You Can Always Go Back

Spending extended time away from the place you call home

This comes to you on a Thursday afternoon because if I don’t send it out, I might never get it out! Enjoy a little surprise thought in your inbox. Give it a like. Interact with me. I’m not on IG or FB, and I need a dopamine hit!!!

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NYC is not a place I imagined would feel familiar. Growing up, all of us kids talked about where we would go and live some day. How we’d get out of Madison and really be somewhere else. Can you imagine how many of us actually did that? How many of us treated Madison like a small town to get out of? It turns out this place has too much of what a person might generally need (despite an unimaginably vile expensive housing market). So why leave?

Man, do I want to. Luckily I can: for the cost of a direct Delta Airlines ticket varying from $330-$600 (HOW), I can fly to one of my best childhood friend’s home in Brooklyn and spend time in a place that is not where I live.

My most recent trip, which happened only 6 months after my last one, was to support my friend in watching her dog while she got a much needed vacation. Pretty great deal, right? A free place to stay to watch a dog. It’s really ideal.

The dog who subjected me to hours and hours of hugs, stanky kisses, and refusing to walk in the direction I wanted to walk in.

The trip was cut short due to a few people having health events, which meant I headed back to Wisconsin a few days early, but this was my longest trip so far. Thirteen days in NYC. I am sure there are people who go live somewhere else for much longer and then come home, but I thought it would be meaningful to share some takeaways from this new life venture.

1. New York is exactly as expensive as everyone is expressing. I went to dinner with my cousins-in-law and it was $23 for three “street tacos” with no sides and they didn’t even double the corn tortillas. A catastrophe and an insult to Latine/x’s everywhere. Never again.

2. $2.90 one way on the train or bus and you better hope there’s a transfer. Imagine my grievances when Google Maps directed me to take the J to the G and I had to get off and pay AGAIN to go back into the G? This is probably normal, probably necessary, but I just did not think about those little transportation things before I got there.

3. There’s some joy in crossing lower Manhattan from West to East and realizing you know exactly where you are.

4. Mentally prepare to walk 25 minutes in any direction, and for that walk to include at least 2-4 flights of stairs up or down.

5. Match the vibe. Don’t be a bad walker. Some of us can’t walk fast, but we can stay in our lane at least and that helps keep the flow going.

6. You will start to feel like you live in a place if you stay there long enough/visit it enough, which means you might spend 3 days in a row in the house watching TV and that’s okay. I work virtually, so some days I just did not want to fuss with a long walk to catch a train to go 30 minutes out and then do that back.

7. The noises start to feel normal after about 5 days. Cats gnawing at each other in the night? Rooster calling in the morning? People laughing on the back patio? Sirens blaring? Pops/booms? Small neighbor dog barking incessantly? The tapping of rain on the window? The wind pushing through the trees in the backyard? The hum of engines above and below? All fine after a few days.

8. The food, the bookstores, the fashion! All supreme over where I live. The music options? Superb. I live in a “College Town” where University students all look copy-paste from the next one. To see someone standing out in their clothing expression is so surprising here. Conformity is Madison’s best kept secret, as a community we swear we’re on the edge of political progress and radical acceptance of all, but we’re not! What I love about walking round NYC is how different everyone looks. Unless you’re a West Village girly (blessed that this came out at the start of my trip). That person is a copy paste of a UW-Madison student who managed to get out of Madison on daddy’s dime.

9. It might feel scary to go somewhere that’s bigger than where you’re from, but your nervous system will acclimate. Your senses will tune in. You’ll get the hang of it. Getting it wrong is the best way to get it right next time.

10. Coming home might be hard. You might go back into your same old slump. I know I did. The moment I got home the noise from our pets, the jets that fly over our home, and the looming housekeeping sent me into overwhelm. The thing is, home is hard lately for me. It’s hard to work there, hard to hang out there, hard to feel harmonious with my family, and there’s just a lot we’ve been holding on to. Going away helped me miss home, but it didn’t solve what is going on there. I am hopeful I can hold on to that feeling of missing long enough to keep participating in improving my home life the best I can.

In September I’ll be going for four weeks while my friend attends a residency. This will be my longest trip to date and I am quite nervous! But the more time I spend away from Madison, the more I realize the world has more to offer me.

I usually top off one of these reflections with spiritual or material goods. That doesn’t feel accessible right now. I am continuously drained. I don’t want to return each week, or even every other, without some note of progress on how I feel about the challenge’s my body and my life is offering me. I want to be a beacon of hope for change, as I think I can be in many ways, but often end up regressing when activated.

I know we are all struggling immensely in different ways. Some of us do a good job at concealing that, especially when presenting ourselves online. I want what I write here to be both a journalistic marker for myself and a portal for you, a reader, to learn something about yourself. Hopefully I’ll continue to carve out a comfortable space to explore all of what is going on in a way that works for us both.