Change

It's been five weeks to the day since we moved out to Ann Arbor, and I thought it might be appropriate to finally sit down and hash out a post on the disruption, chaos, and eventual resettling this move has brought into our lives.  Now that I actually sit down to do it, I find myself so full of conflicting emotions and lost energy that I'm not really sure what to say.
 
It's been an up-and-down ride.  No more than a week ago, Travis and I were fighting tooth-and-nail over his inability to assume responsibility for his social skills and professional conduct.  I was literally moments away from being ready to put him on a plane and ship him home to Mom and Dad.  Now, six days later, he has an appointment with a psychologist, a part-time job, and the possibility of full-time work looming on the horizon.  Things seem temporarily stable.  The pendulum hurtles through the valley and swings back up.

After the next crest, though, who knows where we might be?

Things are different here.  I don't just mean that they are physically different, although they certainly are--the apartment is larger, the buses run on time, the people are friendlier (when they aren't on the road), the weather is warmer and less predictable.  What I feel most deeply, though, isn't a surface adjustment--I feel different on an elemental level, fundamentally changed, perhaps forever, even within this short time.

It didn't begin when we moved.  It might've started when I got the e-mail from the NSF, telling me I had won the fellowship that 8,000 other people had yearned for, but never received.  It might have started in March, when I got those first e-mails from Ann Arbor and Chicago, letting me know that I would have somewhere to go in the fall.  Somewhere in the spring, a vista opening up onto a world I'd seen a thousand times, but only through plate-glass:  tasting the air for the first time, smelling the grass and water and renewal thick at the back of my throat, ready to be born and to stand and to be for the first time in a world I thought myself unworthy of.

Things are different now, and I think the difference has everything to do with a new awareness of myself as "worthy"--a sense of myself as critical, as important, as someone who "matters," as ENOUGH.  Adequate.  Sufficient.  Perhaps--delightfully, dizzyingly, terrifyingly--much more.
I've felt this way before, but the QUALITY of this feeling--perhaps just my perception of it--has changed.  I remember the electric crackle that coursed through me in my senior year of high school, not so very different from the sensation that floods me now:  awake, alert, conscious, present, ready, alive.  I remember how my excitement and confidence back then seemed to startle me, to take me aback:  a loud, effervescent, glittering self-awareness, like a string of firecrackers bursting against tarmac.  Everything seemed so rapid-fire, always spiraling up and up and up with sparks exploding all around my shoulders, sometimes the sharp ecstatic bite of fire against bare skin.  But most of all, I remember the terrible aftermath of it:  smoke coiling up inside my chest, straining to see, moments of blindness from the brightness or the smoke or the darkness that followed after, the sky darker for the spark's absence, the pavement stained and charred from the explosion, everything around me filled with the weight of the denouement, the sense of darkness and suffocation and loss.

Everything is different, now.  What I feel today is not the firecracker enthusiasm of adolescence, but something else entirely--something softer, stiller, but no less powerful, like a river swelling against the channel that restrains it.  I feel fluid, like my thoughts and feelings are as rapid as they've always been, but gentler, flowing, consistent.  There are sparks reflected on my surface, the same glitter that has always shimmered just beyond the edges of my consciousness--but it is muted, now.  It is just as visible, but it makes no sound, intangible and floating--and because it does not burst, it does not disappear.  What is even more important is the river, the surface that bears the sparks and helps them to survive--deep, strong, coursing, profound, sometimes overwhelming, and although it is "stable" in the sense that it is structured--not random, now, no longer scattered, but bounded by the edges of the riverbank.  Tt is still FLUID, still changing, ever-mutable, finally in keeping with the rest of me, while consistent enough that I can trust it not to explode or spin away.

I wake up excited to get out of bed, excited to confront another morning.  I feel like all the gratitude, the appreciation, all of the wonder inside of me cannot possibly be made present enough--that no one will ever know how lucky I am, how miraculous it seems that I could ever be considered worthy of this chance.  I am strong.  I am capable.  For the first time ever, I trust my body.  I trust myself.  I look in the mirror, and am satisfied with the shape of my shoulders, content with the way my shirt falls flat against my chest.  I am prepared, expectant, exultant in this process of "becoming."  My binder braces my shoulders against the oncoming storm, and I am ready.

All I can do is hope that, come wintertime, the river doesn't freeze.