Moving Out & Moving On

I moved out of my house in Portland, OR during November. This was a huge deal for me, earlier in the pandemic I’d taken advantage of low interest rates and essentially, after saving for over a decade and a half bought the most affordable property I could find. I love how quaint the wood panel walls are, a perfect representation of the musky, damp 70’s energy that lingers in Portland, whispers from a simpler, and quite frankly, far cooler time. Oh I also LOVE my girlfriend-not-girlfriend, we’re no longer in a traditional partnership, but we see each other through mostly every major life experience and transition and. Behold, I give you - muscle man, the femme-baby edition.

Sophie and I had kept each other company through a pretty elongated rut we’d both fallen in to in Portland, she was the first one to move, and whilst it came as a shock and was pretty sad at the time, we both knew it needed to happen. She got into a masters program at a fancy college in Chicago and jetted off. I flew out there a month or so later to help get her apartment set up.

Something I love so much about Chicago is the accessibility of different cuisines - It’s familiar to me having grown up in Melbourne which was the immigrant capital of Australia. My parents were both immigrants, and whilst they weren’t entirely sure how to hold space emotionally, they very much knew how to love my brother and I through food and the gifting of experiences. Many a rainy, damp Melbourne Sunday afternoon we’d set out to a different part of the city sampling some of the cusines from any one of the thousands of hole-in-the-wall, immigrant run restaurants that Melbourne had to offer.

These excursions were a vehicle of nourishing, taking care of and sharing space and time for me and my family, an opportunity for my parents to teach us not only from what they’d come from, but from what the world had to offer beyond the confines of the space we were born. I also think there was a familiarity for them to be in those spaces - there was an ease and a comfort I witness in them at those time, they expanded, and grew taller, knowing how to navigate and occupy those spaces in a very different way to how I’d witness them take up space in more traditionally “Australian” environments.

Because of this, there’s a sense of love, safety and familiarity I experience in these spaces. This photo is of a small Lebanese grocery store near Sophie’s new digs in Chicago, the colors, and epically extensive range of deserts speaks a language of love inherited ancestrally, passed tenderly from grandmother to grandmother—a language often conveyed through acts of service and shared experiences, transcending language and intellect.

Onward from Chicago it was on to the Yucca Valley in California. Some friends had invited me to stay along with another couple for the entire month of November, dyke commune styles. Admittedly at first I was pretty hesitant, I didn’t know how I was going to handle living with 5 people (and 5 animals!), I am after all an insane introvert - and my special interest is self isolating. I had also received some very sad news only a week before I landed in the desert. It was a whirlwind of emotions, and much to my surprise it ended up being incredibly healing to be amongst community whilst I was grieving.

It had been a long time since I lived with people, and the experience was so much different to how it was share housing in my early twenties. To live with mature adults (whom are all deep therapy nerds), who share your values and genuinely care for, and want to spend time one another and the shared space was an incredibly healing experience.

Every morning, we’d start the day with a hot-ass cup of chai, chitty-chatting on the back porch while gazing out at the prickly cacti scattered across endless rolling high-desert hills. We’d live, laugh, lesbian and keep things light. As evening fell, we’d gather around vintage black wooden dining table for a group-cooked meal, tiny doggos weaving underfoot, bouncing from dyke to dyke eagerly hoping for a stray bite of food to “fall” from someone’s plate. Admittedly I fed my favorite (Mac) much more than I should have and probably un-did several years worth of dog-training Jo had diligently put in.

The living room, adorned with pottery and lit by the soft glow of early evening sun, offered sweeping 360-degree views of the desert. Over mostly vegan dinners (because, GAY), we’d dive into conversations about tacky queer culture, glory days and overseas adventures. Finally, we’d settle into the boat-sized sectional couch—draped in serapes for a movie and/or old-man style nap-before-bed whilst experiencing the sun slowly disappear in the background.

I can only describe the experience as school camp meets early-retirement - and what better placement for that energy than mid-life. We effectively coined ourselves “chai pigs”, decided we’d like to be each others chosen family witnessing each other through this next episode of life.

There was a time in my life when I went six whole years without experiencing winter, migrating seasonally between Australia and the USA. Before my Saturn return seized my psyche with its unrelenting grip, endless summers were literally my personal brand. Growing up in a city with perpetually miserable weather, enduring it felt both normal and inevitable. The notion of living somewhere sunny and warm year-round seemed naïve, even indulgent. “I can’t be happy all the time,” my inner father’s archetypal voice would insist, echoing episodically from the deep, hollow recesses that CPTSD had carved into my mind. They’d ring over and over like a relentless morning church bell in the distances resembling a dream, but in-fact being very much a reality.

When I eventually moved to the States, I resigned myself to Portland’s seven-month winters, believing that enduring them was just part of being an adult. Once again, in my endless quest for acceptance and the unattainable semblance of parental love, I tried to force myself into a box I was never meant to fit into—rather than simply turning around, walking out the front fucking door. That’s was some Platos cave bullshit right there.

Then, in November, an unexpected wave of liberation came to rescule me. I’d been hesitant about moving to LA, afraid of having to start over without a community. I knew how hard it could be to break into the city, what with all the flakes and ladder climbers and all and it didn’t feel like a responsible choice—especially with my mental health and tendency to self-isolate.

But things had shifted. Thanks to Team Chai Pig and a gentle nudge from grief itself, a sense of YOLO washed over me. Suddenly, moving to LA felt like not only the right, but only decision! With my house already rented out and nothing holding me back, there was no reason to stay, and so on the spot my inner narrator exclaimed, “and so it shall be!” and I immediately started working out logistics for my lifes second great migration.

Since then, the whole “adult-be-normal-settle-down” mindset has completely vanished from my psyche, it wasn’t really mine to begin wit, in fact, I think for the last ten years I’d been carrying it for someone else…

With my load a shit-tonne lighter In its place, something entirely different has begin to emerge—a kind of alchemist’s pilgrimage vibe, guided purely by intuition has me feeling like fluidly moving from place to place with no great need to control how things are going to look. For now it’s LA, until of course something shakes me out and moves me on.

To not know what the next year (let alone 5 holds) has me feeling lighter, happier, and more myself than I have since I was 19.

From me to me, welcome home!

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