me feel bad, except for the economic ruin. It is a city that surrounds you and makes you fall in love, where you can easily get lost among the people and go completely unnoticed. Getting here is a pride for myself and where I have broken and overcome some fears and limits, but the real desire to move had not yet arrived but I still did it. And at the very end the desire to do something comes out and it is projected as a haircut, a change of clothes, city, partner or friends. But it always comes out. Some time ago I watched the show Modern Love where a specific scene connected with my own transition and I felt very reflected about (personal) closure and the change that it entails. In the scene the protagonist faces the breakup of his relationship and to start over (or from scratch if you can) he begins to take off the clothes that his other past "selves" have worn to finish off with his new person. I think it beautifully reflects the internal change that occurs when we want to leave something behind, as if we were taking off those clothes, that hair, that mask that no longer identifies us.
And here I am admiring my views of the East River through my window and I wonder what I am doing that I am not in some corner of the Big Apple burning up the night. Then I remember that I am a working mother (exhausted) and that my daughter is sleeping in the next room of my tiny apartment, and very needy of her mommy. I have to say that living stages of life is fine and having closure is part of it. New York has always been my dream city, that romanticism around it "the city that never sleeps", "the big apple" where there are endless (literal) restaurants, coffee shops, museums, parks and a long etc... that just describing it makes me tired. New York exhausts me. But here I am, facing it and fighting it. I feel like the New York Grinch, but sometimes in the middle of this feeling I can find some peace and suddenly I am just admiring my surroundings trying to understand my achievement. It's strange how internal change and maturity (I guess) changes our gaze towards the environment. The things that you thought you enjoyed and that you thought you needed, are not like that anymore, your new self is not enjoying the parties, the noise, the big cities even your friends and you slap yourself saying “how it can be”. And changing and being in the process of getting to know you (again) is painful, it is terribly painful, although necessary. Sometimes it can lead to such personal growth from which there is no turning back, you can no longer go back because your mind has built someone new, a new you that is much better in every way.
In my full process of change where I write these lines I have always heard positive words, also negative (indirectly), because that new you is going to be very contradictory for everyone and even for you. They say that human beings have the "wise" tendency to return again and again to what is familiar, since it is less uncomfortable and even less painful. Breaking with your own stigma as ¨It's just that you weren't like that before¨, ¨It's that now you've changed¨, ¨We don't laugh together anymore¨ well, that hurts, it hurts to hear it and the person who tells you that probably has lost something too that perhaps (or not) was important whatever it was. But we are not talking about the other person, we are talking about you, me and many people who feel that their life as they knew it no longer fits them, and there is no intend to have it again. And what to do when you're in the middle of it, how to control that feeling of floating in the middle of the universe without knowing where you're going. One of the processes I imagine is to trust. Trust and release the forces (sometimes imaginary) that are keeping yourself to grow and evolve to a new you. Just follow the process. But how easy to say and how difficult to follow. An eternal nostalgia has accompanied me in my changes, an unbearable melancholy, but it is part of my being and I have to accept it no matter how much I hate it. Many times I try to ignore my own suffering in the face of change, but that does not lead me to cope better since at some point in the process everything comes to me suddenly and I cry my eyes out for days and a sadness rides with me perhaps for months (or unlimited time). Sometimes I just want to run into the immensity of a forest, find an abandoned house and appropriate it (or buy it too) and rebuild my life away from noise, skyscrapers, sirens...and maybe I will do it, maybe not, but the idea of thinking about it gives me peace over the craziness.
Anyway, I don't know where I read that you always have to end with a good sentence or a good moral to leave a good feeling when you finish. Like when you say goodbye to a relationship with a kiss on the cheek or with tears of pain but at the same time of liberation, a good ending should be always like that, liberating. But I do not have a good saying to end as Paulo Coelho, I do not think that you will keep any of this in your memory (maybe), but hopefully that is what you are getting from this piece, some liberating closure without melancholy, without sadness or tears, just a transition to a new place, a better place within you.