I spent my first week back in NYC going to every type of doctor’s appointment imaginable. I thought of myself as healthy, almost laughably so, considering our placement in the midst of a pandemic, but after over a year of pushing off all but one meeting with a medical professional due to COVID, I scheduled a different appointment for each day of that first week I returned. I learned, quickly, that every doctor in Manhattan must have discovered I’d gotten my credit card down to $0 and were eager for me to rack it right back up again with medical bills because now, my third week back in New York, has been spent going to every type of specialist appointment available.
My dentist insisted I see an orthodontist, worried that my time for Invisalign was no longer going to conveniently overlap with our pandemic mask usage. (It will not — I may be the only person in America who is willingly getting adult braces on the very same day they become fully vaccinated and are no longer required to wear a mask at every moment). My gynecologist sent me to a breast cancer imaging center, where (after they had to wake me up when I fell asleep during the ultrasound, a feat considering the feeling of the warm goo they squirt on your chest), I learned I needed to go back for a biopsy on a lump that’s likely nothing, but maybe something. After one look at my body, covered in beauty marks, freckles and irregular moles, my dermatologist uttered the phrase, “Your body gives me too much anxiety to look at alone,” (I joked, “Same, ma’am, but probably for different reasons” — she did not think it was funny), and is now requiring me to go to an out-of-network melanoma specialist for full body scans at least twice a year.
All of which is to say — my first few weeks back have been expensive. And, stressful. After over a year of frantic worrying about nothing other than me or someone I love contracting COVID, I’d forgotten what it’s like to worry about literally anything else health-wise. Even so, appointments aside, I’m elated to be back. It’s been an adjustment, sure, switching from the ten months of my “single mom to a pup in the suburbs” days to the life I used to live here and there is no denying that I am a different person than I was when I left. (The only doctor’s visit I truly enjoyed in this past month was the trip to my new primary care physician, a man around my age who I adore both because he didn’t send me for any follow up appointments and because I finally, after so many years, felt like I was answering the health questionnaire correctly when I was able to tell him I no longer drink, do not smoke or do drugs, eat fairly healthy foods and spend most of my free time doing relentless cardio on the West Side Highway.
“Does he look married?,” my mother first asked when I told her how much I liked going to see him, so do not worry, not quite everything about my life has changed).
It’s obvious I am in an adjustment period and I thought about that a lot this month while I read. I loved my time with my parents and my dog and I will always be grateful that I had the opportunity to spend so much time with them as an adult. I’m equally excited to now be back in the city, back in my home, and look forward to learning how to adapt my new lifestyle into my old routine. It’s only been a few weeks, but I’m confident this transition time will be beneficial to me and to the person I am working to someday become.
April 2021 Reads
“The day is new, brimming with possibility and already fucked.”
Every single day, without an alarm, I get up at 5:40 am. This is a byproduct of sleeping with my door open when I lived in the suburbs (I might be almost thirty, but I am terrified of how dark that little bedroom gets when the door is shut), making me the only person in our household who really heard when the dog would start to wake up each morning.
Charlie and I had a good little routine down — by the time we were finishing up the tail-end of our morning tasks, which almost always ended with the two of us walking the perimeter of our property for far longer than necessary, one or both of my parents would be awake and ready with food for him and a hot cup of coffee for me.
The first morning that I woke up in the city, I didn’t know what to do with myself. For so long, I’d been used to filling up the beginning hours of my day with responsibilities, with the mindless yet beautiful repetition of walking in circles with Charlie while the sun rose over our heads. The realization that hours of uninterrupted time stretched before me was almost too much to take in. By the time I completed the one task I had to do that morning — teach myself how to make coffee now that I no longer lived with my parents — only twenty minutes had passed by and I spent the next hour sitting silently on my couch, looking out at the city, marveling at all the time I had left to myself.
My roommate and I like to joke that even though we live together, we get the apartment in timeshares — I wake up early and am usually in bed well before my Apple Watch tells me it’s time to power down at 10 pm and she is more accustomed to rising right before her first meeting and watching television late into the night. I now spend my morning hours alone relaxing, reading, writing — really doing anything other than checking the news, checking my phone, checking social media. I like to think of these hours of uninterrupted time, punctuated only by the sounds of my neighborhood slowly waking up, as the sliver of my day not entrapped in problems needing to be solved. That part of the day will come — it always does — but those few hours I have alone, looking out my window, watching Chelsea come to life, they are different than the endless loops Charlie and I walked in the suburbs, but relaxing and gorgeous, all the same.
“And for my whole life, I’d have to walk around inside a body that kept me from ever truly knowing anyone else [and I’d] wonder how I could ever stop feeling lonely when no one could ever know me all the way.”
When I got back, I was nervous to start seeing my friends.
This was largely because I hadn’t spent time with anyone who wasn’t related to me in over a year and most of my daily conversations were one-sided ones that took place with my dog, but also because, right before the pandemic began, I was feeling a little untethered from every group I belonged to. In the months before the world shut down, I felt like I was on the outskirts of everything — sometimes, I would be out with my friends, having a perfectly lovely time, and out of nowhere get the urge to go home early, to leave at once and be alone in the quiet of my apartment rather than surrounded by the chatter of people who loved me. When it was happening to me last winter, back before the world shut down, I didn’t know why I felt like that and then, forced lockdown plus a year and a handful of months removed from every social aspect ever did not help me find clarity for the situation. I felt like no one actually knew me and I didn’t know what to do to fix it.
Even before the pandemic, even before the few months spent fully by myself and then the many months spent with my parents in the suburbs, I was intimately comfortable with being alone, a gift that I treasure. My own narration in my head has been a soundtrack that I rely on and I’ve never been one to shy away from events just because I’m going solo — I frequently attended concerts by myself and, during the week, if I was found at a bar, it was likely because I loved nothing more than sitting alone there with a book and a beer. I do worry, a little, that this gift of being able to be so comfortable alone is something that will stunt me in the future, especially now, because even before the pandemic, it had become so much easier for me to thrive in situations of meeting strangers at bars than hanging out in my friend groups. When I was sitting there, alone with a book, or standing there, alone at a concert, I allowed myself to be charming and gregarious to people who approached me even when I wasn’t actually experiencing those feelings, able to fake my way through the interaction in a way that my friends would be able to see right through. I was worried, after so long of not being around anyone, how my friends would relate to me now.
Of course, the friends I have seen since I’ve been back have been lovely and nothing has been awkward, not at all in the way I had expected it to be. I’d hyped myself up for so long that I forgotten — even if I hadn’t felt like it at the time — how closely these people know me and what I like to do. They are the people who let me lay on their blanket for a quiet Saturday in the park; the ones who schedule time after dinners to let me play with their dog; the multiple groups of people who have not only trekked from the Upper West Side and Brooklyn to have hours long outdoor hangs at the restaurant directly underneath my apartment, but the ones who suggested that as the meeting location in the first place, knowing how much I love the convenience of sharing an address with my favorite restaurant.
I am tired, after these hangs — not tired in the same way I felt last winter, when I’d be out and need to go home at once, but tired from social interactions all the same. I’m elated by this, though… I feel like I’m spending my time with my friends more intentionally. I’m focusing, hard, on what they are saying, on what they are feeling, and they are mutually reciprocating. I no longer feel untethered — instead, the time we spend together exhausts me in a good way because it’s so special, because we haven’t had it in so long, because even after so much time apart, they are still there.
“As for you, you will probably wake up tomorrow, too. The sun will probably rise. Breath will move in and out of your lungs, blood will probably pump despite your amazing broken heart. Right now, you have a body, a mind, and a memory that extends backward through time’s infinite doorways. You are an everyday miracle. Enjoy life. Because even with the promise of forever, nothing lasts.”
One of the biggest reasons I stayed in Massachusetts for so long is not my story to tell, but it involves a day last summer when I realized how fast a life could change.
It seems silly and naive to not realize how fragile life is, to not recognize how quickly one action can lead to a potentially fatal one and I’m embarrassed to admit it took me so late in my life to fully grasp that concept. We were lucky that day — a situation that would have been the most traumatic I’d ever experienced ended instead happily — but every single day since, I’ve woken up with the knowledge that nothing is promised, that the future isn’t guaranteed.
This past year with the pandemic and especially in the months that followed last July, I’ve made the conscious decision to live life slower, more intentionally, more thoughtfully, more present. I spent months with my parents and Charlie, using every moment of that time gratefully. I stopped drinking, wanting to remember everything more clearly and, in turn, this allowed me to stop making decisions that jeopardized the type of lifestyle I actually craved. The things that I used to want, the behavior I thought was fun pre-pandemic….they just don’t seem as important anymore. The past year has taught me that I want to spend my time more mindfully because while I am young — the likelihood that I have so much of my life stretched before me is high — it is not promised.
It never was.
