BY THE NUMBERS
MY FAVORITES
THE HIGHLIGHT REEL
JANUARY
I’m sure I’m not alone in the feeling that January 2020 feels like a different life and in a lot of (non-COVID) ways for me, it was. On January 1st last year, I was biking and sunset-watching on Newport Beach with the California crew. The year started out living in California with Dylan and his family, continuing to search for the right job and a place to call home. The beginning of the year felt tentatively hopeful. I was hopeful for a fresh start, but was already feeling the weight of being unemployed, and was deep in a job search that wasn’t making any progress. I tried to fill my free time with running, I signed up for some online photography courses to keep the creative juices flowing, and Dylan and I took advantage of anything cheap or free to get out of the house. We went to local concerts, zoos, parks, and volunteered with the PCTA.
FEBRUARY
By the time February rolled around, I was feeling pretty discouraged with my job search. There were endless applications, a few interviews that didn’t work out, and a lot of free time and waiting in between. I filled my time with more running, yoga, and continued some photo classes. Dylan and I also started volunteering more with local conservancies to restore native plant habitats and clean up natural areas. A big highlight of the month was going to the Broad museum, which felt like walking through my modern art history textbooks and was a huge inspiration.
MARCH
March was when everything started to shift — both in my job search, and with COVID. Dylan had found a job at a state park in Washington, so I started looking for jobs in that area and happened to see a posting for a job that was exactly what I was looking for. I applied, and by early March I had a couple of interviews that gave me a good feeling that it just might work out. Dylan and I got plane tickets back to Minnesota to spend a couple of weeks with my family and to pack up anything I could fit into two checked bags, just in case we had to move to Washington. We were a little nervous flying out to Minnesota since there was some news about COVID possibly spreading in the US, but we brought hand sanitizer and figured we were safe. We had plans to spend time with the family and go on a MN-roadtrip to visit friends and grandparents. While we were visiting Fargo, I got the job offer! But within the same weekend, states started shutting down all over the country and we started to realize that this virus was a much bigger deal than anybody anticipated. We cancelled our roadtrip plans and flew back to California in the emptiest plane I’ve ever flown in. We spent the end of month “quarantining” and trying to figure out how to move to a new state and start new jobs in the scary, unsure first months of the pandemic.
APRIL
In April, we packed up everything we could fit into Dylan’s truck — basically our clothes, camping gear, a few dishes, and a futon — and started the drive up to Washington. We spent 3 days driving up the coast, avoiding people, sleeping in backyards with free range chickens, and using lots of sanitizer. It was a bittersweet move. It was hard leaving home in the middle of so much uncertainty, especially knowing that we’d have to go through the stress of finding a new home in the middle of a pandemic. We booked an Airbnb for the first week in Tacoma while we searched for apartments, and thankfully signed a lease the night before we had to check out. We moved in the next morning! And quickly realized that we’d need a lot more than just a futon to make this place a home. The rest of April we spent hunting down Craigslist furniture to fill out our apartment, and getting settled in a totally new place.
MAY
On May 1st, I started my new job as a graphic designer at Ecology! Which in pandemic times, meant I drove in to a completely empty office (the entire agency started working from home in March), met my boss in person for the first (and so far, only time), signed some paperwork, got my laptop, and drove home to do the rest of my orientation meetings via Skype. Dylan also started his new job at a state park around the same time — unfortunately, we had opposite schedules since he had to work during the weekend. So the rest of May was spent getting settled in our new jobs, and making the most of our evenings since that was the only free time we had together. We visited a lot of parks, got to know our new city, and planted a little garden outside of our apartment. I had sold my car back in MN before we moved, so Dylan’s truck was our only car… which meant my weekends were pretty confined to the radius around our apartment. I went on runs and long walks to make up for it.
JUNE
June was much of the same — we settled into our routines with our new jobs, and found ways to enjoy summer in spite of the pandemic. I started walking to a nearby farmers market every weekend while Dylan was at work, and dabbled in painting with watercolor. June was also the month where I shot a lot of film, and would go on long photo walks around our neighborhood. It was tough adjusting to a new place and feeling isolated with the pandemic, so these creative outlets and staying in touch with family helped a lot.
JULY
As routines and pandemics go, July was also much of the same. We found the only July 4th fireworks going on in Tacoma and found a socially-distanced place to watch them… from a patch of grass next to a Home Depot. We got new games to play in the evenings after work. I also got the news from work that we would be working from home until at least the end of the year, so I went all in on my “home office” and got a standing desk. I also had my first visitors from home — Laura and Kadi stopped by during their vacation and it was so nice to see some familiar faces after so long in a new place. We ended the month by finding $50 bikes on craigslist (Dylan got a much better bike for $50 than I did…)
AUGUST
In August, my family visited! My mom and dad drove the entire way out to Washington with a van full of the rest of my stuff that had been taking up space in their basement. It was SO nice having them out in WA, and Brent flew out to join us for the weekend too. We all crammed into our tiny apartment for the week (Brent slept under the table), and we celebrated my birthday camping and hiking out at Mt Rainier. Spending time with them was probably my favorite part of the year. The rest of August was spent working (I guess that’s how non-trail life is), and I decided to dive back into making cyanotypes for the first time since college. It was so energizing to re-learn that process, and I spent every sunny weekend printing as much as I could.
SEPTEMBER
The weather in September was beautiful and sunny, up until the smoke hit. Of course the weekend that the smoke hit was also the weekend that Linnea came to visit us for a long weekend. She had just moved back stateside after living in Australia, and it was fun to see her and catch up again for the first time in almost a year. We did as much exploring as we could in spite of the smoke, and made a day trip up to Seattle. September was the month for visitors, and Chelsea also came out for a little vacation in the PNW. We spent a couple of days up in the San Juan Islands, with moody weather and lots of bookstores and breweries to keep us company.
OCTOBER
October 1st was a day to celebrate! Dylan rang in his birthday by helping me buy a new car! I had been saving up all summer for a new car, and finally had found one that was exactly what I was looking for. He graciously spent his birthday driving me around the Seattle area getting all of the paperwork sorted. We ended the day by biking across the Tacoma Narrows bridge at sunset. October was a big month for bike adventures, and since Dylan’s seasonal parks job had ended, we got a lot more days off together to actually explore outside our Tacoma bubble. We spent a weekend driving around the Olympic Peninsula as our first “vacation” together since moving here. I also went into the office for the first time since starting back in May.
NOVEMBER
By November, fall was in full swing and the days were getting shorter. Dylan had started another job where he had the same schedule as me (finally!), so we continued our weekend adventures. We biked a bunch, visited the bonsai museum, found a bakery with amazing patisserie, and I enjoyed the fact that winter in Washington is much more bearable than winter in Minnesota. We had plans to go to California for Thanksgiving, but called them off because of the spike in COVID numbers. Instead, we did our own quiet Thanksgiving and got our very first Christmas tree.
DECEMBER
December in WA makes me very opportunistic. A lot of days are raining and dark, so any day with sunshine (or at least a break in the rain) means I spend as much time as possible outside. Dylan and I keep finding more parks to check out and go for walks or crossword dates. We decided we didn’t want to travel for the holidays this year, so we went all-in on the Christmas traditions. Lots of Christmas movies, gingerbread cookies, and Youtube-yule-logs to keep spirits bright in spite of missing family. Dylan started a new, non-seasonal job this month, and things are starting to feel more and more settled her in Tacoma. I miss home, especially in this season, but there are a lot of bright spots to be thankful for.
3 THINGS I'VE LEARNED
(in no particular order)
1 how to live in the tension between being thankful + content with how things are, and still wishing they could be different
This is a lesson that I’m sure a lot of people are learning in such an unpredictable and uprooting year. Although I can’t say I’ve learned how to hold contentment and discouragement in the same hand, I can say that I’m learning. I’m learning to recognize the need to acknowledge both. There have been times where I’ve been so thankful thinking of the way things fell into place this year — getting an amazing job right before the pandemic hit, finding a a new place to call home, finally feeling some stability after a long 6 months of unemployment and uncertainty. But of course, this year has thrown all these great things off-kilter and I can’t help but wonder how things might have been if COVID hadn’t been part of the picture. My mindset has swung back and forth between thankfulness to be where I’m at, and some grief knowing that things could have — should have — been better. It could have been easier to meet people and feel connected in our new home, I could have traveled to visit family over the holidays, starting a new job would have been easier in person instead of at-home… the list could go on. And I learned that if I stuff that list of “what ifs” down inside of me instead of grieving them, it just creates bitterness and fake contentment. Acknowledging and holding both sides is necessary for me to find a deeper, more real sense of contentment. It makes me think of Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem, Kindness… it says “Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.” Maybe contentment is a sort of kindness — kindness to ourselves and to our circumstances.
2 how to be more embodied
This was something I’ve been learning over the past few years, but it really came to the foreground in this year that has had so much change and stress. How do we live in our bodies? How do we live as our bodies? Hillary McBride talks a lot about this in her work as a therapist/psychologist, and she has talked about the fact that for every 1 signal our brain sends to our body, there are 9 signals that our bodies are sending to our brain. How wild is that? If there is so much that my body is telling me — about my feelings, my needs, and how I relate to the world around me — then why have I never listened to it? I’ve been on a mission to listen more to my body and make a conscious effort to fully live in it. One piece of that this year was my relationship to running. Running was just adding stress and impact to my body that apparently it wasn’t able to handle, and I had to take a step back and find ways to move more gently. I walked more, I did more yoga, I biked. I listened. I’ve also been learning to listen to the ways that the hard emotions of this year (the stress of a big transition, the pandemic loneliness, the cooped-up feelings of working alone at home) manifest themselves in my body. They come as headaches, as tight shoulders, as tiredness and fog… so often my body is reminding me that there are things building up inside of me that I am ignoring or don’t even know are there. Recognizing that my body is more than just a vessel to carry around my brain has been a big a-ha moment for me over the past year, and opened up opportunities to feel more whole and connected to myself.
3 belonging to a place takes time and patience
It’s been a long time since I started completely over in a new place. I think the last time this happened was moving to Duluth for college, which is very different from being an adult moving to a new city for a new job. How do you carve out a little corner of the world and feel connected to it? When does it start to feel like home? I knew that moving to a new place and finding some kind of kinship with it would be slow, but of course COVID has made a true sense of belonging feel so much further out of reach. But when I get discouraged, I think back to when we first drove into Tacoma 8 months ago and how foreign it all felt… but now it’s normal. I’ve been here long enough to slip into auto-pilot on the way to the grocery store, and to have a street in our neighborhood, and to know how different the winter sun looks from the summer sun. All small things, but they slowly add up to a feeling of connection. Belonging is built by small efforts over time. It’s built with patience. It’s built with kindness and contentment. And a lot of the time, I’m not patient. But it still builds anyway. I’m thankful for the ways that belonging has deepened between Dylan and I in such a weird season, and I’m hopeful for a new year to grow more connections and put down more roots.