Life update

As of approximately one month ago, I’ve moved back to Maine. The decision to come back was motivated by a confluence of factors. And when people ask me why I came back, I sometimes don’t know what to say. The answer usually comes down to how willing I am to trust someone I don’t really know that well. The safe answer is to say that the chaos occurring at the federal government compelled me to New York. It somehow makes me feel more important, that I came back to Maine because I was ousted by the Trump administration – that my work was threatening enough to their interests that they had to take a chainsaw to the federal agencies. This answer is of course a partial truth. I didn’t take the designated resignation offer. And I wasn’t fired. I left on my own accord, though it wasn’t hard to see where things were headed. You could say the writing was on the wall. Emails from the Office of Personnel Management had said, in one way or another, that they would find a way to fire as many federal workers as they could.

When I feel like I’m talking to someone I can trust, however, I say the real answer - which is that my brother died, and I wanted to be home again. And I don’t know why I decide to trust someone – I don’t know whether it’s the way they asked, how I’m feeling, or some other mysterious third thing. It’s a funny thing to do – to drop such a heavy and life-altering fact on someone you’ve just met. The last person I told was my boss, Lewis.

Lewis is an interesting guy. He likes to chat. A lot. When I first started going into the office, I was given a desk in a cubicle in a large empty room. In general, there’s not a lot of people in the office. And the only time people talk with one another is at 10am and 3pm on sacrosanct fifteen minute breaks, a ritual in which people go outside together and do three laps around the building. But every day, Lewis would walk by my desk, and he would literally pull up a chair to sit down to chat. He asks me lots of questions and in general is a very good conversationalist. Surprisingly, a lot of it was personal. It got to the point where my boss was actively distracting me from my work. And in general I feel like we have nice talks. But when he asked me what compelled me to take a significant pay cut to move to Maine, I hesitated. My boss is--well--my boss. Isn’t our relationship supposed to be at least somewhat distant, detached? That we’re only supposed to know each other only insofar as we have something to talk about, but not enough that it gets truly personal?

But something about the way Lewis was, his outgoing and chatty nature, made me trust him, and so I told him the truth. My brother died, and I wanted to be home again.

Lewis was very kind about it. But not the sort of kind that is meant to acknowledge the bomb shell but really inch away from it – instead, he asked more questions, wanted to know more. Were you close? Was it an accident? How’s your family doing? I said yes, no, and hanging in there. And he continued to ask more questions. And I was a little surprised by this. He seemed to be genuinely interested, and the rawness of it didn’t deter him. His unflinchingness was weirdly nice. And so I talked about Gabe a lot and the timeline of it all and why I think it happened and how I was doing. And he asked more questions and I gave answers until the conversation naturally faded into other topics. And after about 15 more minutes of talking, he got up and put his chair away and said he had to go back to work. But before he left, he said that on my work assignment in Skowhegan, I should visit the New Balance shoe factory because he bought two new pairs of shoes for $80, which was a pretty good price. I said I would try to go if I could and thanked him for the suggestion.

It's funny being back in Maine. I left to go travelling on my gap year when I was 18, came back home for a bit, left for college, went to New York, then London, back to New York, until I finally got back. 8 years ago I lived here. It reminds me a lot of a scene from one of my favorite movies, Ladybird. In the end of the movie, Ladybird is reading a letter she wrote to her mom when she left Sacramento to go to college in New York. She had always wanted to go, to escape California and go to the east coast. But in the letter, she’s describing Sacramento and just how beautiful it was – how much she just appreciated it, even though for most of the movie she does nothing but talk about how much she hated it. It makes me wonder if you have to leave to truly be where you need to be, to come back.  At least for me, I think it’s true.

Maine has been amazing. It’s shocking how much a change in environment can uplift you, propel you, pull you forward. On the first day, when I was in Portland, I looked around me and saw couples smiling at each other at restaurant window seats, friends laughing loudly on the sidewalk, people saying ‘excuse me’ when they passed by. A cashier said she liked my shirt. Dogs smiled at me. The sun was out and weeds grew out of the cracks in the old brick city. It was idyllic. And I immediately felt a belonging.

And every day since I’ve gotten here, in some way shape or form, this has continued to be true. But it’s not because I’m wearing rose-colored glasses. The world is just rose colored.

For the first time in a while, it feels like I’m not hitting a wall anymore. After college, I experienced one of the hardest periods of my life. I was in New York City and I was miserable. I didn’t know what to do or how to start my life over again. And after a year, I left to go to London. In my mind, a master’s degree would fix me – let me start over again, be myself again. And London was great. But it was fleeting, and when I moved back to New York I thought that I could do it right this time. But I continued to run into the same issues – my momentum slowed, slowed, slowed, until I was stuck again, in a city that felt like it was trying to eat me alive.

And then Gabe died and going to Maine made sense. Yet, a part of me was ashamed to leave again. That while Maine was home – where my twin brother and friends were – it felt like I had once again been spit out. That it was a testament to the fact that I couldn’t cut it, that I failed.

I admitted this to my very good friend Faustine over the phone when we were catching up. And she said something that completely changed how I thought about it. She said that it wasn’t that New York rejected me, it was that I rejected it. And she was right. It’s not that I couldn’t cut it in New York, it’s that New York didn’t cut it for me. And being in Portland has done nothing but confirm this again and again and again. I wake up and I feel nothing but a deep love for this place. And the longer I’m here, the more certain of that love I feel.

If the period of my life in New York was a chapter of a book, it’d be called “Hitting Walls.” So far, in this new beginning of my life, it would be called “Opening Doors.” I say this because things that I wanted so badly in New York – like finding people to make short films/sketches with, proved incredibly difficult. Yet here, by chance, my roommate, who I’ve been getting along with really quite well, is into cinematography and needs someone to write material to shoot. What are the fucking odds of that? That after literal months of searching the depths of Facebook roommate listings, posting several times with exact specifications of what I was looking for, I did nothing but come up short. Yet without even trying, I got exactly what I wanted here. It literally flew into my lap. Life is weird. And lately, pretty kismet.

There’s a lot more I could say about my life I haven’t touched on – becoming(?) a Quaker, my roommate’s dog Tulip, the arcade-bar that my friends and I have become regulars at, trying to write a book, more work stuff.

But for now, just know that while I am going through incredible grief, incredible joy exists alongside it. And one does not diminish the other. Life is a mix of both as well as everything in between.

For anyone reading this, I hope you find the courage to be free and to be yourself.

 

More to come later!