v. 71 THE UPDATE: A Body in Motion
Welcome to Life, Created — a weekly(ish) reflection on the wisdom of being a grown-ass human and staying curious when the world’s on fire. Rooted in microjoys, meaning, and the moments that make it all worthwhile.
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I'm writing this week's Life, Created from what is now a shared office, surrounded by six years of accumulated stuff we're still trying to find homes for. Every day I uncover something that makes me wonder why the hell we packed it, and then five minutes later I find something I'd been convinced I'd accidentally donated.
It's been awhile since you've heard from me, and the short version is: y'all, we've been BUSY. In that time we moved back to Brooklyn, which, if you've been reading along over the last year, probably won't come as much of a surprise. Some stories announce where they're going long before the people living them are willing to admit it.
Regardless, we landed exactly where we'd hoped: the top floor of a brownstone in one of those historic Brooklyn tree-lined neighborhoods. We have a washer and dryer that isn’t shared with neighbors, and a stoop out front where we've already had our first evening glass of wine together. To be clear, "glass" is doing some VERY heavy lifting in that last sentence. It wasn't wine in proper glasses because the glasses were still packed in whatever box currently contains things like barware. We drank out of metal travel mugs like two people who had absolutely no business pretending they were settled. I fully intend to redeem us with actual stemware soon.
The thing is, to explain why this move has hit me as hard as it has, I have to rewind all the way back to 2020.
We left Brooklyn in the middle of the pandemic, chasing more space for Ira to take pictures (he’s a photographer) and to be closer to my mom. We made that decision while I was still reeling from my nephew's death, packing our tiny apartment through a haze of grief that made even simple choices feel impossibly consequential. Grief has a way of making every ordinary decision feel like it matters more than it does, mostly because your nervous system has forgotten how to distinguish between the catastrophic and the mundane.
If you've been around here for a while (or if you've read MICROJOYS) you know what happened next. Mama Shelley died less than two months after we unpacked the last box. What followed was a barrage of absolute fuckery: hospital stays, my own diagnosis, and a stretch of years that I still struggle to describe without sounding like I'm exaggerating. Sometimes I think about the timing of it all and it still catches in my throat. We moved to be closer to my mother, and before the pink couch had even found its permanent place in the living room, the reason we'd moved… was gone.
Montclair became the place where I healed, or at least where I learned that healing isn't something you finish. It's more like tending a garden; even after everything looks healthy from the street, there are always weeds to pull, things to water, seasons you can't rush. (It’s also coincidentally, the place I learned to actually garden.)
But somewhere in those years I also became a woman I barely recognized. I showed up and kept going. I wrote MICROJOYS in Montclair while deep in the middle of my grief. But afterwards, speaking business aside, I quietly sunset the rest of my work and spent a long time simply existing, because that's all grief allowed for. I am a person who creates momentum, who makes things happen, but leaving requires energy, and for a long time I didn't have any to spare. Newton had a law for it before grief did: a body (object) at rest stays at rest until something moves it. And a body in motion stays in motion. (Not Newton’s exact law but you get the gist.)
Six years in, with our lease coming up, we made a decision before we had a plan: we weren't going to re-sign.
We had no apartment lined up, no backup plan, or guarantee that Brooklyn would have room for us again. All we knew was that our time in Montclair had come to an end. We'd loved that magical, colorful, gigantic apartment (which we painted back to white last weekend.) We filled it with books and art and plants and a velvet couch that survived everything we'd survived. It held us through the hardest years of our lives, and I will always be grateful for it.
But gratitude and permanence aren't the same thing, friends. So we gave notice, and suddenly the race was on.
Wanting something again, after years of simply trying to get through the day, is …exhausting. Hope is surprisingly expensive. Every apartment we looked at asked me to imagine a future, and imagining a future had become a muscle I hadn't exercised in a very long time.
We started touring Brooklyn apartments almost as an experiment, half convinced we'd walk into each one and feel... nothing. Maybe we'd missed our window or maybe the version of us who loved this city belonged to another lifetime.
Of course, there was also the tiny logistical detail that someone else had already signed the lease on our apartment, so one way or another we were getting the hell out. Nothing motivates a housing search quite like the prospect of becoming accidentally homeless.
At one point I sat down and ugly cried, which either meant I'd finally lost my damn mind or that I was finally letting myself admit I wanted something again. Possibly both things were true.
And then we walked into this apartment. The owner was still talking to another couple also looking at it when I looked at Ira, and we both knew.
Floor-through of a brownstone. Skylights. Windows everywhere. But most importantly was the stoop. A stoop means neighbors. It means drinking your coffee outside and waving at the people walking their dogs. It means someone calling hello from across the street and lingering because someone stopped to chat. It means a kind of everyday community that's hard to build when everyone lives in giant homes where few people sit on their front porch anymore.
I've missed that more than I realized.
So here we are, surrounded by boxes and wondering why we apparently own seventeen thousand books and what possessed me to buy a million adorable but tiny things. We've got weeks of unpacking ahead of us and an alarming number of "where are we going to put this?" conversations still to have.
But every morning the light pours through the skylights, and every afternoon there's a stoop waiting downstairs. There is coffee to drink on it, neighbors to meet and there is a city we get to fall in love with all over again. At the moment though, we haven’t much left our five block radius with the exception of going to work.
I'm sad in the way you're sad when you close a chapter that held such loss, because even the hardest times become part of you. In many ways, they calcify in us if we’re not careful. Montclair gave me a place to grieve, to heal, and eventually to become someone capable of wanting things again. And now, for the first time in a very long while, I find myself looking forward to something instead of simply surviving it.
That feeling alone is its own kind of new beginning. Wish us all the good fortune.
Every essay features a section called “One Fine Microjoy” – an experience, place, or thing that brings me joy, grace, and hope amidst life’s ups and downs. I hope it invites you to recognize and appreciate the delights that ground, inspire, and enrich our journey.
Bedroom wall had to be painted with or without pants.
This week’s microjoy: We spent last weekend at our old apartment spackling and painting the walls back to white, and right before I poured the paint, it occurred to me that I had not, in fact, worn painting clothes. In a bout of very quick thinking, I pulled off my pants and went to work. That kind of ingenuity is a microjoy if I've ever known one.
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With love, wisdom [and small mercies] from Brooklyn. xx
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