When I first got engaged a friend told me that this would be the happiest part of our relationship.
In ways, she’s absolutely right. Our friends have been excited. We’ve been excited. And we’ve yet to have a major wedding snafu (knock on wood).
But what I didn’t realize was that the engagement was also a time of grieving. As we get closer and closer to the wedding date, I’m saying goodbye to a part of myself. She is the girl who has both struggled and succeeded alone for all these years, the girl who scraped and pieced together freelance checks, lived in tiny garages billed as carriage houses, who constantly piled all of her things in her car to travel where the work was or where the rent was cheaper.
Which isn’t to say that I’m losing a sense of individual self in my relationship, but I’m letting go of the part who was so sure she would be getting through life alone. While nostalgia can often romanticize the past, I do find myself smiling to remember all of my tiny apartments piled high with drums, the long hours finishing any paid work I could get.
I found success in my career at the same time we found success in our relationship, and our wedding has come to symbolize a great change in both parts of my life. But as I move toward the happy day, I keep finding my thoughts back with my single self, the one who worked and struggled and dreamed, and the one who laid all the groundwork for me now to stand on.
This site was abandoned close to three years ago. I set it up during a difficult time in my life, when my dream-job newspaper shut down, and I lost a music gig that paid my rent. Finally, I was practicing long hours for an ideal orchestral job that suddenly fell through; the orchestra itself didn’t even last until the audition process.
Without work it’s easy to feel your identity slip away. I would practice aimlessly, cash unemployment checks, and spend a lot of time sweating at the boxing gym.
I scrambled fast out of that hard time; I found a music festival in New York for the summer, a part-time journalism job when I got home to Colorado. I started a concert series. I taught kids about poetry. I worked almost desperately.
Now as I watch as magazines and orchestras slowly submerge, I’ve come back to my own writing. This time I don’t want to realign myself by racing for more work, and I’m not necessarily reorganizing this site so I can brand myself, the slimy buzz word I have written about so often.
I’m writing here again so I can feel the simple pleasure of falling in love with daily life and trying to share it with people, rather than wringing experiences for as many magazines pitches as I can. To assert that the joy of working on a craft can define me, rather than the need to find a new quantity of work.
So, hello again. I’m 30, nothing has gone the way I planned, and I’m back here. And, I have to admit, I’m pretty excited about it.