on change

I've tried to keep this blog pretty emotion-free for the past two years. I've talked about being busy, working hard, and occasionally stressing out, but I haven't really delved into my feelings too much. Family members have joked that this blog basically existed so I could post mouth-watering pictures of cupcakes. But now, for the first time since I moved here, I felt like this blog might be a good avenue to work some of my feelings out.





As many of you know, I've decided to move back to Toronto. There are few times in my life where I have been so completely happy with a decision. I know Toronto represents really good things for me: friends, family, JG, a city I love, and an arts community and professional world I am excited to rejoin. Toronto means leaving a life here which has been professionally satisfying, but more recently, less than personally satisfying.

I've known for my entire life that the one thing I am just awful at dealing with is change. Every year when I was a kid (and young adult), I would freak out the night before I went to sleepaway camp. Tears, fits of anxiety, and usually a sleepless night, probably every year I went (including when I was a counsellor!). It didn't matter that I knew I would have a great time, that I would be so sad to leave at the end of the summer. It was the change, the adjustment, the sense of loosing one thing (albeit temporarily), the comfort of home, in order to throw myself into another thing. And the thing is, you couldn't even call it uncertainty, as I'd been going to the same camp for years. It was simply the adjustment, the change, that gnawed at me.

In many ways I feel like I'm still that kid. The nights before I moved to NYC I stayed up late with Joe and my parents, super panicked and scared and anxiety ridden. I was convinced I wouldn't survive here, that everything would come crashing around me. But here I am now, 2 years later, getting ready to move out of my Alphabet City apartment, feeling the exact same way about going home.

I'll miss my apartment here, which really started feeling like a home to me, a place to cook meals for myself and make granola and watch silly tv and feel safe. I'll miss my cafes and my local shops and my favourite neighborhood restaurants. I'll miss my life here, and it frankly scares the crap out of me to be leaving this behind, even though I'm so excited to return to so many people I love in Canada. Part of me feels like I'm just the same little girl the night before summer camp, sleepless and teary-eyed and scared. It's not home that scares me, with all its comforts. It's goddamn change.

But then I realized something important:

Something incredibly drastic and huge has happened to you in between the time that you were that kid going away to sleep away camp and now. That something was moving to New York City

I literally moved to a city where I knew two people, a city that I had not visited in more than 10 years, and I made it work. Things haven't been perfect, but they've been pretty freaking great. If that's not surviving change, I don't know what is. I really don't know what else life is going to throw me, and I know that this transition will be weird and strange, and at times a little freaky, but I really can't imagine that there is much more that tops that huge, monumental move. I can only hope that while I'm not a totally different person, I might be a slightly stronger, slightly bolder one; the kind of person who recognizes that fear and anxiety might be good things, signs that you're moving forward and taking risks. And maybe, I'm just a bit better equipped to fend off this demon of "change" than I even realize.