the liminal space of a new life

taking new year new me too literally

Last week, I started my new job, three weeks after I finished my old one. In between was moving, the holidays, and the baffling many details that come out of taking such a step: updating addresses, figuring out what I need to do to transfer my car, determining that my new insurance policies would require me to make a new online account to manage them even though they’re with the same company, finding a new pharmacy, realizing I no longer live next to a full grocery store. I didn’t know where the holds shelf was at my new public library branch was, and I hate driving here. I am overwhelmed by the newness of my life, even though I’ve lived here before. And then I started my job and everyone was lovely and I even started to like it by the end of the week, as a few puzzle pieces fell into place and I had a little more structure, but I came home on my first day, picked up the kitten, and burst into tears.

I’m excited and grateful for my new life. I’m also having a hard time. These things can co-exist.

“I want to go home,” I sniffled into my kitten’s back. She was very gracious, considering she really just wanted me to play with her instead of holding her, and she very patiently waited for me to put her down. She wasn’t sure what to do with my teary face. She’s six months old, we forgive her. And if I wasn’t here, I wouldn’t have her.

Home, of course, is now the apartment I was standing in while I cried. My partner has lived here for a year and a half; it’s the place I wrote about last year after my three-week holiday haunting of other people’s houses. Even though it’s been altered somewhat by me bringing my stuff here, and we’re in the process of trying to figure out what we’re keeping and what we’re not, I was already familiar with this place. I did not move to an entirely new dwelling. I was already technically a tenant here, as I’ve been on the lease since he signed it.

I can’t go home, at least to the place I was thinking about. I gave it up, by my choice. I looked for a new job, I submitted my resignation, I gave notice to terminate my lease. My landlords authorized the release of my rental deposit last week; I submitted my application to have it returned after they told me (in New Brunswick, rental deposits are held in trust by the rentalsman). I do not live there anymore. My mail is forwarded, my final power bill has been issued. My old job is filled by someone else (a friend, actually, which is so lovely - she also officially started on the same day I did and we were texting throughout the day). I made this choice, I have to live with it. It was a choice I wanted to make.

But after a day of new people and names and a building and campus I don’t know, the strain of First Impressions, keys I don’t know what they’re for, a job I don’t really know how to do yet - I needed to let out some of the emotion that had built throughout the day. I am not going back, I have a new life now. I’ve traded the easy comfort of my familiar old job for a new one, and right now I’m inside the deeply uncomfortable part of everything being new to me. I knew, intellectually, that I would be uncomfortable and tired. And so I am, but the knowing and even the memory of such a change hasn’t prepared me for the sharpness of my feelings right now.

I think of a younger version of me, equally confused and emotional, sitting by herself in an apartment that felt too big and didn’t have internet yet, wondering what the hell she was doing there. She wanted to go home too. I imagine telling her that someday, this room is the one she longs for, and that job she feels scared about is the one she misses in ways she can’t imagine. I imagine telling her that all the new people she’s meeting are the ones she waited all of one business day into her new job before sending an email to the shared inbox (the one that she will create) to tell everyone she misses them. I imagine telling her she will she will build roots in this community she didn’t know she had until it came time to yank them out.

And that she’ll sit on the floor of an apartment in the city she wants to go home to, and cry about how she wants to be in this northern rural place, looking at the same cool winter sunlight on the wooden floors of this future home.