Feature image via 10’000 Hours / Getty Images
BEGIN AGAIN is a series of A+ personal essays running in the first half of November 2023 where writers were asked to explore a transition, a move, grief, a breakup, repeating patterns or breaking patterns, cycles and rebirth, remaking yourself, or laying out plans for the future while standing in the ashes of something you thought was forever. And wow, how they responded. We hope you enjoy these vulnerable, sensitive, always deep but sometimes surprisingly funny works, and we’re grateful for your support that allows us to continue to publish new work from our community. These essays and paying queer and trans writers for their work are things that are made possible by A+ members like you. Queer media isn’t free to make, and we’re now and always grateful that you’re an A+ member.
-Nico
The foam mat lay about 1.5 inches off the stained green carpet. Actually, I’m not even sure it was green. The space between the closet and the couch — which held a life’s worth of clothes, books, appliances, toys, etc. — offered enough space for a sleeping bag and a mini nightstand made of a few books, stacked one on top of the other. Again, I can’t remember what they are, only that they were important because they held a glass of water and my phone each night. I tucked myself into my makeshift floor “bed.” It would be an outrageous stretch to call it a bed, but the intimacy I shared with the floor was truthfully very comforting. I checked my face in my phone camera, still puffy on the left side. Sure, it could’ve been a stroke, but it probably wasn’t. I put on some allergy cream my parents recommended I slather on for sleepy time. The girl from last night texted me, but I was too tired to respond.
I woke up to a toddler yelling. I checked my Google Calendar: a meeting with that woman about making that website. It’ll be about an hour drive, if not more. Then, a writing meetup. I just needed to be back on this side of town by 6:45pm for my evening teaching shift. I loaded my car up with my laptop, a spare change of clothes, and basic toiletries. I never know where the day could take me. My good friend from college suggested this collection of items as a “startup” kit to living in Los Angeles. That, plus a Costco card and the general mentality that it’s okay to neglect responsibilities if you’re offered a big break (I can still get behind this, actually). Just a few nights previous, I was watching The Proud Family on her couch, eating mini weenies and trying to drown out the sex noises coming from the other room. My suitcase hardly contained any business casual clothes, but I was going to make it work. My track record proved that I always have, even if I felt like a fragile shell at low tide.
“Hey how’s your face doing?” The text popped up on my laptop just as my hopeful future boss looked at the less-than-impressive website work I was doing. There I was, trying to convince some random lady I met at an LA entrepreneur meetup (I was not and do not plan on starting my own business) that I could fully remodel her website and use all my (nonexistent) SEO skills to give her blog a facelift whilst the girl who I made out with the evening prior was sending me — what looked like — morning after sex texts. All I could think about was her parents’ couch, lots of boobs, and the radio announcement I heard on my commute that said something like “For the first time ever, Disneyland is officially closed for COVID-19 precautions.” I didn’t believe in the seriousness of the pandemic until that moment. You can’t blame me for thinking people were just being dramatic and racist before our work and schools started shutting down. Up until this point, I was sleeping for about four hours, eating one meal a day, meeting random strangers at business, writing, food, whatever meetups — and trying to play my cards right with women I met on apps, so I didn’t have to make the two-hour drive with traffic.Yes, I was finding dates to sleep with so I could literally have a place to sleep. This frantic networking search operated as a full-time job up until COVID shut everything down. At that point, I had found a roommate through a queer housing Facebook group and decided to move into the city.
In tragic, but not surprising, news, I had to move out after a year. My roommate’s partner became physically and verbally abusive towards her so we were forced to temporarily live with my then partner until we could figure out the next safe step. Eventually, everyone was safe and I had somehow convinced my best friend to move from Seattle to live with me in an extremely small apartment another hour south of the city. We lived together for nearly two years. We are no longer friends. I think he blocked me on all socials.
Quiet nights of passive conversation and whispered phone calls led to my final move in LA: a nice(r) neighborhood where I could live with an older married couple I met through my very progressive liberal church. I also simultaneously started a full-time job in addition to school AND two other gigs I had. There just wasn’t any time to sort out my own feelings, let alone the feelings of someone with whom I had a long, complex, and strained relationship. So, I thought living with a childless couple in their 50s and their dog might make me a more stable person.
One random day in July three months later, I was crashing. Overwhelmed by the half-unpacked boxes around me, a TV nightstand held up by my plastic box of books, and malnourished from my resurgence of what seems to be a stress-induced eating disorder, I stared up at the ceiling, admitting to my emotional crash. All in the same moment, I realized: I was being sexually harassed by my 50+ year old male roommate, I couldn’t work a full-time job, hold three part time gigs, and be in school full time, I couldn’t pay my bills, and couldn’t actually build a life in a city that was never meant to nurture someone as Midwestern as myself.
The first thing I remember after this moment is being at my aunt’s house in Cleveland, ceaselessly sobbing to her and my eight-year-old cousin about how I needed to leave, how I needed to restart my life and get out of Los Angeles, but how I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t begin again, again (again). I had already done it too many times. I’m stuck, I’m drained, I’m tired, I’m broke, and where do I go with my life if I have nowhere to go? So, in a matter of two weeks I flew back to Los Angeles, packed up some of my belongings, gave most of them away, left my whole fish tank with live fish inside them at the house, and made a four day cross country road trip over Labor Day, so that my full-time California job wouldn’t know I now live in a completely different state.
Car stuffed to the brim; I left while the male roommate was away at work. The other roommate waved nervously from the front yard, clearly stressed, with body language that suggested she was not-so-secretly angry with me. I didn’t care. I drove so fast away from her, that house, that man, that job, those lost friends, those queer dance parties, that supportive church, the community I created, without a single sound. Notifying only a few people a few nights prior, I silently headed towards Tucson, AZ: the first night’s stop across the country and a place I had frantically moved to just four years prior for a volunteer year working with unhoused teenagers. I wondered what they were up to, now that they were adults. Did he ever get his dream job as a tattoo artist? Did she graduate high school? Did he start saving up to take that trip to China, he always told me about every morning when I got to work?
With three weeks until graduation, I made the abrupt decision not to go to England for graduate school and, instead, do this volunteer year. Caught between my love for academia and my “calling” to work for social justice, I was torn between how to spend the most important year of my whole entire life, the year after I graduated from college. As I drove to Ozona, TX I thought about this feeling of being “called” to something. This was language I picked up from my college education and short stint of wanting to be a nun. For something to be real and true for me, I had to feel like a divine presence was guiding me in that direction. While this divine being has changed over the years, the behavior still rings true. If I want to be somewhere new, then I must be called to that something new. Some greater authority than me must give me a sign. I cannot be trusted.
Maybe the sign was that the girl I had a crush on was also doing this year of service, or maybe the sign was feeling an immense amount of guilt about the mere privilege I had to be able to just move to England. I followed the “signs” (feelings) and made the sudden switch. Moving to Los Angeles was guided by these “signs” (my friend saying, “maybe you should stay”), deciding to move to England after this year of service came with “signs” (scribbled ideas of a thesis in my notebook), and even moving to my current location, Orlando, was led by “signs” (telling myself “you’re broke and unwell”). I passed the dusty, sun-drenched desert clay for hours as I watched the left side of my arm get sunburnt through the window and thought about all the signs that justified me being in that car, passing through border security, turning off my AC in fear that my car would break down in the heat, friendships I’d given up on, the community I built from scratch that I simply left behind (in Arizona, in England, in Los Angeles).
When I arrived in Ozona around 11pm the feeling of being called quickly morphed into temporary regret. I texted my best friend “This seems like the kind of place I would get hate-crimed in.” I parked under the one and only light in the hotel parking lot and decided not to get food despite my growling stomach. The only place that was open had large, white, drunk men gathered outside the doors. Maybe I followed the signs wrong. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to be here. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to even move. When I woke up the next morning I was relieved to see my car not broken into and pretty much forgot about the existential crisis I endured the night before.
The stint to Louisiana was saturated in condensation and rich soil, views I used to ride by every morning on the way to elementary school. The small rain clouds passing over me every hour or so brought a coziness to the home I now called my Honda Civic. I missed rain, which felt like an ironic thought because just a few years previous the non-stop rain of Northern England used to make me feel like I was suffocating in my own despair.
Before I had a more legitimate, authoritative entity labeling me as mentally ill, I looked back on my move to England as a time where my spirit guides misled me (or maybe intentionally led me) to a place destined to ruin me. I spent the better part of a year making exactly two friends and putting every part of my being into a relationship with a woman who would eventually cost me thousands of dollars in therapy. The June before I was slated to finish my thesis, a friend came to visit me in England and noticed I hadn’t been sleeping or eating for days. She noted how I couldn’t make it through even one hour without crying. Just the week prior my girlfriend had convinced me to move out of a house with three seemingly “normal” roommates into the closet of a suspiciously strange old woman and her teenage son who was only sometimes there and never actually acknowledged me. I still have the photo my visiting friend took of me the day I realized (she told me) things were bad. I had clearly been crying for hours and I was about to take a bite into one of my favorite vegan donuts. I hadn’t eaten anything all day and I’m pretty sure I didn’t even finish the donut. I was becoming a skeleton, and my friend encouraged me to call my family and practically beg for help (the family I had just come out to before leaving for England who wouldn’t speak to me). It was the one and only time I remember crying to my dad. He clearly listened because he helped me fly back to Ohio. I looked in the rearview at the boxes and trash bags in my car. I had to get rid of so much to do this, even more so than when I abruptly left England. When I left England, I had to pay rent to that woman for a few months to hold my stuff until I could eventually come back to get it, retraumatize myself, and actually say goodbye to the two friends I had. If I was still in possession of all this stuff (a Himalayan salt lamp, a food processor, a super cute European wardrobe, etc.) maybe I could’ve saved my money instead of buying all of these things all over again in every city. But I didn’t have my collection then, I don’t have it now, and I’m still mourning the three years worth of crafting materials I had to give away that I was saving for a hopeful craft room in a hopeful house I would’ve bought from a hopeful magic income I was going to get.
The last leg from Louisiana to Orlando was a Hail Mary lap on my way to my ideation of the promised land. It was the place I was going to get my shit together, the place I was going to get my craft room. The main feeling was shame. Instead of feeling “the call” (because honestly who is getting “called” to live in Florida?) it was a logical decision based on facts my aunt literally wrote on a white board for me to see. I was giving in to go live with my sister, someone who has seemingly had her shit together her whole life. She was going to help me and I hated myself for it. The pull to live here was more the instructional guide my aunt created and friends endorsed to help stabilize me, my emotions, my health, my finances, and my living situation. I was the most uneasy about it because there was no divine presence. It simply felt like I had channeled my Virgo moon and rising to say “cut the shit and let the math do it’s mathing.”
It was my Aquarius side that brought commitment issues. All of my relationships and situationships had only ever last a few months. I can’t stay at a job for longer than ten months. I’ll promise you I’m coming to your birthday party and then give some grandiose excuse as to why I’m suddenly in crisis and can’t come. I’ll even purchase $400 Yosemite festival tickets a year in a half in advance with friends I no longer have because I genuinely believe I can somehow make it happen. Part of this I write off as being a flighty Aquarius. Maybe my constant movement is my way of chasing life’s greatest adventures (many fringe social media acquaintances would certainly agree). Some of it has to do with my competing values. A lot of it has to do with the chemical imbalances in my brain that require me to be on a high dosage of mood stabilizers. But most of it is a lack of trust in myself. Here I am, connecting the dots with you, painting the picture of my addiction to starting over.
Starting over comes with loss, grief, transition, and a new language or pattern to learn about what’s to come. Some of us become empowered by our choices to start over. Sure, I had the choice to not move to LA and stay home with my parents. I had the choice to stay in LA and not move to Orlando. I had the choice to stay in a toxic relationship and live in England. Without the high dose of mood stabilizers I’m currently on, none of these moves were choices. Nothing in my brain chemistry was stable enough to recognize wiser, less catastrophic options. I felt trapped in my own lack of choices and toxic circumstances. Beginning again has offered me new lives on ten different timelines where each version of me still somehow ends up flying off into a new life where the old one burns down. I keep running to new places to restart, only to be struck by the cycle and have to flee from the consequences of my own doing. It’s easier to blame it on my brain than to admit the common thread is a deep mistrust of my own authority. All of these moves ended in disaster, right? I can’t trust myself to make the next decisions, so who is there to turn to now that every decision I’ve ever made is objectively wrong?
Pulling into my sister’s apartment complex should’ve brought a sigh of relief, but I was still on edge because of the lack of divine signs. I wanted to validate myself about being there at that moment in Orlando, Florida with her. However, the next morning she spent the whole day carrying the contents of my stuff car up four flights of stairs until we were both out of breath. Two of my aunts called to check up on me to make sure I was settled. My cousin sent me voice messages assuring me I did the right thing. My parents seemed relieved I was finally safe with a family member.
I lay on the blow-up air mattress the rest of the week thinking about all the things I’ve run away from and realized almost all of them had to do with some sort of relationship imploding. The “call,” or sense of fulfilling my own destiny, drew me towards some abrupt moves while the feeling of a failed relationship triggered my avoidant attachment style and flight response. I’ve always known what I’ve been running away from, but it felt like it was with the understanding that I was following some sort of “sign” from the gods as a valid reason to move towards something else. It never occurred to me that I’ve been running towards the feeling of family the entire time. In the case of Orlando, I was literally running towards family. While I live with my sister, a big part of the move was how much easier it would be to travel home to Ohio to visit my dying grandparents. The move to Los Angeles was to find the chosen queer family I’ve been looking for, only to discover on my own hero’s journey that (some parts) of my given family are the queer affirming people I’ve been looking for the whole time. The move to England was my more delusional choice to find an English woman to marry and settle down with in a little cottage in the hills, a dream I kinda fulfilled for a few months. The move to Arizona was to live in an intentional community (their phrase for commune) dedicated to simply living. Each time I fell into the pit of despair a new move would inevitably drag me into, I reached for a family member (aunt, other aunt, uncle, cousin, other cousin, papa, other grandma) who eventually got me back on track. The invisible string tying my running shoes together is the pull towards family, which early 20s Em would’ve scoffed at. For me, this has looked like running towards a few select extended family members and a very specific few friends I’ve grown to trust over many years. This past year in Orlando has reminded me to hold tightly to these very sacred relationships because they’re the relationships that reinforce my decisions to trust myself.
While I certainly don’t completely trust myself in major decisions based on the evidence in, I don’t know, this entire essay, these people have slowly taught me to make choices in a space where I’m not being harassed or feeling unsafe or actively going through a housing crisis. They’ve nurtured me towards a more solid version of myself. Right now, I feel like I can make choices that will make me a better person. I can recognize the crazy cycle of mood instability that often escalates an impulsive decision that could’ve been avoided entirely. I can say “no” to things that seem far out. Most importantly, I can live with the knowledge that spontaneous moves and highs and lows will come again, but maybe moving forward I’ll have the learned wisdom that I can trust myself.
There’s this tattoo I’ve been wanting for years. It’s the Burmese script of our family name, “Win.” A few of my relatives have it in various places on their arms. Every holiday that I travel home to Ohio, I ensure my cousins I will get it, and every holiday I back out. Not because of the pain. Not because of the price. Not even necessarily because I’ve never gotten a tattoo before. What if this is impulsive and I realize I made a huge mistake? The idea of this tattoo hangs with the weight of trusting myself, knowing that, no, even if I don’t get it, or I make drastic mistakes, or I trust myself and regret it, these select family members are always there instilling trust in me. They’re there telling me I’m more than my medication, labels, and altered brain chemicals. They’ve always reflected a trust in myself I can’t always see. While I can’t fully trust myself just yet, I can trust the one thing that has never steered me wrong: family.
Thank you for sharing. As a fellow bipolar queer, an opportunity to feel seen is everything :)
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