I can’t adequately describe the excitement I feel when I run
into an old friend at the grocery store, the parent of a kid I coached at the
coffeeshop. It took me years to understand
that not everyone has that reaction; it took me years to realize that
community isn’t everyone else’s lifeblood.
But it’s always been my lifeblood.
The biggest
achievements in my life – my friendships, my career path, coaching coups – are
not blips that popped up on a radar out of nowhere. Each is an intricate,
sticky spiderweb full of life-long relationships, almost-missed connections,
out-of-the-blue text messages and
friends-of-friends-of-friends-who-thought-of-me-who-thought-of-you.
And so, when one of those almost-missed connections, a
friend of a friend, became my boyfriend almost overnight, it made perfect sense
to me. Though I was inclined to take it slow, both my heart and
head immediately saw him for who he was - a potential partner.
The problem was that he lived a plane ride away, and that’s
where he had to stay. My life – my stable life, the community that had surrounded me for decades – would have to bottom out in order for him to
fit in. The weight of the next questions nearly crushed me.
How can I leave all this behind?
And most importantly.
Who am I if I'm not here?
The answer, of course, is me. I'm not merely a pixelated composition of the people, places and experiences that have come so far. Those are all a part of me.
But I'm also the brazen liberal biproduct of two apolitical parents, the dancer in the midst of athlete brothers, the girl who once forced a group of rugby players to talk about domestic violence in the back of a crowded Wisconsin college bar.
