If given the opportunity to look back and reconsider the moves, Berlin, random places of employment, and buying a dog, I wonder what I would have changed. A conversation over lunch today with a dear friend of mine made me question if this has all been moving full circle, or have I spent the past two years waiting for light at the end of the tunnel. That light is quickly approaching and finally, for the first time in two years, I know without any uncertainty of heart, I am doing the right thing.
Would I have moved to Florida if I had known I would turn around and drive right back in 11 months? Probably not. Was it worth it? Well, the monetary aspect – not so much, but the benefit of moving far outweighed the financial clinch it slightly strangled me with. Did I need to spend a year living in humidity to realize Oregon is perfect? Nope. Absolutely not. But did I go because something here was hindering any sense of progress and sheepishly, like a child, did I run home to my mother? Yes. Yes I did. Was that right? Not for all 24-year-old women, but for this one it was necessary.
Then comes the question of Berlin. It’s hard to give any fair assessment of what happened now as I am still living with a sense of confusion. I know what happened, I know where things took a turn for an unreasonable amount of frustration and pain. But if I could go back and change the one thing that set us into distance and strangers, would I? Was that broken heart a risk worth taking? Or was I simply a fragile heart traveling naively into territory that was not mine to walk in? Albeit a brief moment of belonging, did that moment overshadow a year of my life? To answer those questions sequentially, it probably looks something like this: no, yes, yes, and yes. Maybe Berlin was strictly there to be my muse. And I think that’s where I have kept him.
There was a month of absence from writing that I’m sure was noticed. Over lunch, that absence was discussed, though the conversation had been had during that month, it furthered over gyros. Why didn’t I write? Here is your answer: I sunk into a depression that was so foreign to me, to even begin to explain it would only increase a level of frustration and make it even more real. I tried to hide it, hide myself, and I am pretty sure I hardly left my apartment for four weeks. Was it necessary? Yes. And finally when I came out of my coma, though into a brighter and louder world than I had remembered, it was better. I was simply scared and I had nothing to be afraid of. I was afraid of sharing it with anyone and kept it my own secret. My world suddenly struck a daemon that was meant to be handled quietly and alone. Mission accomplished.
Then comes the light at the end of the tunnel. A month ago, I was miserable. I knew what I wanted and it was a matter of finding that one thing, that one person willing to take a chance and give me the opportunity I had so desired. Well, it happened. Light is near. Come January, my world will be a very different place. However unusual and foreign it will be to me, I will remind myself of the lost August and what failed to happen then. And if ever presented with a lost month again, I will not allow for it to stifle the one thing that keeps me.
We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares are set about
us, and there is nothing which should intimidate or worry us.
We are set down in life as in the element to which we best
correspond, and over and above this we have through thousands of
years of accommodation become so like this life, that when we
hold still we are, through a happy mimicry,scarcely to be
distinguished from all that surrounds us. We have no reason to
mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors,
they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abuses belong to us;
are dangers at hand, we must try to love them. And if only we
arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us
that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now
still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust
and find most faithful. How should we be able to forget those
ancient myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into
princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses
who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps
everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless
that wants help from us.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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