Moving

Everything is changing again.

I stare at the cluster of boxes that clutter our living room, filled to the brim with books and trinkets and memories that my fiancé and I have collected over the years, together and even before then. We are moving in two weeks. And, due to poor planning on our part, a mistake made responsible due to our shared time-blindness, we are leaving for vacation tomorrow. We have been preparing for this trip for nearly a year. We will be gone for five days.

In addition to this, I unexpectedly got laid off three weeks ago. A mass financial restructure ruptured within the company, stripping half the staff of work. Including myself. I had been there for eight months.

Before that, I worked for an HOA. That job only lasted half a year because I had to work on both Saturday and Sunday and by four months, I couldn’t do it anymore. I never saw anyone I loved and on my days off I was alone. So I quit. That HOA position was my first official job. Months earlier, I was still in college and without the faintest idea of what the “real world” looked like.

On top of everything, my fiancé totaled his car in early September. We are relying solely on public transportation and my 2016 bug. He drives the car to work on the days he doesn’t take the train.
His commute via the train takes him an hour and a half. By car, it’s about fifty minutes. Hence the move. I feel like I hardly see him anymore, especially now that I’m unemployed.

I’ve always been resistant to change. Hesitant to the new and different. Through sheer desperation, I’ve tried at all costs to avoid a curvature in my path. I do this by controlling every minuscule detail of my life, from the time I wake up to what I’m eating for lunch to scheduled and uninterrupted reading breaks. I must ensure that everything goes exactly as planned. I follow a predetermined path, laid out by my past self, obliging to her dreams and wishes. Because she’s typically wisest.

Each time this fight for security emerges from within me, my world wavers and stirs. It can feel like forceful hands physically shoving me out of my element and into the murky woods of my mind. I’m left stranded without a map, just a dying flashlight. I’m frightened, and I can’t see very far ahead.

Sure. The move and the vacation were already planned.

I remember when my fiancé and I bought our plane tickets, giggling at how foolish we were for going on a trip before our actual honeymoon. But our wedding wasn’t for another six months and we needed this.

And then we signed a lease somewhere else because the commute was sucking us dry of creative energy. We would arrive home pale and clammy with sunken eyes and pounding headaches, dehydrated and angry. By Thursday, we were shells of ourselves. “This is just how adulthood is,” we reminded each other as we sprawled out along the couch. Our voices were sheepish and depleted. “This is normal.”

In the moment, moving right after our trip just felt like reckless fun. It was a little adventure beyond the realm of our demanding salary jobs, tiresome drives, frequent comments in regards to our wedding planning, and the constant weight of the world already on our shoulders at just 23-years-old.

We felt too young to already be experiencing this sort of pressure. No one had taught us any of this. Warned us. Well, maybe they did. They tried, at least, but it never really made sense at the time. We realize now that no one actually has the answers because we’re all still learning everything for the first time. All of us.

My fiancé and I certainly hadn’t expected the car wreck. Nor the lay-off, and the radio silence that followed my fifty+ job applications. Frantic fingertips shooting off cover letters late into the night on a Tuesday. Wondering if I’ll ever find purpose or meaning again.

I can’t even begin to showcase the level of resistance I have had to all of this. Willing everything to be put back into place. It was perfect, just as it was! Or, no. It wasn’t perfect—far from it, really. But it was routine. This is unfamiliar and frightening, my worst of fears.

Simultaneously, I am in-between homes, cars, jobs, and we will be gone for a week. The stress pumps through my veins and I’ve been grinding my teeth at night and rashes bloom and bleed along my arms. My eczema is always worse during times of stress.

However, I have softened now. I always do, eventually. Once the struggle persists for a while, and I grow tired. I close my eyes and just breathe. Reluctantly but hopeful, I allow. Rather than moving so tirelessly against the current, I decide to follow the way of the wind, enjoying this new lightness within me, the breeze in my hair. I walk along this new path that has formed before me, trusting that my feet will land on the soft ground after every careful step.

I’m not sure where this life will take me. No one ever is. But some seasons are stranger, and harder, than others. Within a matter of weeks, you may lose just about every seemingly stable thing in your life.
But we can’t control that.

There is nothing that we could have done differently, because it has already happened. We are in the now, and it is already done. Sure, there’s always lessons to be learned. But trust is the only way. Trust in the outcome. Trust that we will eventually figure it out. It’ll be just fine. The journey may play out differently than what we might’ve imagined, and that’s okay. It makes it all the more exciting!

I’m now on the plane as I write this, heading back home after having spent a beautiful vacation with my loving fiancé. I’m grateful that we had this opportunity to get away from it all. Strangely enough, it was just what we needed. In a way, it was perfectly timed.

As though everything is happening for a reason.

Admittedly, we almost canceled the trip entirely. We tried to control it all, take charge of the situation. Financially, it made sense to do so.

But after a few weeks of going back and forth on the idea, we decided to go. We followed the current. The trip was already booked and paid for, anyways. We trusted that this was all for a greater purpose that we didn’t understand just yet.

We can’t always predict what the future will hold. Actually, no. We will never be able to predict what might happen in just a few years, months, days, hours, or even minutes from now.

So enjoy it. Let go and allow your life to unfold around you. Embrace the billowing journey, despite what you may be going through.

There is a reason behind it all. And I’m not sure about you, but I can’t wait to discover what that may be.

Change will always find you, in the end. It is something you can’t truly avoid, regardless of how hard you try. And, you know what? It’s going to be okay.

I promise.

***

About the Author: Brittney Kristina is the award-winning author of three books and freelance writer and editor. When she’s not writing, she’s nose-deep in a book, sipping from a large mug of coffee or tea, outside in nature, or gushing over psychological theories.