Life with Lucy: Boobytrapped

If you leave, you will trip and fall and break your neck...it's best to stay here with me.

My secret hiding place

            When I was little, I loved the idea of a secret hiding place.  A place you could sneak into and disappear from the rest of the world, just for a little while.  A place you could just be with yourself, with your own thoughts, on your own time.  My favorite book was The Secret Garden.  The idea of having an entire garden just to yourself…it seemed wonderful to me.

            Maybe my fascination with solitude was derived from my lack of it.  I lived in a busy home.  In my elementary years, my family lived in a house in Richmond, VA.  I have 3 siblings—2 younger brothers and an older sister.  My sister and I shared a room until I was in late elementary school.  Both my parents, still happily married as they always have been, 2 cats, and a dog also lived in our home.  There were often more than just us 4 children.  We all had neighborhood friends that came and went from our home in waves throughout the day.

My little brother recently visited our VA home
and took this picture.  It certainly doesn't look
the same as it does in my memory, but the
castle-like quality is unmistakable.

            Sometimes, I just wanted to be alone.  I had a number of secret hiding places.  As a kid, I thought our house in Virginia looked like a miniature castle.  It was offset on our property with a yard on one side and a small, narrow passageway between the house and the privacy fence on the other side.  The passageway was just wide enough to fit one person and was covered by overhanging trees and bushes.  In the castle-like theme, or family took to calling this the Secret Passageway.  There was also a neighbor up the street who had perfectly trimmed hedges.  In one spot they cupped back into the yard right near the garage.  If you crouched down behind them, you could hear everyone passing on the street while hidden from the house itself.  I often brought a notebook and a pen there with me after “running away.”  I usually got worried and made it back home before anyone realized I was gone.  There was also a large tree with branches perfect for climbing in our yard.  I would climb as high as I could, usually as high as the roof of our 2 story home, and sit there for what felt to me like hours (in kid time, who knows how long this was).  I could look down onto the yard and watch everything happening.  I could spy on my sister and her boyfriend.  Or on my brothers and their mischievous friends getting into trouble.  I liked to watch the world from far away, to take it all in on my own terms, in my own time.

            As I grew older, I still relished my alone time.  Once I had my own room, I liked shutting the door and just having my own space.  In high school, I’d wallow in my despair behind closed doors—I even remember a few times not only shutting myself away in my bedroom, but I’d curl up inside my closet and close the door.  In college, I couldn’t stand the lack of privacy in dorms and moved out of them as soon as possible.  This isn’t to say that I always wanted to be alone, just that I relished my solitude every once in a while.

            In the final years in NYC, I felt as though I had too much solitude.  I had too much time to think, to turn thoughts over and over in my brain until they weren’t thoughts anymore but screaming cries of frustration instead.  I wanted to something to occupy my thinking time, to get me focused on something else.  And so Lucy appeared.  And so running took root.  Focusing on training Lucy, navigating the dog park social world, teaching myself to run, becoming a healthy person—all these things allowed me to take brief reprieves from my own mind.

But after I moved to Seattle, things changed.  I began branching out of my introverted self, exploring the extrovert that I’d hidden away for so long.  My time was occupied, I had things to do.  Suddenly, I found that running was no longer my distraction from solitude but my only source of solitude.  In Seattle, my world flipped upsidedown—no longer did I worry about having too much lonely time.  I worried about having too little.  And so, as it has proved to do a few times since, my running transformed itself to suit my needs.  Instead of being a distraction, running became a release.  It became my only time to stop and think about me, to give my thoughts the simmering time they needed.  Lucy and I would hit the streets of Magnolia, and suddenly my mind was a spinning wheel.  I’d work through all the events of the day, the worries that still nagged from previous days, all the thoughts that I didn’t have time to think otherwise.

This is one of the things I love about running.  Running will be whatever you need it to be.  Running will be a life-changer.  Or it will be the rock that has steadies you through moments of turbulent life.  Running will be your solitude.  Or it will be your distraction from solitude.  Running will be your time.  Or it will be the time you give to others.  Running will be your exercise, your stress relief, your calming agent, or your energizer.  Running is more versatile than I could have ever imagined when I chose to take that first step out the door.

During my first year in Seattle, I needed running to be my secret hiding place.  I needed it to be a place I could run away to when things got too crazy, too overwhelming.  I needed it to be my fount of sanity.  And, reliably, it was.  Most of the time, running isn’t a hiding place for me anymore, but sometimes when days get tough and life gets dizzying, I can choose to find that secret hiding place again and tuck myself away for a bit to find comfort in its solitude.  

The straw that broke the pair of glasses

            Lucy is a likable dog.  People love her.  She’s friendly, loves to play, and has developed a knack for snuggling.  If you walk in the door, she is so excited to see you that not only does her tail wag, her whole body wags.  Her butt wiggles back and forth from her ribcage, slapping her tail so hard against any nearby object that it sounds like it might break off.  She whines and cries and runs back and forth across the apartment as if you coming home is the best thing that has ever happened to her.

            Lucy wins people over easily with her smile, floppy ears, and golden eyes.  People who are not dog lovers have told me that Lucy is a great dog.  She’s quirky and loveable with her odd eating habits, her talkative whining and moaning, her OCD about scooting her bed around and flipping it upside-down before she can fall asleep in it.  Maybe this is a mother’s naïve pride, but Lucy is a pretty awesome dog.

Sometimes when Lucy does something that makes my heart explode with love—like when I unfold the towel that allows her onto the couch and she does a running jump in order to immediately curl up and start snoring—I tell her “I love you more than words” (yes, I talk to my dog…I’m sure you could have easily guessed that by now).  This phrase, with dogs, takes on a whole new meaning.  Dogs don’t understand words.  So when you tell them you love them more than words, they already know.  Because you cannot express how much you love them in words.  You must show them.  They must feel it.  Words don’t matter for a dog.  It’s all about life and experience and reality.  As much as I love words, both writing and saying them, none of this matters for Lucy.  She only knows what she feels.

Dogs live in the moment.  When they are scared, all they feel is fear.  When they are happy, all they feel is joy.  When they are anxious, all they feel is that horrible itching inside them that makes them think that if you leave them now, you will never come back. 

Knowing this about dogs, I can’t imagine what Lucy was feeling when I was rendered basically immobile by a sprained ankle for 8 weeks.  Lucy was about 2 ½ years old, and up until that point in her life, she had never gone more than a day or two without exercise—whether it was an hour long romp at the dog park, a 1 ½ hour walk, or a 5-6 mile run.  She was a hyper, active dog and needed a way to release her energy.  But when I sprained my ankle, there was no dog park, certainly no walking, and definitely no running.  Sierra would walk her as often as she could, but it wasn’t as often as she was used to.  Lucy was stuck with energy compounding by the day. 

Very quickly, that energy exploded.  I lost count of how many pairs of socks, underwear, and shoes were destroyed.  She pulled paper out of the recycling bin and ripped it to shreds.  She chewed her toys to bits within minutes.  She chewed the handles off a pair of scissors, got at the end of the screw driver somehow, so if you try to use it, the teethmarks poke into your palm.  If you caught her with something, she would begin running circles around the wall that stood separating the kitchen from the dining room, making it impossible to catch her.  Especially with a sprained ankle. 

I felt like there was nothing I could do.  I was stuck with this energetic dog who wanted to destroy everything with her craziness.  The only person who has ever told me they hate my dog was my boyfriend from this time, who only knew her during this awful phase.  I don’t blame him for saying that.  She was pretty awful.  And I felt pretty helpless. 

The last straw happened one day while I was in the shower.  I had recently run out of contacts, which I wore daily.  My last contact had ripped in two and I had yet to make a doctor’s appointment (or to even find an eye doctor in Seattle).  I had started wearing the glasses I typically only wore at night, after my contacts dried out.  I had actually started to enjoy wearing my glasses, which only resulted in putting off a doctor’s appointment even more.  But, somewhere around that time, I was in the shower one day and placed my glasses up on the bathroom counter where I always put them.  While I was in the shower, Lucy somehow pulled my glasses off of the bathroom counter and chewed them apart.

Anyone who knows me, knows that I’m blind.  Without glasses or contacts, I can’t see my hand in front of my face.  This happened on a weeknight.  I had to work the next day.  I had to drive to work.  I had to keep my eyes on twenty odd children all day long.  I had to function.  I couldn’t do that without glasses or contacts.  This was the first time I broke down in tears after the ankle spraining downpour.  I had absolutely no idea what to do.  I called friends, panicked.  We problem-solved, and somehow I managed to find an older pair of glasses I had packed away somewhere in moving boxes (how I find them without being able to see, I have no idea).  The glasses were nowhere near the correct prescription—stoplights were still fuzzy as I drove to work the next day—but they tided me over until my frantically-made doctor’s appointment a day later.

When I stepped out of the shower and saw my glasses in pieces on the floor, Lucy didn’t have to understand my words.  She could feel my rage in the sound of my voice, the fact that I would look at her or touch her for the rest of that night.  She knew she’d done something very wrong.  But I felt guilty because she’s a dog.  She didn’t know that chewing those things on the counter were any worse than all the other items she’d stolen to chew.  She’d been yelled at for those things too, but the consequences were never clear enough to make her feel like she needed to stop.

So I made a clear decisions that day—a “this is the last straw” decision.  From that moment on, there would be no more chewing.  No more chasing around the apartment.  No more destruction.  It was time to lay down the law.  And since I couldn’t explain it to her logically, Lucy didn’t even know what she had coming…

Seattle Seahawks and a sprained ankle

            The premise of this blog is to talk about my dog and running, and I realize that I have done neither of those things in the past few posts.  However, I feel that to understand where Lucy, my running career, and I are today, I need to take a few bird walks.  If you are truly dedicated to hearing only about Lucy or only about running, feel free to take a break from me and the blog for a bit.  I’ll get back to it soon, I promise.

I often state the fact that everything in life happens for a reason.  Maya happened for a reason and Lucy happened for a reason.  NYC happened for a reason, and Seattle is still working its way into its reason.  But I have yet to come up with a legitimate reason for why, in November 2008, the powers that be up above decided I needed to sprain my ankle.  Maybe the reason is hidden somewhere I can’t see it.  Maybe I needed to sprain my ankle in order to avoid something else awful that may have happened to me otherwise.  Maybe I needed to sprain my ankle so that I would suck it up and put a last ditch effort into training my crazy dog.  Who knows?  But here’s the story anyways…if you by any chance deduce some sort of reason behind the struggle, please let me know.

            In the ‘08-‘09 football season, the Seattle Seahawks sucked.  This is not to say that they don’t still or haven’t since, but that season they seemed especially bad.  So bad in fact, that tickets to games could be obtained for less than $50 on craigslist.  I was never a football fan—or any pro sports fan for that matter.  I had never been to a single pro anything game, but that season my Boxcar friends and I went to at least 5 or 6 games at Qwest Field.  Part of the Boxcar clan had season tickets and set up a tailgate under the Alaskan Way Viaduct near the stadium before every game.  It was easy to grab a set of tickets off craigslist the day before the game and stumble down to the stadium early Sunday morning.  The craziness of a pro football game was new and exciting to me.  I couldn’t get enough.  I remember the pre-game tailgating to be the best part of the game, and often our group wouldn’t actually make it into the stadium until the end of the 1^st quarter, and sometimes well into the 2^nd.  I don’t need to go into the details of all of the games we went to that year.  They all kind of blend together anyways.  If you’ve ever been to a football game, you probably know.  And if you haven’t, try to make it to at least one in your lifetime.  They’re pretty fun. 

            It was at one of these Seahawks games that I sprained my ankle.  I remember it was sometime after Halloween, but sometime before mid November.  I don’t remember who tailgated with us that day.  I don’t know who the away team was.  I don’t know where our seats were.  I have no idea who won the game.  But I do remember spraining my ankle.  Clear as day. 

            I remember leaving the stadium with Sierra, her boyfriend at the time, and his best friend.  I remember walking down the street, Sierra and her boyfriend in front of me.  The best friend and I were walking next to each other, talking (about what, I don’t know).  I remember getting to the corner, stopping in the massive crowd of people waiting to cross the street.  I remember the exact corner.  I get flashbacks every time I drive by.  I remember turning to the best friend to make a comment as the light changed and the crowd walked across the street.  I remember taking a few steps forward, and then I remember being in the gutter and feeling a blinding, mind-numbing pain.  And then I don’t remember anything else until we got to the emergency room.

            You may think I’m a wuss.  I know there are things in life much more painful than spraining an ankle.  But I have never felt them before.  I never broke any bones as a child, I’ve never given birth, I’ve never even had stitches.  My worst injury as a child was in 7^th grade when I did a cartwheel on the balance beam and instead of landing on the beam, I landed flat footed on the ground that lay 4 feet below.  Instead of my knee giving way and bending forward as it should have when the full weight of my body was propelled along the length of my left leg and into my foot, my knee gave way in the opposite direction, hyperextending it.  I remember this being pretty painful, but I remember being more excited that my hot, blonde, and muscular gymnastics coach carried me like a knight in shining armor all the way through the high school to the physical therapist’s room.  I was on crutches for a weekend.  I consider myself very lucky that this is the worst thing that has ever befallen me.

            When I sprained my ankle, it was the worst pain I had ever felt.  After twisting my ankle on the curb that was obviously a little closer than I had thought it was, memory finally picks up in the hospital—apparently I was too blinded by pain and tears to remember the taxi ride we took to the hospital or how they got me into the hospital.  I know I certainly didn’t walk myself in.  I remember sitting on the x-ray table, wincing every time they touched me.  As I sat there, I’d feel fine for a minute until suddenly I’d feel a new wave of pain and the tears would start pouring again.  Sierra and her boyfriend sat there with me the whole time, trying their best to make me laugh.

            What I remember most about the whole thing though, was how weird it felt to cry like that.  I’m not a crier.  As weird as it may sound while I expose my life story to the world, I’m not someone who is particularly good at expressing vulnerable emotions.  I don’t like people feeling sorry for me.  I don’t like people knowing that I’m hurting and I certainly don’t like people seeing me cry.  I like to be viewed as a strong, independent person, and crying spoils that façade.  Before I sprained my ankle, the last time I remembered crying that hard was when my dad took me to the dog shelter to give my childhood dog away before I went to college (which is a whole other story).  Before that, I don’t remember crying that hard, ever.

            As I sat on the examining table, eyes puffy and red, bursts of tears continuing uncontrolled, I remember thinking, wow, it kind of feels good to do this.  I liked the puffy, itchy eye feeling.  It made me feel like I’d just expelled a lot of crappy things out of my body that didn’t belong.  I liked the sensation of the tears streaming down my cheeks, salty drips landing in the corners of my mouth.  I like the polka dots of dampness the tears left on my sweatshirt.  It felt like I’d just cried everything out that had been sitting in my body waiting to be cried out since I was in middle school.  The heartbreak of my first crush.  The sadness of losing a good friend.  The painful struggle of being shy and uneasy about myself in high school.  The heartbreak of my first boyfriend.  The heartbreak of all the boys that never became the person I wanted them to be.  The frustration of NYC.  The anger of my situation at my job my first two years of teaching in Brooklyn.  The fear I had of adjusting successfully in a new city.  It all came out. 

            And there it is!  I found my reason.  Maybe the powers that be up above wanted to teach me how to cry.  It was a pretty painful, forceful lesson, but it made a chip in the shield of armor I’d formed around my tear ducts.  Since then, I’ve cried quite a few more times.  This doesn’t mean I’m sadder than I used to be.  The opposite is true.  But, I’ve learned the value of a good cry.  Whether it’s over a heartfelt TV show, over a sad movie, over a heartbreak, over the loss of a family pet, or the ultimate acknowledgement of a long past disappointment, I have no problem letting myself cry now when the tears want to come.  I’m still not even close to 100% comfortable crying in public, but I’m much closer. 

            From now on I can say that spraining my ankle happened for a reason.  Spraining my ankle taught me how to enjoy a good cry.  And everyone should know how to do that.

Only an HLM will proudly photograph you
and force you to smile in your misery.

         

P.S. If by any chance you’ve noticed that purple widget up at the top of my blog on the right and haven’t clicked on it yet, please do!  I’m raising money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society as I train for my third marathon and I want to get $1000 in the bank for them by March 1^st.  Help me and donate to this great cause!

Oh those Boxcar days

            In order to help you understand my first 2 years in Seattle, I must tell you about the Boxcar (otherwise known as the Box).  The Boxcar is a bar at the base of the first hill in Magnolia, right next to the train tracks and very close to Fisherman’s Terminal.  It is inhabited by the residents of the apartment cities that populate the face of the first hill.  There are also the occasional dirty fishermen who come off the fishing boats and in for a few drinks. 

The Boxcar is not like any other bar in Seattle.  It is an entity in and of itself, mainly because of its location.  As I mentioned in my Snowmaggedon post, Magnolia is a secluded neighborhood.  There are only 3 ways in and out of the large peninsula, and most of Seattle has never been there before.  People only come to Magnolia if they know someone who lives there, and even then it’s hard to convince visitors to make the “trek.”  Living in Magnolia was like being in college, living on campus, rarely venturing out, just partying with the people you live with.  Except instead of going to school, most of us had jobs.

The Boxcar is a bar that survives on its neighborhood regulars.  No one who lives in Ballard or Queen Anne or any of the other surrounding Seattle neighborhoods would just randomly suggest to their friends, “hey, let’s go to the Boxcar tonight!” like they would with bars in other neighborhoods.  It is, pardon my French, a shithole of a bar.  Until recently, it had old carpet stained with bars stains as old as the bar.  It has a fully stocked bar and a small kitchen that produces decent enough food.  There are plenty of TV’s for sports watching, an outdoor patio with a ping pong table covered by a tarp for rainy nights, and a pool table.  There are 2 karaoke nights a week which draw pretty large crowds, a trivia night, and lesser known bands will grace the stage on Friday nights.  The bartenders are friendly, know everyone in the bar, and make their drinks consistently strong.

But the best part of the Boxcar is its patrons.  The Boxcar is full of a crazy cast of characters that is almost impossible to describe in words, and would simply take too much time to describe here.  Then there are the apartment dwellers, 20 and 30 somethings who have been going to the Boxcar for years—an interesting sort of incestuous family of the sort that you would find in a college dorm.  A bit like the cast of Friends, Seinfeld, and How I Met Your Mother combined into one.   And this is the family that I joined.

A small portion of the Boxcar family

I was like a deer caught in headlights when I started to become a regular at the Boxcar.  I never had a real college experience.  Going to college in New York is extremely different from your typical college experience.  I lived in the dorms for just a year before moving into my own apartment in Brooklyn.  From then on, I went to school for class, and spent the rest of my time out experiencing New York City.  When I got to Seattle and started experiencing this life in Magnolia, it was like I was making up for the college experience I never had.  No matter the time of day or day of the week, I knew I could always walk down the hill to the bar and find someone to hang out with. 

For at least the first year of my life in Seattle, I lived in this bar, with these friends.  There was a lot of drinking, a lot of late nights at different people’s apartments, and a lot of laughing.  I don’t think we ever stopped laughing.  And I absolutely loved it.  I hadn’t had a solid group of friends like that since high school.  And it was the first group of friends I’d made as myself.  A funny thing had happened in the last couple years I was in New York.  Despite the fact that I struggled with my job, disliked the city I was living in, and was generally discontented with life, I had developed a quiet comfort in myself.  I didn’t consider this confidence at the time, but suddenly I was a person who didn’t feel as though I needed to pretend to be anything else but me.  And these friends—these friends who were constantly surrounded by drama, but hated dramatic people—appreciated me for this.  In discussions in later years, after a few drinks when late night talks turned serious, several friends confided in me that what they found great about who I was, was that I was who I was.  I didn’t present any sort of façade when I met them.  I was simply me—you get what you see (in the metaphorical sort of way). 

I hadn’t realized that this had happened until someone told me so.  The first person who ever pointed it out to me was a guy I dated for a few months after first arriving in Seattle.  I say this lightly, as if dating guys at the time was no biggie for me—but it was.  I’d dated off and on in New York, but this was more of the Sex and the City type dating.  See a guy a couple times until it fizzles out.  Nothing serious.  Nothing deeper than scratching at the surface.  But all of a sudden I found myself in a new city, with new friends that I adored, and in a fairly serious, albeit brief, relationship.  It was this relationship, however brief, that convinced me I was a confident person.  I developed most of my new friendships with this guy at my side, this guy whore adored me enough at the time to allow others—and, to be honest, allowed myself—to see that I was worth getting to know.  In fact, he was the first person to ever mention a half marathon to me.  He was the one who planted the first seed.

This new group of friends was amazing and wonderful, and I am still friends with them to this day even if I see them a bit less often.  The only problem was that they were certainly not runners.  Running had integrated itself into my personality, and all of a sudden the people I knew would describe me as a runner.  I’d never heard that before.  But I believed it.  I woke up after full nights of drinking and went for a run.  I ran up and down the Magnolia hills.  I ran in the rain, in the wind, in the cold.  They looked at me like I was crazy.  And it was at this time that I started to realize that running had become a hugely important part of my life, whether my friends were with me or not.  And it was just at the point when I was really feeling great, running farther, running faster, running despite the fact that Lucy was my only running partner, when I tripped over a curb and sprained my ankle.  It was an 8 week setback that spring-boarded me forward into my marathon career.

I was that girl that sat in the corner and never said a word

            As I reach the Seattle part of this story, it’s been getting harder for me to sit down and write about it.  New York City is a far distant past that has faded and only exists in my memories.  But Seattle is here and Seattle is still real, although it’s not the same as it was in August of 2008.  But that’s only because I’m not the same as I was in August of 2008.  Yes, I have the same moral groundings and general personality that makes me me, but everything else has changed.  Or maybe changed isn’t the correct word here…I’ve grown.  I’ve grown into the me that I knew I was destined to be, but couldn’t figure out how to become while living in NYC.

            I was very shy as a child.  Actually…that’s kind of a lie…I was painfully shy as a child.  As an adolescent, I was very shy.  By the time I hit college, I would describe myself as simply shy.  And now, although I still think I can be reserved in certain situations, I can say that one thing I am not is shy. 

Growing up, I always knew I was shy, and I hated it.  I remember when my parents told me at the age of 12 that we were moving from Richmond, VA to Rochester, NY.  I remember thinking that I had finally started to come out of my shell a little in middle school and I was worried I was going to lose it all in the move.  I remember making a vow to myself that in New York, I would not be shy.  I wanted so badly to make friends in my new school.  I wanted so badly to fit in.  But that’s hard to do after leaving all the friends you’ve known since kindergarten.  And in the meantime, I hit my growth spurt that summer and grew about a foot taller in those few summer months, beginning my skyrocket into the 5’10” tower I am today.  So now I was in a new city, in a new school, in a new body that I didn’t quite know how to handle yet.  Everything was unfamiliar.  And the problem with trying to make yourself unshy is that right at the point when you decide that you don’t want to be shy, that’s when all those shy feelings kick in.  Your brain shuts down, you don’t know what to say, you awkwardly respond to others with one word answers, and then 5 minutes later kick yourself as you think of the perfect thing you could have said.  No one gives you lessons on how not to be shy.  At least no one gave me those lessons.  And you can’t teach yourself, because all you’ve ever known is shy—and you don’t know how to be anything else.

            The trick I’ve learned over the years, as I’ve outgrown all the shyness, is that in order to not be shy, you must become comfortable in your own skin. You must like yourself and like who you are in order to be okay with being yourself in front of the world.  You must believe that you are a person worth being and a person worth knowing.  You must believe in yourself enough that it doesn’t scare you to show yourself to the world. 

As much as I love my HLM Sierra, I used her as a crutch for my shyness throughout high school and college.  I wholeheartedly take the blame for this upon myself, because throughout our lives she has never done anything but encourage me to be the person I am.  But in my mind, she was always the prettier one, the more outspoken one, the one who had the nerve to try something new, take a risk, and say what she thought.  I admired her for that, and I followed in her footsteps, but never really tread my own path.  In those late teenage years, I needed that crutch.  I needed someone who would pull me along, force me out of my comfort zone, convince me that I had something to share with the world.  But after a while, I began to rely on this too much.  I chose not to blaze my own trail when she could blaze it for me and I could just follow closely behind.

            It wasn’t until Sierra left New York that I began to make my own footprints in the world.  Sierra left because she needed to find her own place, which forced me to finally make a path for myself.  It was during my last 2 ½ years in NYC that I found Lucy…that I started running…that I dared to make choices on my own (whether I wanted to or not). 

So my biggest fear when I began my life in Seattle was that I would fall into my old ways, fall back into step behind my closest friend.  But fate had different plans for me and placed a few roadblocks in my way to prevent this from happening.  The plan when I first got to Seattle was for me to move into Sierra’s 2^nd bedroom in her apartment, make myself comfortable there, and fall into her life.  But suddenly one week after I got to Seattle, Sierra’s slumlord showed up for the first time in 8 years claiming that dogs were not allowed in the apartment (despite the dog that had lived there for the past 5 years and the 2 dogs that had lived there previous to that).  This was 2 weeks before the end of the month, and he gave us that long to get the dog out or get ourselves out.  Of course, Lucy wasn’t going anywhere by herself, so suddenly Sierra and I were faced with the challenge of finding a new home for ourselves in about 10 days.

In the meantime, I made my first couple trips down to my new job, met my co-workers for the first time, saw my school for the first time, and saw my empty classroom for the first time.  I had been hired months before through a phone interview and had no idea what I was walking into.  And when I say empty, I mean empty.  I was panicked.  Suddenly I had to fill a classroom and make it my own.  I needed books, furniture, storage containers, organization systems.  My staff was supportive and helpful and wonderful, but I still felt like I was drowning.

Therefore my first month in Seattle was filled with apartment hunting, school set-up, moving again, and settling in again.  Lucy was frazzled and completely unsure about what was happening in her life, and this only added to the stress of that first month.  Somewhere in the midst of all of this, I forgot to be nervous about starting a brand new life.  I forgot to be worried about making new friends, building new relationships.  I forgot to be concerned with whether or not I was falling into Sierra’s world, because Sierra’s world got turned upside-down too.  She had just come out of a long relationship and now had to find a new home.

August 2008: New apartment, new lives, and the last official time I had a tan.
Welcome to Seattle!!

This means that by the time we were settled into our apartment in the secluded neighborhood of Magnolia, we were both crossing a bridge.  We both needed new friends, new relationships, and a new home.  Suddenly instead of me following closely behind as Sierra paved the way, we were stepping side-by-side into the fog cloud of the unknown.   And in a funny way, the path that was made for me after my move—the forced and sudden change to a new apartment that led to me feeling comfortable walking next to Sierra instead of behind her—was because of Lucy.  Because Lucy was not allowed in an apartment.  I try to imagine how different things would have turned out if Sierra and I had not ended up in Magnolia, and I can’t even fathom it.  So I give Lucy credit.  As usual she was there to force a change right at the time when I thought everything was ok.  And without that change, life would not be the same.

There's always another bridge to cross

            I moved a week ago.  I picked up my life and Lucy’s life and planted us down in a new neighborhood.  We have a real apartment with windows, tall ceilings, enough room to stretch our legs without bumping into each other.  With the help of my wonderful mother, who flew across the country for a week to help me settle in, this apartment has transformed from a couple lifeless rooms into a home.  My own home.  And life looks different when you have a home.  With this change in location, I am ready for other changes.  But I’m a bit nervous looking forward, because what if the changes I’m looking for never materialize?

It was just about 3 ½ years ago when I moved to Seattle.  As Sierra and I drove the very tail end of our trip, down the mountains on I90, dumping off the highway near Qwest and Safeco fields, getting onto the Alaskan Way Viaduct and driving a few exits into Fremont, I couldn’t help but be baffled by the idea of all this change.  I couldn’t stop smiling, but I also couldn’t slow my heartbeat.  New beginnings are exciting and wonderful, but they are also very scary. 

            Somewhere early in my adolescent days, I equated the idea of change to a very clear image in my brain.  This image has stuck with me always, almost as a dream does that haunts you repeatedly in your sleep.  I am walking across a rickety bridge above an abyss.  There’s no jumping down, and there’s certainly no possibility of flying upward above it all.  I can only go forward or back.  As I step onto the bridge, in front of me lays a foggy, dark, dense cloud.  I can see the next step, but nothing beyond that.  When I turn around and look back, everything appears clear as day.  I can see everything that existed behind me and everything I am leaving behind.  However, as I step forward on the bridge, the fog cloud moves forward with me, always one step ahead.  And as I move further onto the bridge, the images behind me begin to darken and blur, fading away.  Pretty soon, I’m in the middle of the bridge.  In front of me is the ever present fog cloud of the unknown, and behind me are the faded images of a past that is creeping away.  It is in the middle of the bridge that I can make a choice.  Do I step forward, taking a leap into the unknown in search of something new, or do I turn around and run back, hoping to catch the old images before they fade away completely?

            The tricky thing about this choice is that by the time you reach the middle of the bridge, the choice has already been made for you.  Too much behind you has changed and faded.  The things that comforted you before are no longer the same.  Do you really want to go backwards into a place that isn’t what you want it to be anymore?  So the only choice is to step forward.  Walk across the bridge.  Face the unknown.  Because eventually that foggy cloud begins to dissipate as you reach the other side.  It will never completely disappear.  But things become clearer after a while.  At least until you reach the next bridge. 

And there are always more bridges to cross.   Some are long, some are short, and some are easier to cross than others.  But there will always be bridges.  And that’s what makes life interesting.

In August of 2008, I began to cross one of the longest bridges I’d ever crossed, and as I crossed it, I realized something about change.  You can choose to change your life, but that’s not the hardest part.  The hard part is actually doing it.  I chose to pick up my life and transplant onto another coast.  But what it took me a little while to realize was that I couldn’t just change my location and change my life.  I couldn’t change my job and change my life.  Because the problem is that it wasn’t my life that needed changing, it was me.  Yes, moving to Seattle jump-started the change I needed to make in myself and definitely increased the likelihood of me making that change.  But moving to Seattle isn’t what changed me.  It wasn’t the bridge that changed me.  It was making the choice to walk across that bridge and continuing to the other side that changed me.  It was facing the fear of walking into the unknown with no safety net, no cushy ground to land on.  It was struggling through the emotional battlefield of making the change that changed me.  

Years later, here I stand on the other side of the bridge—on the other side of several bridges since that one.  This week I feel as though I am standing at the beginning of another abyss.  But this time I feel a little different.  I’m here and I’m finally ready to take the first step, but the bridge doesn't seem to be built yet.  And that’s ok, I can wait.  I'll just sit here and enjoy where I am in the meantime.