A New Year, New Home, Same Me — Just with a New Twist
2020 is starting off just as the last three years have: with a move, but this time feels different.
A brief recap:
The first year I was moving in January was 2017. I had just separated from my husband and moved into an AirBnb. It was weird, traumatic, freeing, in some ways, but mostly, it was a rough transition. By the next year (2018, if you're counting), I'd left the AirBnb and moved in with a roommate. It was a nice transition place, but what I was really looking for was some quiet time alone. I needed to reflect on how my new life was going to look and get some clarity so I could begin to learn about why I was feeling the way that I was and what had been driving me to make the decisions I had been making. So, I saved money for a deposit and a U-Haul, and I scored myself an apartment in town that was at the top end of what I could afford. I. LOOOVED THAT APARTMENT.
I could feel my icy exterior start to melt away. I was finally getting the quiet that I needed to unwire the old stuff that had been chewing away at me for years. Welp... I got the notice in November, right before Thanksgiving, that my rent would be increasing almost $500/month. Bummer dude. You guessed it... by January 2019, I was off to another house.
This one was special. My 2019 home is a gorgeous home I've always oohed and awed and it just happened to be where I really dug in and learned the whens, whys, whos, and hows of what had been driving my decisions for all of my adult life: Fear. Fear in so many tricky little forms. I learned a hell of a lot more than that in 2019, and we'll get there eventually, but for right now, I just want to focus on the living, because at the end of the day, that's all any of us are trying to do, right? We just want to live in a place we love, find our peace, and leave a good mark on this world. We all just have different ideas of what that mark looks like and how best to leave it. That's where the disagreements come from, right? Different perspectives.
Ok, so anyways... I moved in with a family that has been special to me for many years. They opened their home to me and my life will never be the same after some of the experiences I had while living there. Sometimes they taught me to just laugh, sometimes they taught me to chill the fuck out, sometimes they taught me to speak up, and sometimes they taught me to clean up after myself better 😅. My family has always been pretty small and very private. Their family is huge and loud and they TALK about everything. They sing, they drop by, and sometimes, they bicker. But the love is so clear, so bright and obnoxiously bubbly that even when I would sometimes get overwhelmed by all of the cars in the driveway, or 10 people being in the kitchen when I got home from work, I could never not be happy to see them and hear about whatever excitement is going on in their lives. I've never been immersed in something like that before. How rad for me that I got to do my most intense, gut-wrenching self-work yet while living in the same home as these warm, strong, funny, beautiful, confident, hustling-ass women? Super rad. I am so grateful.
I'm only 7 days into 2020 and, yep, I'm moving on again. But like I said before, it feels different this time. When I moved last year, I HAD to move and I was sad. Sad that I was "losing" my space in the world. Sad that I felt like a failure because I fell victim to the predatory housing market like so many others. I knew how fortunate I was to have a cozy safety net to fall into when so many people don't, so I also felt guilty for how sad I felt even knowing that things could have been so much worse. I guess that guilt served me because it motivated me not to waste the opportunity that was being put in front of me and learn everything I could while I was in that house with that big ol’ family. See, the matriarch of that family is someone who I have always admired and I had the gift of being able to live with her and watch how she moves and operates. Life lessons folks. Life always be handing out lessons.
Anyways, I'm still working out some tech issues with my website (something imperfect is better than nothing, right? (RIGHT?!), but I have so much coming this year that's going to blow ya minds and I have some amazing people helping me out.
Stay up to date with me on social media, I’ll be makin’ new kinds of moves... Just as soon as I get unpacked 🤪
✌🏻❤️ — Alicia