A Big, Bold Yes!

When I was 16 years old, I went to Vermont for the first time on a bus out of Port Authority, up into the mountains to be with a collection of young writers at Breadloaf. It was the first time I saw mountains, streams tumbling down the side of the road, expanses of rolling hills and fields. I fell madly, deeply in love with a place.

After the first year of the pandemic had come and gone, a lot had shifted and resettled in our family. We were healthy and deeply settled in our home, like so many. From the outside, I believe it looked like everything was fine, and in many ways things were fine. But also, things weren’t fine. Within us we were all dealing with our own stuff, having stared it down day after day through this stressful year.

As Summer 2021 began, I was a year sober and as a family we had just come through a pretty intense mental-health crisis. So much in our lives felt raw and out of our control and too much. From a place of our privilege (because it is not lost on me how fortunate we are to have options), Mike and I decided we wanted to hit the pause button. The rat-race, the giant house and yard, and all our “stuff” was suffocating us. Our family felt fragile and far-away even though we were living on top of each other day in and day out.

We woke up one morning after and very hard night and asked ourselves, “If we could go anywhere, where would we go? Where would we be happiest?” We chose Vermont.

From that morning, it took us less than two months to buy in Vermont, sell in Massachusetts, and move our family and pets up north. That morning was my first big, bold yes. And I continued to say yes and make things happen so we could land safely in a new life more aligned to what we needed next.

The big, bold yes is a scary thing. It takes a level of trust in the unknown that I had never experienced before. And yet, because it was truly the right choice for us, it often just flowed. We are aware that moving locations doesn’t alleviate challenges. We are not so naive as to think we can outrun any of our previous problems or issues. In fact, this move, this big, bold yes was a committed YES to facing our life head-on.

Everything is still so new to us, yet familiar because this place has always been a second home, a love affair. And while some days things flow with true meaning and connection to our larger purpose, we have plenty of days where I often end them asking myself, “WTF?”

But that’s okay. It’s okay to carry both the joy and the pain and feel both at the same time. For so much of my life it felt confusing to feel both; it felt wrong. But not anymore. My big, bold yes was a yes to move to where I felt happiest. It was a yes to heal my family and care for them in a better, more connected way. It was a yes to downsize and simplify. It was also a yes to slow down and sit in discomfort, sadness, and pain. It is a yes to feel all your feelings deeply, honestly, and embrace them. All of them. And on and on. xoxo