My Year of Pain and Beauty

Atlanta in April. The trees are all wearing leaves again—spring came upon us quickly this year. One of the things I missed most when I lived in San Francisco was the changing seasons. There was something about the lack of seasons there that allowed time to slip past unnoticed. We wore the same clothes all year round. Our hottest weather was in October and everyone would scramble to buy a sundress or unearth a pair of shorts. The few places in town that have patios were packed with long lines whenever the weather got above 70, but no matter how warm it was during the day the evening would bring fog and cold and wind. Summer was often one of the coldest stretches—hats and scarves, misting rain, thick wool sweaters. It was the only time that really felt like fall to me. Pumpkins would appear on doorsteps and I’d remember that it was October, that time was passing. But for the most part, time was a line unpunctuated by anything particular. Time both swept by continually and appeared to never move at all.

I moved to San Francisco when I was 23. I had lived one tumultuous year in Providence, trying so hard to love and be loved. I was with the wrong boy, and it was a year of finding this out. Of continual heartbreak and occasional beauty. But it was undoubtedly my biggest year of growth. Boston had been to me everything I had hoped. And it had been less. And it had been more.

I moved to Providence with Adam, someone who I was desperately in love with. Someone who felt like my soul mate at times. Someone who felt unfeelingly distant and aloof at other times. I lived in Providence, in an apartment which had its own sad story, but that is for another post. We moved in and made it ours as much as we could. But there was sadness in the corners—smeared reminders on top of the fridge. I worked in Boston, a place I had been longing for since I moved away when I was thirteen. Every morning, I took the train from Providence up to Boston and walked to work: a landscape architecture firm on Mass Ave, right across the street from the Berkeley School of Music. I would go to work where I was the only administrative employee for a firm of 23 landscape architects and I would think and think and think as I performed tasks. The longer I was there, the more my job grew to encompass. I was, when I left, involved in marketing, award proposals, RFPs, preparing bids for new jobs, reorganizing the electronic libraries, accounting, and my original job—front desk person. It became important to me. It was a good job with a good company and I was needed. I edited and formatted almost everything that left the office. I was only there for 10 months, but several things happened in that space that changed me and the course of my life.

But again, I digress. I want to write about coming back to Boston; to a place that had been magic to me when I was just a child, taking the T into the city on the weekends with my friends. The trains, the tunnels—walls smeared with soot and graffiti—the musicians who always seemed to be playing Simon and Garfunkel (is that possible?) the feeling of being a very small girl in a very big city. The feeling of being capable. This is something I had lost through years of self-doubt and discouragement.

And suddenly, there I was, back in the New England of my youth. But at first, it wasn’t how I remembered it. It was expensive and cold and dirty. But the romanticism had worn away. The people were rude and the wind was bitter and the subways were just dirty. Mostly, however, it was the feeling of being capable that failed to reappear. I don’t know what I was expecting. To reencounter myself? To become, again, the girl who was so fearless and confident? This had been worn away by many years in the South, a foreign place to me where I had never found my legs. It took many months for me to find her again, but find her I did. It was my year of pain and beauty.

When did it become beautiful? Only after the pain. In that raw and broken space where life feels so real and sharp that it’s like burlap on bare skin.

There are so many small moments that added up to that amazing change in me. So many lonely hours spent wishing I knew myself. Wishing I liked who I was. Hard wooden park benches where I escaped for lonely lunches hoping to avoid being noticed. Awkward seconds spent in the elevator that inched by like hours, feeling insecure and shy and ugly. Was I fat? Was I stupid? Did I have any value at all? A collection of minutes waiting under the large clock in South Station, wondering if Adam would show up. Wondering if perhaps he hadn’t waited for me and was already on the way home. Wishing someone could sweep into my life and fill it up to the brim. Riding crowded train cars, yawning distance between me and the people I rubbed shoulders with.

But at the end of it, when I began to see it all differently, see myself differently, I wallowed in the hurt and fear and crazy until I owned it. Until I became part of the world again as just me: a small girl in a big city wondering who I was and being ok with not knowing.

This was such a crucial time in my life, so rich in blessings and epiphanies, so drenched in beauty, that it deserves many posts. Over the next few days I’ll be writing snapshots of these moments—each pregnant with potential. Each moment an essential piece of who I am as I sit, now, on my front porch in the waning light of an Atlanta spring evening, still trying to know myself. But very sure that I’m on the right path.