I have been waking early this week – this year, the entirety of 2024 – though I don’t need to get up until my little one starts making noise. I have been getting up before my alarm; 4:55 and I’m ready to rise.
I like it, though I am tired.
In my annual New Year’s letter, I talked about the waves that have been roaring up against our coast lately. They’re slamming into the earth now; from the cross-legged perch where I sit in my living room, I can hear them, along with some sea lions barking, along with someone’s rooster down the street, along with the fog horn bleating on the ocean. Are roosters allowed in city limits? We live in a sleepy place. My wind chimes dance in the breeze, tinkling against one another.
A long time ago, just after college, a girlfriend and I wanted to move to Ireland together but we chickened out. I chickened out, really. I had all this anxiety that I didn’t realize was anxiety, all these fears about what would happen if I needed to get home quickly. I didn’t like the idea of an ocean standing in the way of my family, but this fear was also something more, something paralyzing and stunting in a way that I didn’t understand for a long time. I wish someone had urged me on, whispered in my ear: you can always catch a flight home or the scary truth is that something could happen anytime, and you still have to live your life.
A few months later, ever so restless, I thought about moving to Oregon. I’d never been there, and I can remember sitting in my apartment outside of Washington DC, looking at pictures of this bungalow for which the owner claimed to need a housesitter. I always thought housesitting sounded like fun; I still think that. But this was not guaranteed enough; it was before there was any sort of website that provided even a modicum of protection. However I found this man, I couldn’t be sure he was who he said he was. I backed out, and he was angry, and I was validated in following my instincts.
And then, California. I think I made this move, half my lifetime ago, because I needed to learn about my own independence. When I consider that, I think about how I didn’t give myself enough credit then, for creating something that was only mine. No single action I’ve taken has defined my life as much as making the move to California when I did; it has influenced so much. Some of it has been wonderful, some of it has been really hard, all of it has – probably – been necessary, though I wish I’d learned some lessons more quickly than I did.
I wonder if I will ever realize my long-held dream of living abroad. Making that move at this point in my life is so much harder to do than it would have been years ago. Maybe my choices have already closed that door, and I am in denial about it.
I sit in my living room and think about how one thing leads to another, how life requires decisions that will open some doors and close others. I sit here, now, because of a lifetime of paths taken and not taken, a constellation of my own design. Maybe a version of me is sitting instead in a small town in Ireland, having built my whole life there, listening to a different ocean, still thinking very similar things, wondering what might have happened if I’d remained Stateside. Drinking tea instead of coffee, perhaps, but listening to the tick of a clock keep the exact same time.
The Wandering Introvert 