small magic

adventures in solitude is my travel diary from 2022 and 2023. Inspired by a well-timed and well-worded question from my oldest friend, I set out to try and find “home” during a period of significant grief and loss. 

After taking a giant jackhammer to my life, I looked at the pieces scattered around my feet and started to examine the edges and cracks of every single one. The opportunity in moments like this is to sort through the rubble and start to make clear and conscious decisions about what is next. You keep some pieces, you let others go; some you shape into something new; and some, you realize, are missing. 

In the rubble, there were pieces of myself that I didn’t recognize, and others that I couldn’t see, but longed for. One of the biggest missing pieces for me was “home”. After a lot of hard years, it felt impossible to know where I actually belonged, and in some ways, who I actually was, separate from what had happened to me. 

Solo travel has always been a great love of mine. Like an anthropologist, I enjoy slipping into others’ lives – observing and trying things on, creating elaborate back stories for the characters I meet on planes, trains, and subways, feeling the freedom of public solitude in cities where no one knows my name, keeping radically different hours, making friends with strangers, trying new things. And so, thanks to that gentle nudge from my oldest friend, I decided it was as good a time as any for me to try and find “home”. There is no such thing as starting over, but it is possible to start again. 

I made a short list of places that have meant something to me – where I thought some of those missing pieces of myself might still be found – and took off: to New York in September, to Maine in October, to Rochester in November, and to Chicago as frequently as possible in the Fall. Winter and Spring found me skiing and eating lobster and getting my first tattoo in the Midwest, in Raleigh with the same oldest friend and her family, in Mexico with my sister, and unexpectedly but most importantly in the forest in Northern California. These trips have punctuated my healing, as I have sorted through the aftermath of finally finding the courage to break my own heart. And they have helped me to come back to myself after too many years away. 

This post series has a soundtrack, takes a page out of Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida’s book (er, screenplay) and starts in New York, where (spoiler alert) I now most unexpectedly happen to live. And to those of you that hosted me throughout this journey: thank you. You couldn’t have known the gift that you were giving me. 

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the promise of new york (september 2022)

On the plane to New York, I start a note on my phone titled “basic requirements”. I think I’ll document anything that comes to me and how it makes me feel. That’s what I’m after, after all: the feelings. 

I’ve spent the majority of the last ten years not really feeling, instead thinking — and often overthinking — my feelings. My therapist tells me this is what our brains are wired to do when we’re experiencing trauma: shut down the feelings, and create walls around our hearts to protect us. We then live only on hope and promises, rather than on the now. I know this in my head but not yet in my gut, and that’s a theme I’ll keep returning to throughout the year — maybe years — ahead. 

So I’m off to find my feelings — to visit the parts of me that I’ve left behind for safekeeping — ones that remain carefully locked away in people, places, and things. They still tug at my heart, however walled off it might be. They’ve been tugging at my heart for years, it’s just taken me a long time to work up the courage to follow them. But here I am now, flying towards the promise of New York, looking for myself and for my home. 

I begin my list of basic requirements: really good pizza, a walkable city, an Anthropologie; water, mountains and or hills, good places to see the sky; dog friendly, with a variety of restaurants, and good hot yoga. Someone I already know or something I already love must be there, but there must also be space for me to create a new life — space for me to reconcile all of the hurt and all of the hunger — and to learn to live on more than hope. 

I start to remember myself as I land at Newark and hug one of my dearest friends in the front seat of his Toyota Prius. We listen to Ingrid Michaelson and the Weepies as we drive to his apartment. We drink bourbon and eat steak and he listens to me share part of my hurt and part of my hunger, and helps me continue to try to make sense of it all. 

We sing karaoke loudly and badly after too many drinks and I ferociously hug his new puppy and his husband. We eat a dreamy Italian lunch in the West Village before wandering the streets of Chelsea to find Carrie Bradshaw’s apartment and pose for a picture, and then visit a Japanese-American bar littered with Samurai movie posters and colorful bartenders. Later on, I venture into the city solo — a teenage dream still smiling in my heart as I walk past Broadway; an early-twenties melancholy nearly crying atop a rock in Central Park; an ageless artist wandering through the Museum of Modern Art to get a taste of the beauty that makes us ache to be worthy of it; an early-thirties cynicism judging the tourists in Times Square; inspiration everywhere, overstimulated and oversaturated but never overestimated. I buy a tofu bowl at a small restaurant with plant-covered walls and gaze at passers-by. I feel at once so big and so small. I love New York but it makes me long for Chicago. These feelings will keep me warm for a long time. 

This is the promise of New York about which we Midwestern kids grew up dreaming: being on the edge of the center of everything but also being able to disappear into nothingness simply by popping in your noise-cancelling headphones. The sense that absolutely anything could happen absolutely anywhere at absolutely any time. If you can make it here, you’ll make it anywhere. I’ve watched enough of my friends “make it” to know that “making it” is not what we used to think it was: for me now, making it is feeling peaceful at least once a day; moderation as self-love; staying grounded in myself. I write “live the questions now” on a post-it note as part of a living exhibit at MoMA and take the bus back to New Jersey. I now realize the gravity of everything that I’ve been carrying. I resolve to let some of it go. 

Later on, I ask my friends to walk with me to the Hudson River. I crumple up my separation agreement and throw it into the muddy water. I watch it float away and part of my hurt, with it. I realize that my basic requirements are different than what I originally thought. That they’re also questions: what does a relationship that is safe feel like? Will I ever be loved in the way that I want to be loved? Is part of embracing the possibility of magical thinking also being okay with always being a little bit disappointed? Is it worth it, regardless? Is trust just a chance that you take? How do you stay in your own power? Will I ever feel less tired? 

I take these questions with me to the gate at Newark on my return flight home. I think about what I came with and what I’m leaving behind. I smile at the part of me that will always be here, but know that this is not my home. I start to wonder if what I already have is enough. I pop in my headphones and sink into what comes next: If you need to know for sure what’s on the ocean’s floor, you’ll sink. 

I carry that with me back to Illinois. I think of grief, and of getting past it. I start to think of dangerous and noble things. I feel a little bit lighter still.