I Thought All My Problems Were Solved

If there’s one thing you should know about me, it’s that I take leaps.

So when Peter, my colleague and friend of four years and brand new boyfriend of exactly three weeks, took a job in San Francisco, I drove across the country with him in a U-Haul. For a few days nothing else existed. We were in a bubble, somewhere between away and toward, just hopeful and moving and not yet any of the things that came next.

Then I flew back to Chicago alone. I could barely get in the Uber to the airport. The only thing I was hopeful about was the thing I was leaving behind.

Three months later I packed up and moved. I couldn’t believe San Francisco was a real place. The hills, the ocean, the fog. It was so beautiful and I was hopeful in a way I hadn’t been in years. A new city, a new relationship, a new life that finally felt like it was pointing somewhere.

I started a new job and walked in that first morning convinced I had finally cracked something open.

The job was like the first few bites of a meal you’ve spent hours prepping that taste a little off but you can’t quite put your finger on why. By the end of the first week the whole thing had curdled.

I quit three weeks in. My third serious job in one calendar year.

The floor dropped out fast. The man I had driven across the country with, the whole reason any of this had made sense, was in New York three weeks out of the month. I was in an apartment on the cable car line in a city where I knew almost no one, surrounded by clanging and yelling and sirens and full conversations and someone sneezing two floors up and bells and honking and singing in Mandarin, completely alone.

The panic attacks came back. The ones I had spent years learning to outrun. They started on planes and didn’t stay there.

I spent that winter at a coffee shop I barely even liked because I didn’t have anywhere else to be, aggressively strange, occasionally rude, never quite warm enough. I went back every day anyway, with a laptop and good intentions and somewhere between ten and twelve open tabs, job listings mostly, occasionally directions to a better coffee shop I could never quite justify the distance to.

I was performing forward motion. I wasn’t going anywhere.

This was the bottom. Quiet, grinding, expensive, lonely. No clear way out and no idea how long it would last.

I didn’t know yet that it was about to crack open.