write me well

Tag: roots

  • Nest-y

    I am not going to start this post talking about how I’m sitting in a coffee shop, because damned if a quick scroll through my last several posts didn’t show me that’s almost exclusively what I write about.

    If you follow me on Instagram or speak to me on even a sort-of regular basis, you’ll know about my fairly big news. I mentioned last time I wrote that there was some potentially really exciting stuff going on. Usually that’s almost a guarantee that said really exciting stuff will immediately implode and lead nowhere at all, but I’m here to tell you that THIS time, the opposite has happened.

    One week ago today was my last day as a retail manager.

    MIND. BLOWN.

    I promised myself in 2019, somewhere in-between ringing up customers and getting sale stickers stuck on my arm at the Anthropologie in Spitalfields, that it would be my last Christmas in retail. Christmas 2020 did see me in a shop (or it would have, if we’d been allowed to be open), but I wouldn’t quite call it retail, since my role at UAL helped me vastly expand my skillset and provided so many opportunities outside of working a salesfloor (and, COVID or no COVID, it was 9a-5p, Mon-Fri). I didn’t immediately think I’d be breaking my word when I joined back up with World Market last May, but when I took a store manager position in Santa Cruz in June, it did seem a bit like the death knell of that promise nearly two years past.

    Nothing extraordinarily bad happened while I was in Santa Cruz. It just served as a reminder of how nothing about retail had changed, but holy shit, I certainly had. I kept looking at my resume and how close I had been to achieving something different with my career. At the end of July, I decided enough was enough. I started applying elsewhere.

    By the end of August, I’d gotten nowhere. The holiday season was closing fast, and so one Sunday, out of respect for my district manager – who I’ve known for nearly a decade – I made myself a new promise. Christmas 2021 would be my last in the business and I needed to do the right thing and wait until the new year to pursue another job. And because life is life, roughly 24 hours after I made myself that promise, I heard back from a job application I’d sent out the week prior for easily the dreamiest and most ideal of any of the jobs I had applied for.

    When I wrote last, I was two interviews in and a week away from hearing that I got the job. I write this now having finished my first full week as an Experience & Program Coordinator at a historic house and garden. So it’s been a really nice seven days, even if I am still in disbelief half the time.

    Of all of the amazing things that have happened in those seven days, one of my favorites happened yesterday when I was walking to my car with my new manager. She was asking me how everything was going, and said she hoped it hadn’t been too overwhelming for a first week. I told her that at the risk of continuing to gush about this job (shockingly, I have already gushed quite a lot), I couldn’t be happier. I gave her an abbreviated version of how relieved I was to feel like I’ve finally found a role and career path I can settle into without having to constantly wonder what’s next, because I’m so unsure. She turned to me and said, “Yes! Roots. It’s so great when you finally get to start putting them down.”

    I thought immediately of what I wrote last January, a very wild nine months ago, about roots. The exhaustion of the what’s next and my inability to do anything but feed that vision. But I think, dare I say it, I’ve sorted out that rootless self.

    And now it’s time to get a little nest-y.

    I’ve started drinking more tea than coffee again, I’ve hung stuff on the walls, I’ve started to build a home with another person. Please stay tuned for more of the total craziness that is the fact that my life, for once, will not be so crazy anymore. I’m thirty-two, chill, and pretty fucking thrilled about it.

  • Roots

    Some of my favorite memories are ones that are impossible to reminisce out loud. I was either alone or surrounded by strangers, which makes me wonder if they ever remember too.  

    Walking to buy popcorn chicken on lunch break from a driver’s education class hosted out the back of a strip mall classroom, hot summer sun and listening to Chutes Too Narrow while reading the book that was about to become my favorite for years. Sitting at countless coffee shops – I have sat at so many coffee shops over the years, because of all of the habits I have formed, it seems to be the longest running. Sometimes with my dog (he’s turning seven this year with a new family, another wild thought), usually alone. Almost always writing, almost never the same thing. Driving up the California coast, having cut through the hills to Laguna Niguel, walking through neighborhoods of the super tanned, super fit, super rich. Watching the ocean on several occasions, because you can never watch the ocean too much.  

    Are you okay? a friend texted me this morning. I’d taken the day before off work, for “reasons”, and she was just checking in. Oh yeah, I reply, Just general what-am-I-doing-with-my-future-life-is-really-weird-right-now malaise. I’m still sitting in that malaise and have been for a week. I spent the last hour looking at apartments in San Diego, even though I’m actively in the middle of sorting out the next phase of my life here in England. But I also spent five hours yesterday watching a show set in sunny southern California, a place that for me will always have a magic glow and impossibly vague siren call. In my dream world, that one with ceaseless funds and a job that allows a semi-rootless existence, I have two homes. One in San Diego, golden and salty and craftsman, with Gilmore, black iced coffees, drives down the 163 and warm walks through North Park and the Gaslamp. A lithe, aesthetic life where I spend my January to June. And across the world, I have my second home, from June to December. A terraced house nestled in a cathedral city, cozy and cold but faultless in the sun, brick and stone and the weight of a storied existence, energy moving from Roman to medieval to Georgian, all within a stone’s throw. A river nearby, because there needs to be water, and books and cups of tea and winding wandering walks, even just to a corner shop for milk.  

    Once when I was living in Long Beach, I decided to make a cake. It was a rare rainy day and I was only missing one or two ingredients. The rain stopped for a few minutes and I tried the tiny grocery a block over, walking rather than driving, getting caught in a downpour moments from the return to my doorstep. I called my mom for company while I baked my cake and tried to explain how much that innocuous walk had reminded me of living in England, of walking to the shops to pick up something, rather than getting into the car. I’ve never owned a car in my years in England, something that will likely change when I eventually leave London, but for now it’s something that draws a very specific divide through my life experiences. Everything about a car feels very Route 66 American, very freeway road trip traffic radio, very windows down Phantom Planet crooning California Here We Come. That will change, but I’m avoiding it. A car is the one form of root I haven’t planted over here. I think something about it makes me nervous in a way I won’t admit.  

    I haven’t had roots in a long time. It’s one of the beauties of being on your own, but it’s becoming exhausting. That’s where the malaise of this week really sits. Hiding beneath the very real exhaustion of living in Unprecedented Times, I’m tired of moving and the excitement of the unknown. I still appreciate how valuable it is to have options. But I would love, very much, to have this be the last “next phase” for a while. Whatever is next needs to last a while. Every move feeds that rootless self, that love of asking myself where do I belong? It makes me want to keep trying new places and finding new homes.  

    But I’ve already found enough homes.