Goodbye Apartment 8

A quick note about the new name: How Will I Keep You Safe? is now The Light is You!

I was mulling over an updated name to reflect the evolution of this newsletter for a while now and the time felt right. Next month, I will share more about what this new name means and my vision for this publication going forward.

For now, please enjoy this month’s essay (and vlog!!), all about moving in with my boyfriend and the choices that paralyze us :)

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I officially moved in with my boyfriend in March. I say “officially,” because, unofficially, we have been living together for the last two years.

Weekend sleepovers turned into working from his kitchen counter on Monday mornings. One week turned into two, until the idea of waking up alone in my single-girl era apartment began to feel foreign.

So, last month, we moved my final few boxes and all the furniture I hadn’t sold or donated out of that apartment. In some ways, it was the easiest move I’ve ever made, since most of my things had already migrated over to my boyfriend’s house. But in other ways, it was the hardest—a delicate dismantling of the safety net that I was surprised to find myself clinging to.

Me? Famously pro-commitment? Afraid to take the leap? How unexpected.

In May last year, I made a big deal of telling my friends that I was moving in. And each month after, at least one of them asked me if it was official yet.

But it wasn’t, because later that May, something in me had baulked. A primal memory, the way my body had felt when it lurched down the aisle towards something I was not ready for, kept snaking its way through my mind.

I got divorced at 27, after five years of being married to someone who was wrong for me. And, as with anything that ends in rubble, I walked away with wounds. I spent a while trying to leap over the trauma, and subsequently falling down deeper into the chasm. But eventually I faced it, I started the slow, boring climb of healing.

And it worked! I got better at not reading every romantic interaction through the lens of my bullshit. I got to know myself well enough to recognize someone who was good for me when I got lucky enough to meet him.

Which is why it surprised me when I felt my body grow rigid with fear whenever I thought about firing off a jaunty, “I’m moving out this month!” email to my building manager.

I want certainty more than almost anything else in life. Certainty that I am making the right choice, with the right person, at the right time. I feel like I have made the wrong choice so many times, that I struggle to believe myself when something feels right.

Isn’t that what you said before? I hear my own voice taunting, whenever I reassure myself that the choice I am making is a good one.
You’re so good at lying to yourself.

It’s true, and I know it. Twice in a row I convinced myself—against my instincts and better judgement—that the wrong person was right for me. That I could bend myself to fit their shape. It felt right to move-in, but what if I was just deluding myself again?

So, I found myself paralyzed at the mouth of two roads, forking away from each other, as I cast about for a fortune teller, a crystal ball, anything to tell me whether the fear I felt was premonition or trauma.

What’s the right choice? I hear the agonized echo of my younger self. The one who, after spending five years married to the wrong person, spent months trying to decide if she should leave him.

I had an epiphany during that time, going back and forth about whether or not I should get divorced.

What if there is no right choice? I was walking home from work one day when the thought occurred to me with a jolt of clarity that made me halt in place for a moment.

Sometimes, there is just a choice. You pick what you want more, and then you start walking.

When I asked myself if I wanted a divorce, the answer was so obvious.

I was desperation personified, body pressed against the bars, arms reaching for the sliver of light at the end of a long, dark hall. My whole body was electrified by the intensity of my desire to be set free. I let that long-stifled blaze guide me to a choice that was suddenly much easier to make.

“Can we wait a few months?” I asked my boyfriend in June.

“Of course,” he said. “You can keep your apartment forever if you want to.”

I didn’t want to keep my apartment forever. I was already tired of being in limbo and feeling unsettled, halfway between one place and another.

Something about a safety net still felt important though, even if admitting that felt like a kind of relational failure. As if me needing the security of my own apartment, even one that I never spent any time in, meant that my relationship wasn’t as solid as it was supposed to be.

But I decided it was important to give myself what I couldn’t when I got married: time to listen to the hesitation.

When the truth finally unraveled itself, I wanted to laugh out loud at the simplicity, the conspicuousness of my true reason for stalling.

Had I found a fortune teller at those crossroads and been able to ask her about the future, the question tumbling from my lips would not have been about my apartment. My real question was bigger, more existential.

Are we going to break-up some day?

THAT’S what I really wanted to know. That was the certainty I was holding out for in my quest for the “right” choice.

I realized, with a mingling sense of relief and disappointment, that no couple ever gets that kind of guarantee. Didn’t I know better than most that all vows can be broken?

The alarm sounding in my mind was not about the risk of letting go of my apartment. It was the risk of love. And moving in with someone, however good the relationship, would always feel like a risk to the part of me that was begging the universe for a notarized edict of certainty.

My fear of choosing the wrong thing became less paralyzing when I realized what I was actually afraid of, which was just all the things I’m normally afraid of—loss, loneliness, suffering—disguised as something new.

Once again, there were just choices. There were just desires. I stopped asking myself which one was “right,” and started asking myself which one I wanted.

I will always long for certainty, but I am learning that certainty is something we can create for ourselves to some extent.

I am certain that no matter what happens, I will figure it out. I trust my future self because I have seen what my past self is capable of navigating. I’ve gotten myself through everything that has come before, and I will get myself through everything that comes after.

On March 9, as daylight leapt ahead one hour and I woke up in my old apartment for the last time, I felt grateful for all of the choices that had led me to that one.

Not the right one or the wrong one, but the one I wanted most.

Goodbye Apartment 8!! I loved you like no other.
<3