don't forget to breath

Assess.  Prioritize.  Readapt.  And don’t forget to breath.  This has been somewhat of a mantra for me the past several months.  But mostly just the breathing part.

I flew from Paraguay to LA in the beginning of April and burst into tears went I saw the ugly urban sprawl that is Los Angeles.  I had forgotten what it looked like and it terrified me.  I soon found myself in a steady and comfortable rhythm working at a gear shop and spent most of my free time doing things that I had enjoyed in Paraguay like cooking and reading.  I initiated a wine and cheese night once a week at my house with my family and traveled to Orange County, Colorado, and the Eastern Sierras.  That now seems like a long lost dream to me, a time of much needed rest and peace.

For whatever crazy reasons my mom and I decided to do this, at the end of the summer we packed most of my belongings in a rented car and drove from LA to New York.  Thus began the hardships in my life once again.  I have always loved the idea of road trips and dreamed of traveling cross-country on a motorcycle ever since my mom began telling me stories of how she did that in the 70’s.  Comparatively, road tripping in a car is easy.  I fed my mom snacks, looked up directions on a map (because I have no smart phone), changed the music, told stories and asked questions.  But sitting in a car for 8 plus hours a day gets uncomfortable and sleeping in a different place every night is not conducive to getting a good night’s rest.  We were spending time with family along the way though, seeing different parts of the United States, and largely enjoying ourselves, so the discomforts we had to bear seemed minor because they were temporary. 

But really, they were temporary for my mom and not for me.  After a week of driving around and seeing cousins and aunts and uncle, we drove into Manhattan.  Literally the first thing I did after getting out of the car and greeting my roommate was to leave my mom with the car to go check out a couple of potential apartments.  Thus ensued the craziness.  My mom left the next morning and I moved all of my baggage into a friends’ two-bedroom apartment where five of us (three of us looking for another place to live) would stay for over a week.  If I didn’t have pictures to prove we fit four people’s lives into one bedroom minus a bag or two, I wouldn’t really believe it actually happened.  We rotated sleeping on the bed, the couch and the floor.  Two of us started a weeklong orientation a couple of days later and we all continued the apartment search.  It really was as crazy as it sounds and some mornings we actually filed in and out of the bathroom as it was available.  Miraculously, I think it bonded those of us who didn’t know each other before and somehow we all enjoyed it.  I think.

My roommate and I found an apartment relatively quickly and handed over all of our money from loans for a security deposit and first and last months rent.  It’s not worth explaining what we went through to get the place, but I’ll just say we dealt with a broker that I would rather not see again.  Although we gave documentation that looked like Word doc or web printout supposedly proving that we were accepted into universities and borrowing exorbitant amounts of money to attend school and pay for personal expenses, he was far more technical on things like our W2’s which proved jointly we made less than 6 months rent over the course of two years.  Nonetheless, we moved in on Saturday and started searching Craigslist like mad.  By Tuesday we had a fully furnished apartment, had been all over Manhattan to pick it up, talked in Spanish to taxi drivers to get discounts, carried a table and chairs on the subway, carried everything up five flights of stairs to our apartment and I’m pretty sure sweated literal gallons with 90% humidity.  By then I was exhausted and sore all over from sleeping on the floor and lifting furniture. 

The next day I started classes and was assigned (after already completing reading before the first day of class) more reading than is humanly possible to get through in one week.  I also had a community project, an advising assignment, and four syllabi packed with more information and more reading and more assignments to be doled out over the course of the semester as my professors see fit, I believe with the intention of disrupting my sanity and furthering my education in that order.  Because a full load of classes isn’t enough, I also have twenty-one hours of internship a week that I started this last Monday.  This internship also started me off with training, information, forms to keep tabs on, reports to write up, training and meetings every week throughout the semester, and, oh yes, the clients.  After a day and a half largely filled with informational meetings, tours of the Manhattan and Brooklyn offices, and introductions to far more faces than I could possibly remember or could possibly interact with over the next year, I had a one-on-one meeting with my supervisor.  When she asked me if I had any questions, I just looked at her blankly.  I don’t even remember what I said, but I think it might have included “information overload,” “hands on learner,” and “questions later.”

Today after calling the Columbia doctors to get refills on prescriptions, I found out that my time is far less flexible than theirs because I repeatedly responded with, “No, I’m in Brooklyn that day,” or “I have class at that time” and resolved the problem with deciding to leave a class early to get to an appointment.  I started wondering, “How in the world did this happen and what am I doing?” 

I won’t even begin to talk about the kinds of transitions that I have been through the last couple of years but clearly I have been through many.  Some of them have been gradual and some of them have been rather harsh.  I’ve learned to take a step back when I get thrown into life changes and adapt as necessary.  Sometimes though I forget about taking the step back or get so lost in my reading assignments and looking for apartments that I can’t figure out how to prioritize or adjust.  There is a song I like by Alexi Murdoch that says, “keep your head above water.  And don’t forget to breath.”  That is how I think sometimes when I feel as if I’m losing my grip on reality.  I’ll forget about that whole prioritize, reassess and adjust process but as long as I don’t forget to breath, I’ll be alright.