All You’ve Overcome
“This is our last session in Houston,” my therapist reminded me over Zoom on Wednesday. Michael drove up to Colorado two Saturdays ago, and I’m halfway through my three week micro-season of living alone in Houston to finish out my five and a half years here.
It’s felt surprisingly appropriate to be alone for this time, even though I am happily married and that marriage is the reason for this move.
“You moving as one person or two?” Yank inquired last time I stopped by the chess tree, indiscreetly checking if I’m still with Michael.
“Two,” I assured him.
Recent emails I’ve sent mention that I’m ‘moving to Colorado for my husband’s job,’ suggesting a level of dependence and domesticity that I don’t recognize in myself.
“You’ve done a lot here,” my therapist continued. “Earlier in this session we were talking about your fears, but don’t forget to note the fears you’ve overcome.”
I moved to Houston in September of 2015, barely 22, four months out of undergrad. I had a choppy pixie cut, two fifty-pound suitcases and a backpack jammed full of books. And here I am, five and half years later, married and packing up wardrobe boxes to move back to where I came from: Boulder.
“You’re packing up and taking your man back home?” Rick texted me back after I told him.
Houston is the place where I became a real person. I was a child when I came here, a proto-version of myself.
I almost left Houston at one point. It was spring of my second Mission Year, not long after we’d had our second bout of bedbugs. Just before our spring break, two women from my house announced they were leaving the program: one woman who had pushed back against the program every step of the way since September, whom I was relieved to see go; and my best friend in the house, who was leaving the program since her mother was dying. Our team was shrunken and haggard, and spring break was a welcome respite. Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ book, Women Who Run with the Wolves describes the woman whose soul has paled, and I knew that described me. The solution for soul-paling, she said, was to go home, to a secluded, restorative place. I retreated to southeast Appalachia, to stay with friends, visit Serenity Knoll, to dance my heart out in a log cabin in the Carolinas. “My spring break was a journey of going home,” I journaled afterwards, “but in coming back from that I find myself so drained.”
When I returned to Houston, I knew something needed to change. “I feel like I’ve fallen out of love with Houston,” I wrote. “It all seems flat to me, suddenly. It feels like my love for Houston was just an artistically conjured mirage, and now that’s just and just the bones of this anonymous, impersonal city are left standing.
“I want to be proactive this spring about going to all the place in Houston I want to see, either because they’ll help me fall back in love with it or I’l make it to all of them before (if I were to) go. I’m really scared—scared of being trapped. Scared of tricking myself into thinking I love something I don’t. I’m scared of looking for something that doesn’t exist.”
That’s when I finally sought out tango classes.
Dancing anchored me here in a new way. It gave me a new set of friends, people who understood my urges and my need for connection, people who were generous and tender and outrageous. My free time took on the shape of my dancing schedule: practica on Tuesdays, followed by sitting on the patio eating tacos from the taco truck; weekend milongas and dinner parties. Those were the rhythms that carried me through the end of that second Mission Year and into my non-program life.
t was through tango—the very night before Hurricane Harvey hit—that I met Naomi, the badass attorney who helped me plan my wedding. Tango provided me with a new family of transplants and misfits: the couple who asked me to be the witness at their living room wedding, the cohort of friends who came to beach bonfires in the summertime, the friend whose kids Michael and I have watched grow from babies to individuals.
My life in Houston has been so rich. I’ve had jobs I loved and jobs I didn’t care for; I lived alone for the first time; I got married in a back courtyard at a bar in this town. Houston is a small town dressed up as a big city, as everyone who lives here knows.
Here is the place where I’ve weathered hurricanes and power outages. Here is where I quarantined and social distanced and masked up and got vaccinated. Mid-pandemic I quit my job and enrolled in grad school for creative writing, the crazy thing that now feels like the most obvious thing in the world.
I feel bewildered at the person I get to be. I’m so happy I didn’t leave Houston after my second year with the program, and I feel both grieved and grateful to be leaving it now.
I’ve packed so many times to pop back up to Colorado for visits or holidays that it hasn’t fully sunk in that I’m packing for good this time. Where I live next, Third Ward won’t be a few miles’ bike ride away. No more casual visits to the chess tree or popping by the Porch Party or Ms. Shirley’s front stoop. All of that will be locked into the past, as Third Ward redevelops and turns over and becomes something unrecognizable. My hair is nearly the longest it’s ever been, sunset blond and thick as always. I inherited my husband’s grandmother’s wardrobe last year, so I finally dress myself in something other than t-shirts and ratty shorts. When I had my first session with my therapist, I told her I didn’t know how to dress myself for my professional job, and I really just wanted to quit working in nonprofits and go be a writer.
“Look at all the fears you’ve overcome,” she urged me. I’m doing the thing. I might look unrecognizable from the version of myself who came here, but that’s what it means to grow. To flower, to flourish. To give oneself permission to change.
How it started v. How it’s going
The left photo is from several months into my first Mission Year, so it’s not quite how it started. But it was too good of a photo to pass up. I showed up to Houston a child, and I’m leaving it as a woman who is doing what she wants to do: work that fills me with good cheer. Wild.
(Regarding the photo on the right: I’ll be participating in an exhibition of Pandemic Works with the Holy Family 2020 Artist Collective. Details to come.)
