Hi there,

It’s me, Lyn.

I’m still here. This is me, candidly catching up with you. Because really WTF.

The last few years of my life have truly been an unparalleled experience in learning to adapt.

In September, a hurricane blew my life over. Literally. And I feel like I haven’t been able to find solid footing again in my world since then. It might seem kind of dramatic, but I think I’m still processing the immense grief and trauma that living through that experience and all of the drastic, rapid change it caused in my life since then.

In January, I moved to Vermont to be with two partners that I was dating. Four days after I arrived in the wintery woods, my ex-girlfriend, Bug, broke up with my boyfriend, Goose, whom she had also been dating. That disintegrated our polyamorous triad into me suddenly dating or “hinging” between exes. For a valiant three months, I tried to make both relationships work, living with Bug even though she pretty much immediately gave up on her relationship with me at the same time as her break up.

In April, I decided I simply couldn’t tolerate it anymore. That I was tired of being told her pain was somehow more valid than any emotions I was feeling over the massive changes careening through my life, some of which I had made for her. It was utterly heartbreaking, and I left the relationship feeling so shitty about myself, my mental health, and my value as a partner. I felt and honestly still feel sometimes like she made me somehow utterly worthless. In hindsight, it felt like she only dated me to earn more time with Goose and to look cool to him that she was dating me too. That made me feel used, and then promptly discarded once my value to her “ran out.”

In May, I finally moved into my own apartment after floating for a few weeks as I tried to find work and a space I could afford on my own. It was my first place living alone since Manhattan, and that was scary and exciting all at the same time. I moved in while some major renovations were happening, and then went down to Asheville to rescue my things from the storage unit they were placed in post-hurricane. I returned to my tiny upstate New York town (just a few minutes over the Vermont border) with my things ready to make my new home and settle into my new life.

And then in June, Goose’s other long term partner broke up with him after multiple years together. It was surprising and unsurprising, devastating and necessary all at the same time. I watched a human I love more than anything in the world have his heart crushed, and I did my best to pivot with him. Because suddenly life no longer looked like what we thought it would be. Suddenly, I wasn’t living in my new apartment alone—my partner was living with me, a possibility I never once had thought would be possible given our polycule’s operating dynamics. Suddenly, our polycule wasn’t multiple deep long term relationships co-existing and attempting to find harmony—our polycule was down to one major relationship: Goose’s and mine. Suddenly, we were no longer tied to the rural area of Vermont we’d been sure we were going to be staying in long term for his other partner—we can go anywhere and start a new chapter somewhere else entirely… Even though I just finally moved my whole life up here. Everything I thought had been solid, no longer was, and everything I had planned on my new life in VT/upstate NY being just wasn’t going to be.

All the massive change has undoubtedly been for the best. I’m trying to take a deep breath as everything settles. I’ve spent the last few weeks reevaluating what I even what my life to be and look like with Goose now that some many doorways have opened up for us, our lives, our practice of polyamory, and our futures. I’ve had to relearn how to share a space that feels entirely my own with a partner. I’ve had to reexamine coping skills I have for anxiety and depression that were built out for me living on my own or being apart from my romantic partner. I’ve had to really confront my own humanness in the mirror as I’ve slowly uncovered boundaries, expectations, emotions, and just plain stubbornness in the wake of great change.

Some of you know that I really love pulling tarot cards for my daily journaling sessions. I recently pulled the Hanged Man and this morning the Moon reversed. Both seem to be loud reminder that the only way forward in life is to let go, to release my fears, dredge up my secrets, and give way to the vast tide of change that has come to pass.

If you’re someone familiar with or who vibes with astrology and the stars, I’ve been in the first short blip of my Saturn’s Return this summer. It started the day I moved into my new apartment, and will run into September. I get a short break and then dive back into it next February. I had been prepared that it was likely to be a time of big change on a cosmic level, and it has not held back. I’m sinking into a layer of self discovery that is challenging me like never before.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how to create the life I want to live for myself. And I’ve got to be honest, right now with the way things are economically, politically, and even culturally… It feels really daunting and impossible to get even near the life I thought I might want. And when I’m asking myself questions about where I want to live, what I want to do, and how I should go about getting after my big dreams, I’m truthfully just really tired. I’ve had times like this before and I know that it will pass as the next phase of life begins, but right now, I am feeling it. That deep and heavy tiredness that comes from surviving chaos.

I don’t mean to complain, because I know that I’m really lucky to be in a loving relationship and stable enough to keep a roof over my head and food on our table. I know that not everyone is as blessed or fortunate as I am, and I know I’m privileged in the access I have to things in this life. But being alive is hard sometimes, and even though I feel kind of embarrassed to say that out loud, I’m hoping that maybe one of you readers needs someone else to say it for you to feel less alone in it. The news is disheartening, career opportunities feel like they’re disappearing overnight, and everyone seems to losing their minds.

I usually try to find some way to be uplifting at the end of my updates like this. Some bright spot or lesson learned with hope for what’s next. I’ve got to be truthful with you though that right now, this summer, I’ve just been having to hang on. Life feels a bit out of control. And I don’t really have a shiny piece of advice to make either of us feel better. Perhaps you, dear reader, have a silver lining to share this time around. We both know that this season like all the other before it will pass and that something else new and beautiful will come in the season after it. I’ll keep trying to be gentle with myself until I can get there. Picking berries in the Vermont sun, spending days off at the nearby watering hole, and taking naps with sweet Sadie cat when my afternoons allow.

I hope you’re well wherever this summer finds you.

xoxo, Lyn

Hi there,

It’s me, Lyn.

It’s been a bit longer than I intended to leave you hanging. I had other things that I was going to write about and post here. Like, really, I had an entire post planned about my cute weekend trip to Manhattan to visit my grad school bestie. I had writing updates planned. I had meditations on spring in Vermont. I had all kinds of ideas for what I was going to say in this space in April. (And hey, maybe I’ll still post some of them later.)

But… well…

Sometimes shit falls apart.

I broke up with Bug.

And that was incredibly difficult since I had been living with her. Once I told her, my life sort of fell into a deep plunge of frantic apartment hunting and new job searches, while finding every new coffee shop in the area to set up camp in for a day. I’m always a girl with a plan. I took a big risk when I made my move to Vermont in January, moving without much of a plan beyond I was going to test it out. Truthfully, Bug encouraged me to take time to focus on writing, overpromising a bit on the support I’d have here, and I chose to believe her. So I didn’t set myself up in a new living situation the way I normally would have when moving somewhere new. And, of course, now in ending of that relationship, I’m reaping the consequences of having not planned. So I’ve been doing my very best to scrape a plan together.

I’m lucky that my boyfriend, Goose, his other partner, and friends I’ve made over the last few months are able to help me figure out what my next steps are. I’m not entirely alone in this process of starting over again. And that is a blessing even though there’s a lot of uncertainty right now. A few pieces have started to come together, and hopefully in the next few weeks a few more will also fall into place.

If you’ve been around for a while, you know that I don’t really like to air out any dirty laundry when it comes to my break ups. There’s another human involved and they also have feelings and a perspective, and I don’t like to cast the other person into a villainous role in such a public space. At my core, I really try to believe that we’re all doing the very best that we can.

But what I can say, is that I’m really hurt.

And like no duh. Everyone is always hurt when a break up happens. And I don’t share the acknowledgement of my pain to garner pity. I just say it because it’s where I’m at.

The dissolution of our relationship is months in the making, threads of it rooted at its very inception. And honestly, it’s fucking disappointing. No one likes to find out that what they thought about a relationship isn’t how the other person saw it. It’s so painful to step back and realize that while you were discovering and growing and learning about yourself, the other person’s perspective was misaligned. And maybe they were learning too. But you weren’t reading from the same book.

I fall in love hard. I always have. And as hard as I commit, I un-commit even harder. Romantic relationships are one of the few areas of my life that is very black and white to me. When I’m in, I’m all the way in. When I’m out, I’m all the way out. Maybe it was surprising when I made the choice to end our relationship so definitively. There’s no grey area with love for me.

I’d been caught for a while in a grey area that wasn’t of my own making, but just a result of practicing polyamory and the web of connections that had formed and unformed over the last few months. As much as I wanted to trust things would work out and as patient as I tried to be, it just wasn’t a grey area I could continue to live in. And you know what. That’s okay. Regardless of the relationship structure you practice, if you find yourself in a grey area that you decide you no longer wish to be in and decide to leave it… It’s okay.

It’s okay to break up. It’s okay to end an engagement. It’s okay to get divorced.

Sometimes shit falls apart. And it’s okay.

Of course, I immediately felt the crushing weight of failure on me. I went holy hell, how am I here again? I felt like I was watching history repeat itself as conversations spiraled into unsolvable territory. I felt like it was all my fault. The dialogues happening didn’t do much to persuade me otherwise.

And then I forced myself to step back and take a different perspective. To instead look at all the ways I had grown in the last few years since the end of my engagement, and how instead of repeating the same mistakes twice, I showed up for myself and applied what I had learned from the last time. That I looked at the situation from all the angles I could, decided it wasn’t for me anymore, and then made the choice to do something about it now instead of waiting for years to see if the other person will change their mind.

When shit falls apart, we blame ourselves for “not knowing.” I should have known better. I should have seen it coming. I should have noticed the signs. But those things are unknowable. If we’d known then what we know now, we never would have made the same decisions and the resulting knowledge would have never come to light because we didn’t put ourselves in that position in the first place. I couldn’t have known that the things that would divide Bug and I, because in January when I moved up here, I had no idea they existed. Of course, they seem glaringly evident now. But they weren’t then. And I made the best choices I could for myself then with the information I had at the time.

Of course, I’m disappointed that everything I thought had been promised to me ended up ringing false. While I could never fault Bug for being human, I do fault her for an immense lack of foresight that she repeatedly lacked during our relationship and with the choices she continued to make with it. Decisiveness, I’ve learned, is something I deeply value in my partners. And I’m not talking about picking where we’re going to eat lunch (though that’s nice). I’m talking about my partner being decisive about how they feel about me, where they see things going, and being sure that they want to be in relationship with me.

I think that’s what has cut the deepest in this break up. It’s something I tell anyone that I date, and something that I was incredibly vulnerable with Bug about. If you change your mind about wanting to be with me, I need you to let me know. Because people do change their minds. People grow, circumstances change, and sometimes things just don’t happen the way you thought they would. Sometimes shit falls apart. But I deserve someone who is sure about me. And I had asked Bug very early on to tell me if she ever wasn’t sure. It was clear from our last conversation that led to us breaking up that she was very unsure, and one of the things that hurts the most is that she didn’t just own that. I’m not sure why. Maybe she was embarrassed to be unsure after encouraging and then literally moving me into her house. Maybe there was a piece of the puzzle that she was calculating that I didn’t see. Maybe she just wasn’t brave enough to say it.

Cause let’s make no mistake, endings take bravery. Endings require transformation, reinvention, an alchemy of soul as you unstitch yourself and thread yourself back together in a brand new pattern. Endings are singular and yet infinite, and when you’re going through one you feel like it might never end. In truth, it doesn’t. Rather the pain of the ending transmutes into something else. Nostalgia, longing, reminiscence. We look back at ruptures as guideposts, a string of lights of all the choices made that twinkle in our pasts reminding us the way we’ve come.

It would be easy to tell myself that this relationship ending is a failure. That I was reckless in my decision to move to Vermont and to trust someone who despite feeling like she wasn’t, still was largely a stranger to me. That I made a mistake.

But here’s the thing about failed launches of love. There’s always a lesson to be learned in the combustion of rocket fuel.

And disappointment is a venom that heals.

It is an acid that seeps in and recodes you. A stone that ripples and sinks to your small intestine. A mirror that bounces back your bone structure. A clarity induced by the passage of time it takes to know oneself.

One can’t feel regret over that.

So I will take myself and my disappointment, and I will start again.

xoxo, Lyn

Hi there,

It’s me, Lyn.

I just wanted to say, “Hey, I miss you.”

A lot has happened since you’ve been gone.

Hard to believe it’s been an entire year.

I moved to Vermont.

Yeah, I know it’s pretty cold up here. Lots of snow. But it’s not so bad with a sweater.

I fell in love. Twice, actually. But I think you’d like them.

He’s smart and a good partner to have in a game of Rook.

She’s kind and a good partner to have out in the garden.

They both make me laugh. They both make me happy.

The other grandkids are good too. You’d be so proud of them all.

We try to find joy together even in the milestones that you’re no longer here for.

I’m glad you weren’t here to see the hurricane tear up our mountains.

Or the wildfires that have ignited in the remnants of that destruction.

It would make you so sad to see your favorite place in the world flood and then burn.

I don’t think you would have been happy with the current state of politics either.

There’s not a lot of folks helping each other, and I know that would have made you mad. You always did tell me that the most important thing was to take care of each other. I try to hold onto the hope that we all will find a way to do so.

I cooked Christmas dinner for us this year. Swear you were there in the kitchen with me. I hope they have a satisfactory kitchen wherever you are, and I hope you got a double oven just like it should be.

I don’t know what you would have said about all the latest. I wonder if you’d be a bit sad like me.

I still hear your voice in my head sometimes when I’m driving the car telling me to be safe on the road. Maybe you’re thinking of me then just as I am thinking of you.

I’m writing just like I promised you I would.

I know that you’d really like this story. It’s about our mountains after all. Maybe one day I’ll get to tell it to you.

Sometimes I forget that you’re gone. I think about calling you up to tell you about my day. I’ll see something that reminds me of you and want to remember it for my next visit until I remember that I’ll just have to tell you in those quiet moments that sit in between. I know that’s where I’ll always find you now.

I’m trying not to hate this time of year, but it’s really hard. Too many times spring has cut me up, crocuses blooming into glass. Losing you was bitter, even as the hummingbirds returned, their throats stained red.

I promise that I’m trying to have more patience.

Sadie is as sweet as ever.

I hope Ellie is there with you.

I saw a chickadee this morning, and it looked at me. I think it was you coming to say hello. So I told it, “Hey, I miss you.” And I think it knew what I meant.

Fly safe on your way back down south to tell all the rest of our loved ones hello too.

I miss you, MJ.

Talk more soon.

xoxo, Lyn

Hi there,

It’s me, Lyn.

The snow melt has begun in Vermont.

I’ve never lived somewhere where the snow stays on the ground for the duration of winter. The places far enough north that I’ve inhabited rather either been rain-filled or urban, and in the south the snow just doesn’t stick around for very long. So this winter has been my very first living in a snowy terrain.

I knew to a certain degree what I was getting myself into. Snow, ice, cold temperatures that make you wanna cry. I knew from living in Manhattan that I could brave northeastern winters again, even though it wasn’t going to be like living in the city. And truthfully once I got up here I realized it wasn’t so bad. The northeast is equipped to handle snow, and that makes dealing with it much easier to live with. Yes, it’s still been really cold, but your body adjusts pretty quickly to the temperatures it finds itself in.

Learning how to drive with snow and ice is still a work in progress. I’ve only gotten stuck once so far, and fortunately it was in our own driveway. Romping through snowy woods can actually be quite peaceful as long as you’ve worn a warm coat and your shoes have good traction. I don’t mind a cute hat and scarf combo to keep warm. There’s been a certain magic about the snowiness of the landscape all winter long. It almost makes the cold and dark season of the year slightly more worth it when there’s at least a reason for it that holds some beauty.

The interesting thing about entering the later months of winter here and higher temperatures creeping back into the days, is that I’m experiencing my first snow melt. And unlike all the times I’ve dealt with snow before, the snow doesn’t just … disappear. Which I’m sure if you live in a snowy area, you’re just laughing at me reading that. But truthfully, when your experience of snow is that it melts in a day or two depending on the amount that fell, it’s a little disorienting when you realize that snow melt in a northern climate means that everything just sorta slushes and then refreezes into ice.

As the ground has slowly reappeared, I’ve thought to myself that growth is a lot like snow melt. Things will melt for a little bit and then stall for a few days when the temperature drops. There’s still some ice and slippery spots til there’s the next warm day and things melt again a bit. More of the ground clears with each day that passes and each melt that occurs. But it’s not linear, and it’s all at once. There’s still moments of hard icy patches.

There’s inevitably messy change with snow melt. The blanketed landscape that you got used to suddenly shifts. You’re reminded that there is in fact ground and things beneath the snow pile. It’s been a long winter so it’s hard not to feel like the changes are scary when you’re gotten used to the landscape with the snow fall. But the truth is that the landscape is always changing because the seasons are always shifting. And just because you get used to things looking one way doesn’t mean that they won’t change again and again. They will.

But the transition into spring isn’t a bad thing. It just is. Sometimes growth can seed resentment in the moment:

Why did this have to change?

I’m so tired of things changing.

This isn’t how I thought things would change.

I know that there have been multiple times in my life that I’ve felt like I’m a victim to change outside of my control. It’s any easy headspace to slip into when we feel like things are chaotic and they aren’t unfolding like what we might have envisioned. Sometimes we can get really stuck in our vision of what was going to be, and it can be excruciating to let that go.

Change isn’t the enemy. The seasons pass one into the other, because that’s just what happens. That’s just what is. The snow melts.

I feel like change is a theme that I come back to time and time again in my writing, and it’s certainly one I’ve discussed many times here on the blog. I’ve found that usually when I circulate around something over and over, it’s because I’m trying to understand it. What happened. How it works. How to predict better for the next time. But you can’t really learn change or how to understand it. You just sorta have to accept that you’re never going to fully grasp it.

I wrote a chapter this week that I’m really fucking proud of. It was pivotal moment of change between two characters and they won’t be the same after it. Seems fitting to write it during a week where the very first stirrings of spring are rising from the ground.

We’ve still got some icy patches left to watch out for as the earth begins her thaw, but for now I’m trying to find gratitude for change and all the new chances it gives us. Each day is an opportunity to do something a little different.

Each day is new.

I hope your feet are warm even if your nose is still cold.

xoxo, Lyn

Hi there,

It’s me, Lyn.

Today is Valentine’s Day. And often this holiday is one that a lot of people strongly dislike. Even opening my social media apps this morning, I was met with folks asking if anyone even celebrates this holiday and saying what a farce it is because it’s just a cash grab for you to buy cards, chocolates, and flowers. I get where a lot of the critique and negative feelings towards Valentine’s Day comes from. The commercialization of it does make it feel like it’s ploy to get you to spend money or to rub romantic love in the face of folks who find themselves single on this day. But I just have never seen Valentine’s Day as only that.

I have to thank my mom for this holiday meaning more than just chocolates and roses to me. Valentine’s Day has always been (at least as long as I can remember) my mom’s favorite holiday. She would make it so special for me and my sisters when we were growing up, especially in later teenaged years when I didn’t have a boyfriend or girlfriend and my high school friends all did. Each year she’d take time to put together a little Valentine’s Day gift, usually something cute and pink, and pick out a special card for us each to write us a sweet love note inside. She’d set our “Hearts Day” gifts out at our designated spots at the kitchen table and we’d get to open them up at breakfast as a special way to start the day.

My mom made Valentine’s Day in our household about telling the people that matter to you that you love them. It didn’t have to be romantic love like in a Hallmark movie, it was about telling the people in your world that they were important and that you cared about them. There were no crazy gestures like Taylor Lautner’s giant stuffed bear given to Taylor Swift in the film Valentine’s Day, rather small but significant ways that she made the effort to tell the people around her that she cared. I’ve always really admired that about my mom, and I think it’s one of her qualities that I share: Putting thought and intention behind the small things we do for the people we love.

It wasn’t until my grandmother’s funeral this past year that I realized why my mom loves Valentine’s Day so much. When we gathered to celebrate my grandmother’s life, my mom gave some words of welcoming and talked about a card that MJ had sent her while she was in college. My mom still had the card and in it my grandmother had written to her to remind her that she loved her. My mom encouraged everyone gathered to tell the people they love that they love them in concrete ways that they can hold onto. I realized then that was why my mom sends my sisters and I cards, even now, especially for important dates like Valentine’s Day. Because for my mom, saying that you love someone out loud and on paper gives those people something to hold onto.

And I think that’s what Valentine’s Day really is about as a holiday. Giving people you love concrete examples that you love them. Of course, it comes out as give your romantic partner(s) flowers or chocolates because that’s what someone somewhere at some point decided was “romance” and the market grabbed that and ran. But it just doesn’t have to be that. Or only that. Hey, sometimes flowers or chocolates or cute things with hearts are nice too.

Telling people you love them should be something we do more often than just on February 14th. But today is a day that is set aside for that already. It seems like to me that instead of loathing the holiday for its commercial hype and bright colors, maybe we all should just remember what a joy it is to get to love people in the first place. Because it is. Loving someone is a joy. It’s a privilege and a responsibility too. But at its core, getting to love another should be something that brings joy to your life.

When my grandmother was still alive, she’d usually text me something around this holiday to the effect of “Will you be my Valentine?” It was always silly to me because she had my grandfather who was still alive to be her Valentine, but I’d always respond yes. Now that she’s gone, I know it was her way, though humorous, of saying that she loved me so infinitely that I could be her “Valentine” too. The amount of love we have for someone is not dictated or dependent on the amount of love we have for someone else. MJ always knew how to tell you that you matter to her. I can still hear her voice telling me “Drive safe and let me know how you are” when I get behind the steering wheel of my car.

Love is not singular. It exists in multitudes. We love our partners, our families, our friends, our pets. We shape ourselves and our worlds around those we love. People matter. Love is important.

My very first Valentine’s Day in college, I was single. My big sorority sister (who reads this blog: Hi Erin!) also happened to be single at the time and I had told her at some point in us becoming Big/Little and fast friends that Valentine’s Day was really important to me because of my mom’s efforts to make it a holiday about loving those important to us. Erin had me over to her off campus apartment, which at 19 I thought was something out of a dream that she had a home she’d created for herself. And that Valentine’s Day she cooked me Coq au Vin with sage brown butter mashed potatoes. It was probably the fanciest dish a friend had ever made for me at the time, and I remember standing in her tiny kitchen chopping veggies and being like “Wow this is so special.”

Because it was. Erin had listened to me tell her that a day mattered to me, and taken the initiative to come up with something special for us to do together, and shared with me something that matter to her in doing so. We made Coq au Vin again together on our last Valentine’s Day as college students together (Erin graduated later that spring). Later as a gift Erin hand wrote recipes out in a notebook for me and including our Valentine’s Day tradition among the ones she selected. I made the recipe on multiple Valentine’s Days afterwards on my own and whoever I was sharing the holiday with at the time. It was a tradition born out of love and friendship.

It’s been a long time since I’ve made the recipe, and honestly it’s been a long time since I’ve had someone to celebrate Valentine’s Day with. My sister and I decorated our apartment, The Homestead, in all manners of hearts and pink twinkle lights last year, but she had to work on Valentine’s Day. Both years I was in Manhattan I was alone and going to evening classes for my masters degree. The last three years I’ve been long distance with the person I was seeing romantically at the time (and that’s even with that being different people across those three years… Yes, long distance is a bitch.) Really only three Valentine’s Days of my life have ever been spent with a romantic partner in person, and I’m excited that this year will make four. But despite all of that, Valentine’s Day has still remained special to me because of the people I get the honor of loving.

Gestures of love can be small. It can be leaving a note on their desk before you go to work. Or cooking and sharing a meal together. It can be making them a small item that you know they’ll be able to keep in their space. Or holding them when they’re an anxious sobbing mess. It can be sending photos of your cats to one another to say, “Hi. I miss you.”

Love grows in between in the small cracks of life’s pavement. It’s gentle and it’s fierce. It keeps it’s own orbit. It requires patience and attention, but it also sneaks up on you. It is steadfast, even when we don’t want it to be. Love is something we spend our whole lives trying to earn, to protect, and to understand.

And you know what, I think that love deserves a day to be recognized and for us to celebrate it. Even if Valentine’s Day originated as a feast day for a martyr. Most modern day holidays are feast days that got extrapolated into something else entirely anyway. Honestly, let’s bring back feast days. We can just make really good food every holiday from now on and have that count as celebrating it.

Jokes aside, my point is this. Say “I love you” to your people. It’s never too late, and it’s never too much. And it doesn’t have to be on Valentine’s Day if you’re just really truly opposed. But I’d like to think that today, like every day, is just an opportunity to tell someone you love them. And perhaps, you just say it a little bit extra special today from how you might on a different day of the year.

Life is too short to not to.

xoxo, Lyn

Hi there,

It’s me, Lyn.

This week marks the beginning of a brand new chapter of my life. I have moved to Vermont. You might be asking yourself, “Lyn. Why in the hell did you move there?” Of course, the answer is simple. I’ve moved because the people I really love are here.

My life has been a chain of choices made around the people I love.

I’m the eldest grandchild, eldest daughter, eldest sister, eldest cousin. I’m the first for everything in my generation of my family. I lead by example and I set the precedence. It’s sometimes a rather heavy mantle to uphold. As my sisters and cousins have aged into being adults themselves, some of the pressure has lessened, but the fact of the matter still stands that I sit in familial position that means I have to be conscious of my choices. I chose to attend a college far from my nuclear family, but closer to my extended family in order to be interconnected. I ended up leaning on those family members—my grandparents, uncle, aunt, and cousins—through all four years of undergrad and wouldn’t change that chapter of my life even now. But college close to my family meant that many of the choices I made throughout that time and even in the two years post-undergrad were made with my family in mind.

When I got into my first significant relationship in college, I made many choices that kept me with that boyfriend and kept our lives’ trajectories in a similar arc. It was my first time being deeply in love with someone and I made a lot of sacrifices that meant what I really wanted got buried underneath what that ex wanted for himself. I account a lot of that up to the mistakes we make when we’re young and dumb and in love, but now that I’m older and I’ve lived a lot more life, I know that the choices I made there were unhealthy ones that built myself around another person. It’s probably why when we finally broke up, it was so incredibly painful.

I did make the decision to move to New York for my masters entirely on my own and for myself. That was perhaps the first independent choice I had made for myself that changed the fundamentals of my life by moving somewhere completely new all on my own. I did have a brief experience of making an independent choice for myself when I studied abroad in Spain during college, but it was one that while it altered on a deep level who I was, didn’t change the day to day of my life.

In Manhattan, though that chapter was one of the hardest and at times darkest of my life, I had a freedom over my life that was unlike anything else that I’d lived so far. I woke up, chose how I was going to move through my day, and often times, I ended up spending entire days completely alone not interacting with anyone at all besides thanking the barista for my latte. It was a really lonely chapter, but one that I think was really important in the development of who I’ve become, because I did learn how much power I have within myself and in being alone.

My second significant relationship and subsequent failed engagement, also demanded that I make choices built around the partner I cared about. New York seemed very temporary even from my move-in day, because I had decided to be partnered to someone who wasn’t in the city and who probably never would be. Because I thought I wanted the life that we had discussed building together, I made choices that took me back out of Manhattan before I’d even settled in it. I knew I’d have to return to the South eventually because both our families were there and because that’s where he say his career taking him.

The hardest part about being a writer and having a career in the writing and publishing industry is that you essentially can work from anywhere. It means that often you are the person in the equation that has to bend the most with your career path since that career is the most flexible. And it means that you, even yourself, can end up devaluing the importance of what you’re doing since it doesn’t have the dollar signs attached to it, the desk at an office with the company computer that comes along with it, or any of the stable “adult” necessities like healthcare, salary, or a 401K. For me in my longest relationship, being a writer meant that I was supposed to be the partner at home along with all the very gender stereotypical roles that came with that, especially in the context of monogamy.

When I hit the point of realizing all these choices I had made to keep the trajectory of my life with this person who I really didn’t want the same future with anymore, there wasn’t a whole lot of room for anything but to call the whole thing off. There’s not much compromise when your goals for the future sit in direct opposition with one another. I still stand by my decision to call my engagement off even now a year and a half later. For me, it was the only choice.

And in making that choice, I had to choose to realign once again with the people I love. I came home to Asheville, to my family, and to my sister and the two of us built a life for a year that was anchored by sisterhood and healing our inner children by being together. My choices that led me homeward were ones that felt like there wasn’t really any other logical decisions to be made, but ultimately were ones that I benefitted from immensely. I’ve found that sometimes the choices we must make because the only alternative is to essentially lay down and die, are the choices that become the axises on which our worlds tilt. Had I not felt like I had to break off my engagement and return home, I would never have done the work on myself that I needed to do to realize I was polyamorous. I never would have healed the parts of myself that were actively bleeding out. I never would have ended up here where I am now.

When I decided that I was going to make a big change and move to Vermont to be closer to my current partners, Goose and Bug, it wasn’t a choice that I made lightly. Goose and I had been doing long distance for what seemed like an eternity. Bug and I had been facilitating something brand new through the distance which was difficult when so much of a relationship’s beginning requires exploration. Both relationships required a lot of work to maintain connection, intimacy, and trust over many states and long stretches of time without in-person contact. A long distance relationship is hard enough when you’re monogamous with just one person. Long distance polyamorous relationships are another whole level of difficulty like playing the video game of life on extra hard mode.

I really meditated over my choice to either continue doing long distance or to move closer to be near my partners. I knew in my gut that I wouldn’t be able to do long distance with them both and be happy with it forever in perpetuity. That there would come a point where I’d have to decide if I were to move to be with them or to stay where I was and have to end those relationships. The trouble I found myself in was that I was so incredibly and undeniably in love with these humans, I couldn’t picture a reality where I would be okay breaking up with one or both of them because I couldn’t keep doing long distance. The only other choice left seemed to be that I would have to move myself to be closer to them.

Uprooting and changing my whole life AGAIN was and is so fucking intimidating. Right now as I’m settling into this new reality, I am doing the mental dance of questioning myself. What the hell am I doing here? Who am I that this gets to be my life? Do I even deserve this? When you’ve been raised with a cultural notion of what your life is supposed to look like and turn into, breaking out of that mold and choosing something off-script and without the prewritten narrative markers is destabilizing and thrilling all at the same time.

Choice, choosing, chosen, chose. And everything always leading you from there to here. To this exact moment. To these exact people. To the present that you currently inhabit. We are all creations of the decisions we make, the patterns we develop, and the rhythms that become echoes of our own manifestations. When you look up off the sidewalk that you’re walking on and see what is all around you, often you wonder, How the fuck did I end up here? But when we look behind ourselves at the trail we’ve taken, the answer is clear. We end up where we choose to be.

The realization is one that forces you to reconcile with yourself. If your present is a result of your past choices, and the present you inhabit is not one that makes you happy, then there isn’t anyone else to blame but yourself. The burden of responsibility then rests with your own self to make new choices that create a life you are happier with. There can be many hurdles in the way of doing so, but you have to navigate those anyway or continue to sit in a present that is unaligned with your true self. And of course, we can’t predict where the future will take us. There is no guaranteed success. We have to take risks to make change, and damn it if change isn’t so hard.

There are two truths about our lives: Things will change. And you will have to eat something for dinner.

I’ve been obsessed with Kelsea Ballerini’s work for a few years now, and have been listening to her newest album, Patterns, on repeat since it dropped in October. (Listen to it here.) The album opens with the titular song. In it Kelsea sings, “I got questions, I got whys, I got patterns.” The song goes on to say that some patterns are just a part of our make up and then begs the question will any of these patterns be able to be overcome. Kelsea leaves this question open-ended, but goes on to discuss many of her own patterns in a deep dive of her own life, choices, and headspace. Some songs indicate growth beyond original patterns, some songs allude that some patterns might be inescapable.

The album ends with track titled “Did You Make It Home? (Outro)”. It’s a short song, only a minute long, and all the lyrics are questions that Kelsea is asking the listener. She sings, “Are you safe on the road you chose? Did you make it home?” Ending the album on another set of questions indicates that the original questions asked in Patterns go unanswered, instead replaced by the new question of: Did your patterns lead you down a path that you are happy with? Because in the end whether keeping, breaking, changing, or unlearning the pattern, what matters more is where you ended up with the choices you made about the pattern itself.

In examining our own patterns, we realize that the choices we make create the patterns themselves. Do we keep making the same choices? Do we make new ones to change the pattern? Is there something that forces us into only one possible choice? What do we do when faced with an impossible decision? What patterns do we fall back into even when we’ve chosen to let them go? Are we happy with the patterns we choose to keep?

Our patterns create our paths.

The paths we take and why we take them has long been a fascination of mine. It is deeply seeded into my stories, my writing, my conversations, my interests. The paths we take come down to the choices we make—knowingly, unknowingly, willingly, by design, by circumstance, by necessity, for ourselves, for others, for the betterment of the whole. And the trickiest thing about the paths we take is that they are unknowable. It is in retrospect alone that we can identify the choices we made that lead us down the path to our present.

We make the path by walking it.

Poet Antonio Machado says it much more poignantly than me: “Traveler, your footprints are the only road, nothing else.” (Read the full poem here.)

I’ve chosen Vermont for my next chapter. I’ve chosen two humans who really love me. I’ve chosen the uncomfortable unknown in recreating myself once again. And I’ve chosen to trust myself on the path I’m walking simply because I know that I feel I am being true and honest with myself in walking it. This move is a choice once again made around people I love, but for the very first time the people I love while make the choice includes myself.

I’m incredibly excited to share snippets of my new life here in the mountains of the north. There’s a huge learning curve ahead of me for winter, the outdoors, and rural life. I can’t wait to tell you everything I discover about myself along the way.

Choose yourself today. She deserves it.

xoxo, Lyn

Hi there,

It’s me, Lyn.

Healing is like trying to deconstruct a non-linear narrative. You don’t really learn the depth and meaning of the story trying to be told to you until the end, and often it requires you to return back to the beginning to read the narrative again with the new context. Running back through it all again hurts just as much as it did the first time, but it’s the only way to understand it and move forward. The interesting thing about doing this enough: Healing becomes a rather liminal experience.

In college, I studied religion, and to this day still have such a passion for many of the things I studied in that degree for four years. One of the most intriguing concepts I came back to again and again was the idea of liminality. The liminal is the in between. It’s a threshold. It’s a crossroads. It’s a space that exists without really existing. Because of it’s qualities, the liminal is the place of the divine. The only place for an interaction beyond our comprehension is one that demands a departure from the ordinary, the mundane. If the liminal is the interaction point of divinity, then it is also the keystone of reckoning.

When you’re caught between the no longer and the not yet, you are stripped down to the barest form of yourself. To make it through the transition, you have to confront yourself as you are. See yourself for who you once were, and decide for yourself who you are going to be. In most instances, this happens at a rather rapid pace, or at least happens while caught up in the sense of motion as you move between the two: The past and the future. I will admit that that has been my experience for most of my big transitional moments of life, an unfolding rather than a delineation.

But there are rare moments, particular circumstances that allow for one to exist in liminality in perpetuity. Healing is one of them. Hurricanes are another.

Since I left my life in New York, I’ve been stuck in the doorframe of my own life. I changed my trajectory because the life I was living didn’t feel true to my most authentic self, but in doing so, I had no idea what my path forward looked like any longer. For months, I just let that be okay. I didn’t have the answers, and truthfully, I’m not even sure if I wanted them or was ready to have them again. Everything felt temporary, including my own internal landscape.

Strangely enough, this chapter of liminality has been one of huge growth and enormous healing for me. I’ve sewn up wounds I once thought would never mend. I’ve fallen in love again, not once, but twice. I’ve spent countless hours being a kid again with my sister in our little sanctuary, fondly called “The Homestead,” that we made out of our apartment in Asheville. I’ve finished a manuscript revision, queried for the first time, drafted half a new manuscript, refined genres I write in, come up with multiple new story ideas, and written more words, more regularly than ever before in my life.

In this long extended transitional time between what my life once was and what it was yet to be, I’m really proud to say that I have just lived. I tried, in earnest, to embrace this chapter for what it was. Tried to glean out of it what could be. And tried to give myself the space to ask myself hard questions of what I really, truly wanted next in life. I really believe the journey of internal reckoning I’ve been on would not have been possible for me if I hadn’t allowed myself to just live in the liminal for the last two or so years.

Now as the calendar year winds down to an end, and as we enter into the true winter season, I find myself leaving this beautiful painful liminality that has been my life for the last two years. I’ve made a decision that changes my life once again, but one that moves me closer to my truest self. In making that choice, I feel like I’ve finally crossed the threshold and entered the next chapter of my life.

This chunk of time has been a returning. A return home, a return to myself, a return to beginnings and reinvention and creation. There is great power in returning. And eventually, like all energy, it must be released somewhere, into something, out and upwards and onto the next cataclysmic momentum of your life.

Who I will become on this new adventure is the next version of myself that I’ve been intentionally seeking and shaping. This next iteration of me will not be perfect, because I’m human and so I will always be imperfect. She will still have anxiety to deal with. Depressive pitfalls to avoid. Quiet contemplations needed to regulate her soul. She will still have struggles and doubts and challenges. But she will be one huge step closer to the person I really am meant to be.

So long I’ve spent questioning myself and questioning my path. What I should do? Where should I go? Who I should be? I tried to be the person that I thought people really wanted me to be. Tried to do things “right” even in the choices I was trying to make for myself. You can only chameleon yourself into other people’s expectations for so long until you lose all sense of self. It’s probably why my chapter of liminality has taken me so long to wade through as I fought to regain my own conscious self. I’ve spent most of my life afraid of messing up. Afraid of doing something to upset other people or that will “ruin” my life.

Here’s the thing: I’m already living my life. My life is happening underneath me whether I’m doing things “right” or wrong. I know it sounds silly to perhaps be so caught up in worrying about making a mistake, when life is just happening and you’re going to make mistakes anyway, but I know I’m not alone. I know that there has to be at least one other person out there who feels the same way I do.

I’m telling you now: It’s not going to make sense. When it’s finally time, the leap of faith you’re going to have to take to get to the other side of the huge, depthless pool of liminality is going to feel insane. But it’s going to feel right. You’ll know it, because you’ll say to yourself, “I know this. I know myself. I know it’s where I want to be. I know it’s who I want to be. And I know that I am going to be happy.” You’ll know it, because when you get there dreams stop feeling like dreams and they will start feeling like reality.

When I first moved to New York there was spray paint on a lot of sidewalks in my neighborhood that said, “Dream until it’s your reality.” I actually snapped a photo of it that I’m sure one can scroll back and find on my Instagram. I thought during that chapter of my life it meant if I worked really hard, it would pay off. I thought the client I was working for was going to turn into something huge for me. I thought grad school was a golden ticket to a career I’d always wanted. I thought I was content with a relationship that I had complete control over because I never let the other person fully in.

The truth is all those things in that chapter were hopes. They weren’t really dreams.

Dreams are the big secret things we lock in our chests. To get stories published. To travel the world. To have really great sex again. To be fully loved, seen, and accepted by a partner and have them want nothing in return. To have a child. Dreams are things like getting to live in New York. In retrospect I’m sad that I was so caught up the entire time that I lived there with the fact that I wasn’t going to be able to stay, that I wasn’t happy, that I wasn’t enough… That the moment of that dream actualizing sort of passed me by. I think I recognized it at the tail end of my time there, but it was with a bittersweet taste in my mouth since it was drawing to a close.

In the throws of my depression in Manhattan, I wondered to myself, “If this is life, what the hell is the point?” and I think it’s because I felt hopeless in everything. Hopeless in my career, because I was spending all my time building someone else’s and seeing how doomed and harrowing getting myself published was going to be. Hopeless in where I lived because I was alone and lonely and miserable and I never, ever felt like I was doing enough. Hopeless in my relationship because everything was incredibly one-sided and I wasn’t able to receive support in the ways I really needed it. Hopeless in my life because it felt like all of that was how it was always going to be: Pressure from all sides, a partner who didn’t really get me, dreams of mine put on the back burner for someone else’s benefit, parts of life forced upon me before I was ready or capable, and feeling like I’d never be ready or capable. It was easy to say, “There’s no point!” when the life I was living was sort of without point, or perhaps rather all coming down to a singular point, an ending destination, an expiration date.

I wasn’t able to dream the big dreams in a way that they might actually be able to become a reality for a very long time. Now suddenly, I find myself being able to dream the big dreams and feel like not only maybe that they could happen, but actually see them out there forming in the distance like little wisps of mist actualizing in the air, morning sunbeams bursting through their fine apparitions. Dreams are what happen in the liminal when we allow ourselves to lean in and harness all that the in between can give us.

I doubt that this will be my last dalliance with liminality. We seem to have a rather cyclical relationship, the liminal and I. In fact, I think as the foundations of my life (hopefully) start to solidify, there’s a great likelihood I will purposefully throw myself into the liminal. Travel, pilgrimage, and of course, story worlds bursting at my fingertips ready to be told filled to the brim with (you guessed it) liminality. I think for better or for worse the liminal is an inescapable recursion for me.

I’ll leave you with this.

You’re standing at a doorway. There is a girl on the other side. The girl in front of you looks like you, but isn’t you. Still she’s familiar. Is she your past? Is she your future? Does it matter? Will you ever really know?

The girl on the other side reaches her hand out to you.

You walk through.

xoxo, Lyn

Hi there,

It’s me, Lyn.

It’s been a few months. Let’s catch up.

I got a bit quiet here in this space and on social media in the last few months, because a lot of really big life shifts have been happening and I just wanted to be present for them. I wasn’t ready to talk about what has happening in my personal life, because it was, well, deeply personal. But then, I found myself caught, because what’s been unfolding in my life feels really big and really important and there didn’t really seem like there was much else I could or even wanted to talk about other than that. So I chose the path that usually comes most naturally to me: I waited.

Often times, we view waiting as a passive choice. A path of least resistance. Or perhaps even the nonsectarian option. Sometimes we see waiting as not really even making a choice at all. I remember when I first heard “Wait for It” from Hamilton in college. I love the whole song, but one line gut punched me even then at 20. The lyrics say, “I’m not standing still, I’m lying in wait.” It was the first time I had ever felt like someone saw and understood my inclination to wait not as a negative, but as an active decision. At that moment in the musical, Burr actually holds an incredible amount of power in his waiting, a loaded cannon. Of course, ultimately, we know that Burr waits too long and it is his downfall, but since hearing this song for the first time I have been (slightly) obsessed with the idea that waiting is an action.

A lot of this year has been a season of waiting for me. Waiting for the right doorways to open. Waiting for the right people to reveal themselves. Waiting for the right time to speak up and claim my own happiness.

And I think that’s the thing. And maybe the reason I’m ready now.

I’m really fucking happy.

I’ve been happy for a while, but I just haven’t wanted to jinx it. Didn’t want to rub in people’s faces that even amidst a literal hurricane blowing through my life and completely uprooting me out of Asheville permanently, that somehow I was still incredibly joyous. Because when you do what I’ve done: losing everything and rebuilding your life again and again… You start to believe that people expect you to be sad and write sad shit. And you start to believe that maybe you just don’t deserve to be happy. That the happiness you have now probably won’t last anyway so why is it even worth sharing.

Here’s the thing though, we get to be happy. Being happy now doesn’t mean I didn’t go through really hard shit in the last two years. Being happy now doesn’t mean I won’t go through hard shit again. (Lord knows winter is about to descend and I’m having a staring contest with my seasonal depression to see who will blink first.) Being happy, truly happy, isn’t like the end of the movie where everything is tied up with a neat bow and the heroine drives off into the sunset without a worry. The happiness I have now comes from a deep inner peace that I’ve worked really damn hard to facilitate within myself and from being for the first time in my life in partnership with people who absolutely see me and completely love me.

You might notice I said people there. And that’s the big point we’ve been building up to in this post (and the reason I’m so happy).

I’m polyamorous. And I’m pansexual.

And fuck, it feels so good just to say it like that and own it.

I realize that sexuality and non-monogamy can be controversial for some folks. I’ve spent a lot of time anxious over what people will think of me when I tell them I have multiple partners. There’s so many negative stereotypes that exist for polyamorous people. I stressed about losing followers, hate comments, even people who know me in my personal life finding out and severely judging me. For a while I thought maybe I could just compartmentalize my chosen romantic relationship style and then people wouldn’t need to know information about me that might make them uncomfortable.

But that’s my people pleaser tendencies trying to make myself a digestible meal for everyone. There’s no one food every single person loves and even if there was, it would have no spice, no dimension, nothing exciting about it.

I found that the harder I tried to shove my lil non-monogamist heart back into a box, the more polyamory popped up in my writing. All my characters were in love with multiple people, many of them were queer. I kept looking at the page going, how the fuck am I gonna explain this when it comes time to letting other people read it? And maybe that’s when it clicked—that the people who were going to love these stories of my soul… They were gonna be people open-minded enough to let my characters be polyamorous or pansexual or both. If they could allow it for my characters, then they could allow it for me the author as well.

And listen, I know that this sorta thing makes people uncomfortable. Polyamory often comes with A LOT of questions. If this isn’t your cup of tea, I completely understand. I’m sad to part ways with you, but I wish for you all the goodness life has to offer.

But this—this is my life. I’m polyamorous. I’m pansexual. I have a boyfriend. I have a girlfriend. They make me really fucking happy. And I want to talk about it. I’m done being scared of what people might say. If you get it, you get it. If you don’t, you don’t. And if you care about me as a human, you’ll respect me either way.

If you are interested in sticking around to know more about this all, I’m gonna dive into how all this came be and my partners that I’m over the fucking moon about. And truthfully while it won’t be the only thing I talk about in this space, it is going to be a large theme now that I’m ready to talk about this part of my life. To not talk about these truths about myself would be a disservice to myself and my authorial authenticity.

And my greatest hope is that perhaps there’s at least one young woman out there who is like me. Who has found herself at a crossroads of what “should” be and what she knows is true. Who’s a little scared that she might fuck her life up if she leans into what she wants. Who knows that in choosing herself with something like this, she will irrevocably alter the trajectory of her life. Who isn’t sure she can do it.

I hope I can be proof to you that you can.

I’ve been on journey for most of my twenties figuring out my sexuality and finding a label that I feel fits well. I’ve settled on pansexuality, because for me it is the person and not their parts. It means I could see myself with anyone: a man, a woman, a non-binary baddie. Who I love is who I love. For me, it’s about a deep, deep connection. And about being seen in a way that I really need to be.

By the time I truly knew I was queer, I thought it didn’t really matter because I had set myself up for marriage to a man and my relationship was straight presenting, so why not just let that be. I figured my sexuality was something that I would just take to the grave with me, a feeling I think almost all queer folks can relate to. I had chosen my partner and monogamy, because I didn’t really think there was any other option on the table for me. And as a result, there wasn’t a need to broadcast my pansexuality.

Then I broke my engagement off, and suddenly I could do anything, be anyone, go anywhere, love any person… It was overwhelming. I settled for working on myself, healing and growing. That seemed to make sense. To take some time for myself when I’d spent almost three years pouring into someone, who ultimately didn’t give anything back into my cup. I needed to rebuild some of my self-love first.

But I had my what if person still floating in the back of my mind.

(Side note: Because I value my privacy and my partners’ privacy so immensely, they’re gonna get cute lil code names here on the blog. Goose is my boyfriend. Bug is my girlfriend.)

Goose was this missed connection that haunted me. We’d had an electric chemistry that I’d never had with anyone else before or since. I don’t know if I believe in love at first sight, but if it exists that’s what Goose and I had. It was the wrong timing of early twenties and two people who didn’t know who they were yet. He had occupied a corner of my mind since the day I met him, and I had made my peace a long time ago he’d always be my one that got away. Then I found myself single.

I had to know.

I reached out to Goose who immediately and enthusiastically asked what my opinion of polyamory was because he was poly, dating a few partners, and curious if I’d be down to date him too. I said I didn’t know. That I felt like I wasn’t really ready to date anyone at all. But that we should talk. So we did. It felt like no time had passed at all instead of four years.

Over the next few months, long distance (which I had once said I’d never do again) forged a deep connection built on open communication, shared desire, and deep trust. I found myself falling in love with him. I freaked the fuck out. I felt like there was no way this could be happening and yet it was. So I did something that I hadn’t allowed myself to do since the very first time I’d been in love with someone.

I let it happen.

I let myself fall and I kept asking myself “Why not?” to any mental road block I hit and somehow I ended up in a place where I was completely and utterly in love with this other human. And somehow all the other bullshit just stopped mattering once that was true. Maybe all the logical leaps I made to realizing I wanted to practice polyamory myself is a blog post for another day.

Like a snake, I had outgrown my skin. I had to shed it. I had to let go of things I once thought I had control over. I had to release my old self, my old life, what I once thought my future would be. I had to leave behind the things that were no longer serving me.

I felt so much stronger, calmer, and in control of myself and my emotions on the other side.

Once I had embraced being polyamorous, I realized I had to confront and embrace my pansexuality too. The two were opposite sides of the same coin. If I wasn’t going to limit my ability to love to only one person, I couldn’t limit myself in my ability to love only men.

This is where Bug enters the picture. I met Bug through Goose, and the two of us clicked right away. I think we could see ourselves reflected in each other and perhaps that was easier because we are both women, but there was something about Bug that just made sense. We started falling for each other pretty rapidly and (perhaps too) eagerly decided we wanted to be girlfriends after sharing time together. Having my queerness validated by her is something I will probably spend the rest of my life thanking her for.

I like to think of us all as puzzle pieces. Some of my edges match up perfectly with Goose’s, and some of my ridges align perfectly with Bug’s. They both see me for exactly who I am, but from different angles and with different lighting. We’re all still looking at the same whole picture. And honestly, that’s pretty damn cool.

That kind of catches you up to where we are now. I’m dating both of them, pretty in love with both of them, and ecstatically happy to be so. Long distance with two lovers has proven to be a challenge. Even though it’s one we’ve been conquering easily, it’s one that I hope won’t have to last forever. Since Hurricane Helene pretty much destroyed my life as it was, I’m doing some work now realigning and discovering what it is I really want or rather, where it is I really want to be, now that I’m really certain who it is I want to be with.

I’m finally feeling like my life makes sense. Like I make sense. Most days I’m just overflowing with gratitude that this is my life now. That I get to be loved unconditionally and overwhelmingly by two humans that I’m really obsessed with. That I get to know about the what if’s and the if only’s. That I have the freedom to do everything I need and want to do, and still be loved for my entirety. Not the idea of me. Not what I might be. Not for what I provide. Not for what I pay for. Not for the concept of me invented in one’s head.

But for who I actually am.

In any given moment. In every given moment.

I’m really excited to share this part of myself and my life openly with the world. I can’t wait to tell you more about how different everything is now that I see myself and the world this way. Please be gentle with me. I’m still figuring it all out for myself and I certainly don’t have all the answers yet.

And I hope, that even if none of this makes sense to you at all, you can at least share in this moment of happiness with me.

How wonderful being alive is.

xoxo, Lyn

Hi there,

It’s me, Lyn.

I accidentally ended up taking all of May off from writing. I hadn’t planned it to be that way, but I hit an internal wall at the end of April and said to myself, “I know I have to pause.” As a writer who really does at the end of the day need to be writing, admitting to myself that I needed to stop for a few weeks was really hard. But I’m proud of making the decision I knew was going to be the healthiest and safest option for me in the long run.

And when I say I took May off from writing, I mean that I really took the whole month off from all writing. No blogging, no journaling, no story drafting, no poetry. I really took the month to do a hard reset. And honestly, my mental health needed it.

May marked a lot of pretty traumatic one year anniversaries for me. I think even when we’re aware of that, our body remembers things in a way different than our brains do. Initially, I wasn’t sure for a while why my anxiety had sky rocketed through the spring months. Spring a year ago dumped me and my life upside down with one unexpected transition after another. I realized this May that even a year later, I’m still grieving through a lot of that.

But the thing that I came to hold onto as I worked my way into June was that it has been a whole entire year since those huge transitions reconfigured the way my life was going to be. On tough days that meant I wondered if I really have done anything of worth in the timespan of a year. On good days that meant I proudly looked in the mirror and said, “Look how far we’ve come.”

Somehow a year passes and we become older, wiser, better. I look back now at Lyn from a year ago with such compassion. How much she was carrying all on her own. How truly unhappy she was. How far away she was from herself. Sometimes I’m not even sure I recognize her, even though I know she and I are one and the same.

The cool thing about growth is that we become better for the next time—the next challenge, the next opportunity, the next relationship. Something I’ve always prided myself on is my resiliency. I’ve learned in the last year or two that when you pair resiliency with a present mindset, you can grow in really neat ways.

That’s something I’ve been working diligently on since the start of this year—a present mindset. Staying focused in the here and the now. As I’ve aged into my twenties, I’ve certainly improved steadily at having a present mindset, but I think right now might be one of the first times in my life that I truly believe that if I stay focused on the current moment instead of everything that’s yet to come (and if we’re honest, may never even come to pass) that it will all truly work out as it’s meant to. If I stay present and put my energy into the now, then what will happen is given the opportunity to happen as it’s meant to.

Don’t mistake me. I have plenty of wild hopes and dreams that have cropped up in my chest cavity over the last few weeks. But instead of panicking about those being crushed or taken from me, I’m choosing (almost obstinately) to let things evolve into what they’re going to be all on their own. It’s a really scary decision to be making for myself, because it requires a release of control. Which really we can’t control the future anyway and it’s all just a illusion of a sense of control, but it is still hard to give up those imaginary reins anyway.

You have to believe things will work out as they’re meant to. That the timing will be right. That the person will want you back. That you’re making the right choices. That you’re building the life you really want to be inhabiting.

And fuck, being optimistic is so hard.

But then every once and a while, life will give you a little shimmering thread of hope. When you find one, you have to grab it gently so it doesn’t rip and hold on to it with an open palm. Let it pass over your fingers with the rush of joy that it brings and remember that it is those tiny things of quiet brightness that make our lives worth living in the first place.

I feel light for the first time in a really long time. Like I can take a full breath of air, let it expand in my chest, and not be afraid to feel the bottom of my lungs.

I’m sure some of it has to do with the fact there’s infinite sunshine right now and that somehow makes everything better. But I think some of it has to do with me. Getting myself through a tough spring, making it onto the other side. Being brave enough to go after what I want and being vulnerable enough to let something good back into my life. I’m not sure what life is going to throw my way, but I am sure that I’m making choices that are in line with what I want.

The Lyn of a year ago could not have possibly fathomed that her life would look the way that it does right now. I could not have dreamt up in my wildest dreams that I’d be creating this path for myself. Couldn’t have predicted the people that would be in it filling it with so much richness and passion. Would have laughed in your face if you told me that I could be this happy again. Probably would have told you that I wasn’t sure I saw the point anymore.

How wonderful it is to be alive and to be present. Sometimes life is big and full and beautiful. And sometimes it is small and wonderful too. Sometimes there is perfection in just sitting. On a picnic bench, cold cider in your hand, watching the sunset over the river. On your couch, big book in your hand, watching your cat sleep in the sunshine. On a porch stoop, hot tea in your hand, watching the world awaken around you.

I’m keeping my eyes wide open right now.

I fear if I blink, I will miss it.

xoxo, Lyn

Hi there,

It’s me, Lyn.

This entry is a weird one for me. The last time I wrote and put up a blog post, my grandma was alive. And now two weeks later, she’s gone. Something about that it sitting weird with me this morning as I put together words and try to figure out what it is I want to talk about today in this space.

As I write today, I’m sitting in my bedroom watching my cat sleep like a sweet little cinnamon roll baking in a pan as little rainbows from my sun catcher dance across the carpet. I’m reminded in this moment that just a few weeks ago it felt like I’d never make it through winter and that I’d never see the sun again, but here we are. It’s spring, even if it’s still making its mind up here in the mountains. Each season we make it through teaches us another lesson in life.

Right now, it seems like I’m still figuring out what the lesson in this season is. And hey, that’s okay. We usually don’t know what the lesson is until we’re through the season that we’re in. But I know that the theme of my last year or so (we may be even getting closer to two years now), is learning the art of letting go.

And make no mistake—letting go really is an art form. Like any art, it requires practice, consistency, intentionality, and meaning. It doesn’t just happen because you snap your fingers and it doesn’t become easy to do without repetition.

I think there are a lot of us (myself included, thanks anxiety) that have a natural tendency to want to hold onto things. In the past for me, the logic has often gone: well I’ve worked so hard to get things just as they should be, now they should just stay this way. Of course, the only thing that is consistent in life is that things will indeed change. Wanting things to remain unchanged is a mind framework that I spent multiple years in therapy actively working to alter.

In a recent session with my therapist, I was discussing with her how I felt I’ve gotten pretty good at being able to hold a situation that arises, weigh its impact to me, ask myself how much if any of it is my responsibility to handle, and then let the rest go. She agreed with me that this was a skillset I’d drastically improved over our years of work together and reminded me that I had put in months and months of work to get to the place where I can let things go.

It really got me thinking about how I’ve progressed to a place where it isn’t easy, but easier to let go. In my younger years, most things in my life I held with a clawed death grip. While I know I’ve ended up here because I put in the work, I tried to reflect back to what was the mindset shift that happened that allowed me to be better at releasing what isn’t mine to carry. Because for an anxious mind like mine, letting something go when it is bothering you quite literally feels impossible if you don’t have the tools developed to help you do so. I remember being so fixated on something that was completely out of my control that I’d make myself physically sick with worry and to what end? I still couldn’t change anything about it at the end of the day.

I don’t exactly know when, but somewhere in between Covid lockdown and my move to New York, I think a shift in my mind began. I stopped panicking over all the things that could go wrong, and I started asking myself what might happen if things just went the way they were supposed to. What if I stopped anticipating disappointment and instead allowed myself to explore what is possible? What if I surprised myself?

In writing this post today, I was reminded of a song I found and loved in my early college years: Surprise Yourself by Jack Garrett. The song is about leaving the room for growth and potential in your life, and continuing to find wonder. One of the lyrics he sings on the track is “You know you might surprise yourself. So let go and surprise yourself.” It was a powerful lyric for me when I found it back in 2016 and it remains just as poignant for me now. An open invitation to let something new happen within your life and within yourself.

Every time we let go of something, by force or by choice, we make room for something else to enter into our lives and surprise us. I certainly never imagined my life looking the way that it currently does, but I’m so glad that I am where I am. I’ve been surprised in the very best of ways over and over again in the past few months. I’m so happy and at peace in my life, and even though I have hopes and dreams for what’s next, I don’t feel like I’m in a rush to get there. Where I’m at wouldn’t have been possible without where I’ve been. I had to let go of a lot of things to get here.

Still, letting go of someone we love is extra hard. Even if we know it’s coming, even if it’s time. Letting go of someone is different than letting go of expectations or letting go of someone’s opinions of us. It’s still something outside of our control that we have to find a way to release, but it’s a heart-wrenching tug-of-war between moving on to keep living and holding on to keep remembering.

The important thing I’ve been reminding myself is that letting go doesn’t mean I won’t remember. Remembrance is altogether a completely different art form.

I think when we approach our lived experience with an open palm instead of a closed fist, it can be scary. We’re more vulnerable, more exposed, more liable to be hurt. But we’re also experiencing more. Once I started uncurling my fingers on my own life, I started discovering more about myself than I even knew was possible. It’s made me a better person. It’s made me a better writer.

The art of letting go is one I’ll spend a lifetime learning. I don’t really know that it’s something that can be perfected. I think you just get better at it the more you do it. And like any art, I think it’s messy and emotional and filled with little reflections of yourself. But it’s a necessity of the human experience.

You have to let go or else you’ll be dragged.

There’s only you and what you can carry on this journey we’re on. Keep just what you need and let the rest settle as it’s meant to.

xoxo, Lyn

Hi there,

It’s me, Lyn.

March has been a month. I set a lot of hopes on March, and while most of them have come to fruition, I also have had many unexpected turns within the start of the spring season. Life always does unfold that way, and I wish I could say that I was better prepared for an ebb and flow month, but I haven’t been. I was so focused getting through the winter season (I reflected a ton on this over on my first {ever}season post) that I hadn’t stopped to think about how spring could surprise me. And it still has.

Spring has started with both joy and sorrow, and the two have intermingled and overlapped. While being the happiest I’ve ever been in my personal life, I’m also experiencing the greatest of losses in my familial life. My grandma, who has been the lifeblood of my family for most of my life, is dying. She has spent her final days surrounded by her family and wrapped up in our love for her as we try to make her last bit of time as comfortable as we can. We know that it will be soon.

The loss of any family member is hard. There’s no poetic way to put the pain. It just hurts. It hurts to see her in pain as her body shuts down on her. It hurts to see the tears in my sisters’ and cousins’ eyes as they say their final goodbyes to her. It hurts to see the deep sorrow in my grandfather’s eyes as he loses the love of his life he’s spent the last sixty years with. It hurts that it’s happening in slow motion. It all hurts. And it will continue to hurt for a while.

I almost didn’t want to write this post today, because things just felt heavy and hard, and I really fucking hate being a downer. But one of the things that my grandma has told me in a semi-lucid moment this weekend was to keep writing, and I know that’s not only what she wants, but what I have to keep doing. Writing is the only way forward for me and the best way to process what’s currently happening. After all, this is CurrentLyn and this is where we are currently at.

In the midst of this incredibly hard time for my family, someone near to me was able to make space for both joy and sorrow to exist at the same time. They asked me how I was, what I was thinking about, and how I was feeling, and then they just listened. They let me talk and then didn’t give me any feedback. They just let my emotions, as complex a duality as the emotions were, exist. And when I mentioned this to them and thanked them for allowing the space for both the most joyous of joys and the most sorrowful of sorrows to exist at the same time for me, all they said back was, “Let me know how else I can be there for you.”

I can’t even explain to you how powerful a moment it was to have someone just let two opposing emotions exist within me and to only offer support. For so long in my life I have felt like emotions could only exist in singularity. Which, of course, I’m sure if you’re a smart human reading this, you’re laughing at this thought with me, because that’s just not how emotions work in the slightest. Emotions exist in a complex and often competitive arena. They get all bunched up together and they make things messy. I spend most of my days trying to out-logic my emotions and make them make sense.

Emotions don’t make sense. That’s why they are emotions.

Having the opportunity given to me to just feel my emotions, even when they were really tricky ones—it was a priceless gift given to me in a moment that I really needed it. And it got me thinking. What would happen if I gave myself the same allowance internally? How much more internal peace might I grant myself if I could just let emotions, even the big ones and even opposing ones, just have space to exist without so much internal judgment or immediate logical course correction?

I don’t know. Maybe that’s incredibly obvious to other people, and maybe that’s how other people think about all of their emotions all the time. But for me, it’s something kind of revolutionary. No one is harder on myself than me. To even contemplate letting my emotions just be. It’s a really big step for me.

Joy and sorrow are opposites, but I also think they’re interconnected. We don’t know one without the other. The depth of sadness isn’t deep if we don’t know the height of joy. And the highest peaks of happiness aren’t so euphoric without the knowledge that great sorrow exists. You can’t have one without the other.

It seems fitting that I’m experiencing both these heightened emotions at the same time. It’s almost like I was meant to experience both at the same time to remind me of the intensity of the other.

This post is a little shorter than usual, and I’m not entirely sure how to wrap it up as nicely as I normally do. I think there’s not a lot more to say in the moment. Just time for quiet stillness and space for big emotions.

Whether it’s slushies shared at sunset or a whole bottle of wine split over a movie, my people are carrying me this week. And they’ll continue to. Through the joy and the sorrow, how loved I truly am.

xoxo, Lyn

Hi there,

It’s me, Lyn.

Okay brace yourself, we’re getting a little abstract today on CurrentLyn.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the definition of “home” and having a sense of belonging that stems from that recently. While journaling the other day, I realized that I have two very opposite and directly opposed internal forces within me: The force that demands freedom, travel, exploration, and newness. And the force that requires consistency, predictability, a place I call home, and quietness. Both forces hold validity within me and need me to nurture them, even if they’re often in conflict with one another.

I’m sure I’m not the only person who feels like they’re constantly fluid, consistently evolving. I seem to always be saying to myself, “I’m still figuring it out.” Maybe I haven’t always seen it this way, but recently I’ve really been embracing and finding power in the fact that I’m a person who exists in the liminal, both physically and mentally within my own headspace. There is something beautiful about continually becoming—being in the act of becoming—and viewing that inertia as an art form.

When I moved back to Asheville last summer, I had a really hard time not viewing it as a step backwards at first. I felt in a lot of ways that I had failed. I couldn’t handle New York, I didn’t make it, I wasted my time, I lost two years, nothing has changed, and on and on and on. But once some of the dust from moving had settled, I realized that even though I was returning to the same place I had lived for six-ish years before my NYC chapter and that yes, maybe not that much about the city itself had changed, I, on a very fundamental level, had changed.

I continue to be in the process of figuring out who I am now and where I am now and sometimes even how I got here. And it finally dawned on me that maybe I don’t have to have an end goal and maybe there isn’t a final destination when it comes to being a person. Being is a verb. It’s an action. It’s motion, which means movement. Being isn’t just something you do, it’s something you are, which means it’s both fixed and malleable at the same time. It’s a state not a permanence, and it’s always going to look different tomorrow than it did yesterday.

As a younger adult, I resented this. I just wanted to get to the point where I felt like I had it figured out and everything in my life made sense. That just isn’t how it works.

Since moving back, I have had the opportunity to fall in love with Asheville all over again. When I first moved here, I was 18 and I really had no idea what I was doing other than I was supposed to go out into the world and be some body now. Now almost a decade later, I’ve returned to the mountains with a determination and gratitude forged by the city that never sleeps.

Growing up I spent school years on the west coast and summers on the east coast. There was so much interchange, a push and pull between where my life was lived, and really a giant question mark as to where home truly was and what home even meant. I’ve always said that home for me is wherever my sisters are, and I still find that to be true, especially living with one of my sisters again now as an adult. But there was something in my return to Asheville that did feel like coming home.

And maybe home could have been anywhere, would have been anywhere I spent my formative adult years… But life unfolded the way it did and I guess this is a place that is a fixed axis point in the map that makes up me.

I always feel the most myself in the mountains. There is something about them that transcends past the ordinary for me and enters into a place of deep contemplation. They are a threshold across which I find myself again and again.

The Appalachians are an area of the world that I think people often misunderstand from what they’ve seen in media about it. Especially in Southern Appalachia, the reputation that precedes this area is that people are stupid, their practices backwards, their customs laughable, and their food barely tolerable. We get lumped into a hick and bumpkin stereotype that isn’t just offensive, but also is just incorrect a lot of the time.

Our stretch of mountains here in North Carolina is one of the most beautiful and biodiverse areas in the entire world, because our plateau was missed by the glacial meltdown path. We have plants and animals that exist no where else. Our history is a long, complex, and compelling one—a history I continue to dig into for my own research on my “Mountain story” project. Our food, music, customs, and people are all richly diverse and just flat out good.

It’s not a place without it’s faults or imperfections. Many of the problems other places across America and the globe face are still present and troubling here. And there are certainly things that I have to wrestle with on a daily basis, like having a very tourism driven economy, which the expansion of has come at the detriment of the locals and deterioration of our incredibly stunning environment.

But I think it’s home. At least as close to home as I will get for now.

Maybe home, like myself, is ever shifting, always evolving. Maybe you keep certain strong ties to place and space even after you’ve left them and even once you return. I know one thing is for certain, I’m going to write about it in my “Mountain story” book (or maybe the sequel… we’ll have to see!).

I’ll leave you with one of my most favorite quotes of all time by David Mitchell from his novel, Cloud Atlas (which is brilliant, by the way, if you haven’t yet read it):

“We cross, criss-cross and recross our old tracks like figure skaters.”

I think sometimes we might be recrossing our concept of home and where it is located, too.

xoxo, Lyn

Hi there,

It’s me, Lyn.

I went out to dinner the other night for the first time in a long time, and actually sat down to eat at the restaurant with my family. With work schedules and winter, my sister and I have eaten our dinners mostly in the quiet comfort of our little apartment these past few months. I found myself completely shocked by how quickly I became overwhelmed in the loudness of a Saturday dinner rush. I lived in Manhattan for two entire years, one of the busiest places in the world. How could I all of sudden no longer be able to sit in a restaurant to have dinner when that was my normal for so much time?

Of course, the answer is easy. I’ve simply gotten used to the quietness of mountain life again. The particular calm that I feel in the mountains is something that I’ve always treasured. There’s a simplicity and a wildness to life here that isn’t easily replicated. I hadn’t realized how easily I had slid back into embracing the mountain pace or how at peace it had made me within myself until I reflected backwards on what my life in New York had been.

The thing about my life in New York was that I loved it, just as intensely as I hated it. And some of that was circumstantial—job, relationship, grad school, and a whole handful of expectations that Covid blew right out of the water… But some of intensity was just the city itself. I said it once before, but New York is a microscope that magnifies whatever you have coming in to her. Everything is bigger, louder, taller, faster. Everything is more.

Even though I had some of the darkest moments in my Manhattan chapter, I also had some of the very best times I’ve ever had, and maybe ever will have. Despite existing within the calamity of the city, I had the most time alone that I’d ever had in my life. I spent a lot of my days tucked up in my tiny studio, working hard, dreaming big, and writing what I could, when I could. So many new story ideas were created in that apartment, so many breakthroughs on the existing tales I was weaving. All I could see then in the moment was that I wasn’t moving fast enough and I wasn’t headed in the direction I thought that I “should” be.

It might sound silly now knowing how much happier I am in my life currently, but there are days when I really truly miss living in New York. Sure, I was directionless and overwhelmed. And of course, I knew the entire time that it wasn’t something that could last forever. But I was forging an entirely new person. And that act of creation, while incredibly painful and at times unyieldingly darkened, was perhaps the most powerful, most important, most quintessential journey of all. After all, the story is only as strong as the storyteller. For one’s writing to be richer, deeper, fuller, more meaningful, one must first walk the path themself.

When you’re in the midst of it, you don’t realize that one day the you you’re currently living will become a past version of yourself. That you will mourn the loss of her as fiercely as you celebrate the new version of yourself that has been birthed from her ashes. When you’re in that present moment, you’re just trying to put one foot in front of the other, trying to make the best decisions you can, trying to embrace where you’re at. It isn’t until afterwards that you discover, you were there doing it all along.

I spent a lot of my time in New York saying that to myself. I’m here, actually doing this. I constantly had to remind myself to look up from the ground and realize the gravity of really being there, living out my wildest dreams that I had dared to come up with as a small girl.

Now on the other side of it and out of the mindset of “should” and “should’ve,” I know that those two years occupy such an important pinnacle for me creatively. I’m the same as I was, and yet so fundamentally different. It was a chapter of exponential growth, some of which I’m still processing what it means for me now. I’m braver, yet more balanced. Being alone in my own head doesn’t scare me anymore and being introspective isn’t a bad thing. It’s my superpower.

The saying goes that everything always looks better in hindsight. I know there are pieces of my New York chapter that I’m able to reminisce on because I’m no longer in that part of my life. I also know there are parts of my life post-New York that I wouldn’t give up and that wouldn’t have happened had I stayed. But it doesn’t mean that there isn’t a small part of me that might always miss it, just a touch.

In truth, I miss a place that no longer exists. New York, herself, still stands, timeless and merciless as always. The physical places I went to, walked by, lived in, got coffee at, drank cocktails with, and hurried in the shuffle from one stop to another—they all still exist, likely quite the same, too. The streets all have the same names and I bet if I went back tomorrow, I’d still be as orientated as I was on the day I left. I don’t think you can take the city out of the girl, even once she’s left.

But the place that I mourn doesn’t exist anymore, because the girl that I was when I inhabited it also doesn’t exist any longer. Somewhere between stops on the 1, too many martinis, a story dying to be told, a failed engagement, the loss of what could’ve been, and the persistent mountain breeze… She disappeared. She’s out there somewhere collecting stardust alongside college-aged Lyn, teenaged Lyn, and little Lyn. I’m grateful every day for the sacrifices and decisions she made that led me here. But I miss her.

Some day her story will written down on the pages of one of my books.

For now, I’m still figuring out what this version of myself is. I titled this blog or journal (or whatever you want to call these ramblings) CurrentLyn, because I wanted it to serve as little snapshots, almost like trail markers, of what I was currently doing and who I currently am. Currently Lyn. CurrentLyn. I find it apropos that I’ve returned to this space in a time where I’m really still figuring out who I currently am.

Perhaps, that is how it always feels. That the past versions of ourself we know we no longer are, become concrete and monolithic in our memories, while the current versions of us spin helplessly in concentric circles wondering what the hell we’re doing. Maybe it’s the knowing better that makes the past reflexive and the not knowing that makes the current the present.

I don’t succeed at it every day, but I’ve been trying my hardest this year to leave room for surprise, to make space for the unexpected. I’m learning that when you open the door for it, life has a way of giving you things you didn’t even know you needed. Sometimes it’s reconnecting with important people of your past. Sometimes it’s meeting new people by chance. Sometimes it’s living life with your sister and healing together. Sometimes it’s a cat.

One must remember to look up from the map long enough to actually see what is on the path they’re walking right in front of them.

I hope today that you look up. Even if for just a moment.

xoxo, Lyn

*This entry discusses mental health, and may be sensitive to some readers.*

Hi there,

It’s me, Lyn.

Look. See, we’re doing this. Sitting down and writing. Honoring our commitments to ourselves and to our practice. This is good. It’s needed.

Can I be honest?

The calendar turned to January this year and my seasonal depression sucker-punched me in the face with a force so hard, I actually thought I had reverted back to a version of myself from five years ago. Man, was I so caught off guard by it. I keep having to remind myself that I’m in a really, and I mean really, different place than I was last winter.

I think I’ve always suffered with some seasonal depression, even as a kid. I can look back at my childhood and remember moments in the dark winter months where I really didn’t want to do anything. But as a child, you have so much structure: parents, school, extracurriculars, homework, chores, reading lists… That you don’t really have time to process that the sadness the cold season brings is something affecting you.

I do, however, distinctly remember how much it impacted my mother. How the winter months seemed to add an extra weight onto her shoulders. How she was more forgetful, less excited, more sleepy, and less herself. And how when spring would arise from the depths of the rainclouds, my mom, as I knew her, would return.

As an adult now, I look at those memories of childhood winters with such empathy. She was struggling with the season, and yet she somehow she still made every Christmas holiday season magical, still packed every lunchbox, still tucked every daughter in with a kiss. Despite it all, she held it together. Got through it. Made it to spring.

For me, anxiety and depression are lovers with interlocked hands. Where one goes, the other follows not far behind. They’re the same divisive force interrupting my brain, you just never are sure which one is going to pack the punch first. I think it’s always been this way for me, and it’s just taken a really long time to figure that out.

I’ve owned having anxiety for quite a while. I know it’s something that I’ve always had from the time I was very small. When it completely derailed my life in my early 20s, I finally claimed it and sought out the help I needed for it. Somehow, owning that I had anxiety was easier. I think I thought to myself, Almost everyone has some kind of anxiety. Mine is just a little bit more than some people’s. Somehow it wasn’t that big of a deal to accept it and instead giving it a name made it much easier to tackle it.

Depression… She was a beast a lot harder to declare. In truth, I’m still working on owning her as a part of my makeup. If anxiety is a pulsating sea urchin stabbing me in the chest repeatedly, reminding me to run over and over, then depression is a slippery eel with gargantuan jaws who sneaks from the depths to pull me under the surface without me even knowing it.

Often the two work in perfect tandem. You spiral so high up into anxiety that suddenly you’re deep down in the bottom of depression. Honestly, who has time for that? I’m being sarcastic, but really, what a time suck mental health spirals are. I feel like there are whole chapters of my life that got lost to the mental ebb and flow, and I know I’m not alone in that.

Now depression and seasonal depression—two different critters. Maybe one day I’ll spend a longer amount of time talking about depression depression, but since she and I are still figuring out our tango together, you’ll have to forgive me for the time being. Seasonal depression though, that’s what we’re chatting about. You’re rambling, Lyn. Yes, right. Back to point.

Seasonal depression or winter blues or whatever name you may call it, I think it sneaks up on us all. The end of the year slide from American Thanksgiving to Christmas to New Year’s quite literally catapults you into the winter stratosphere with no parachute and no idea how you ended up smack dab in the middle of January barely clinging to half your sanity. Like misplaced car keys or a clock that always runs two minutes behind, somehow you blink and go holy shit the month’s almost over.

No resolutions or goals even made it onto the list. Nothing feels new or shiny or sparkly at all. It’s all just cold and flat and, let’s admit it, abysmal. Why someone decided that the calendar should start in the northern hemisphere’s winter season I will never understand. Maybe that guy had seasonal depression, too.

You know, I’m calling bullshit on this whole winter thing. It just sucks this year. It’s always tough, but isn’t it like the extra supreme deluxe version of sucking this year?

I’ve found myself finally lifting my head up after a nice few weeks of simply the most debilitating anxiety I’ve had in a while. (Like really, laying on the couch doing breathing techniques and staring at the ceiling kind of anxiety.) And I’m realizing that it’s the first time I’ve lifted my head up and looked beyond two steps in front of me in a really long time.

Sometimes that’s what we have to do. To get through trauma (which you know if you read my last post, I’ve been in no short supply of that lately), you just have to put blinders on and focus on one day, one hour, one minute at a time. You tell yourself, I got through yesterday, so I can get through today. If I can get through today, then I can get through tomorrow. Sometimes that’s just how you have to exist. And sometimes that’s how you have to exist for a long time.

I’m here to tell you that it’s okay. It wasn’t the first time. It won’t be the last. But you will get through it.

In the darkest of dark, the coldest of winters, when I sit in the quiet alone by myself, this is what I remind myself. You. Will. Get. Through. It.

Without fail the voice in my head always demands to know how? It sure does feel like it will never end. Maybe I will be here forever. How do you know that you will get through it? How do you know that this is true?

My answer is always the same.

I will get through it.

Because I have before.

And I know I will again.

Because I have before.

Spring is coming, dear friends. Even if it is just one day at a time to get there, do not forget that the flowers will bloom, the birds will hatch, the sun will return, and you will breathe.

And keep breathing.

xoxo, Lyn

Hi there,

It’s me, Lyn.

Hi, yeah, let’s try this again.

When I launched (or attempted to launch) CurrentLyn last spring, I really felt like it was the right moment to do it. I was in the midst of some rather big life changes. You know graduating, moving (again), a whole slew of personal things… And I thought to myself, you know what keeps me grounded through huge transitional changes like this? Writing. And there’s no better way to do that, than to commit to something like a blog, something that will hold me accountable. And I truly, truly thought to myself—this is it, I can do it.

And then… honestly… my whole life fell apart.

Like not just a little bit. Like the entire thing fell apart.

You know when you’re watching a horrible accident? This one time in college, I watched a man walk straight into a glass wall and physically bounce backwards, slammed on his back to the ground. His nose started bleeding, and he just blinked up at the ceiling, utterly dazed and completely confused how he ended up on his back, bloody, with a bunch of college students rushing to his aid. And at the time it happened, it played out in slow motion. I saw him walking and I knew he was going to hit the glass, and there was absolutely nothing I could do to stop it in time. It just happened. And we just had to deal with the aftermath.

That’s what my life for the last year has felt like. A horrible accident, unfolding in slow motion, unable to stop it from happening. All I could do was watch and deal with the aftermath.

At the beginning of 2023, I had to make some hard decisions about my professional work. Ones that had left me heartbroken and confused. My career trajectory changed overnight and I was no longer sure exactly what it was I wanted to do work wise. I tried to focus on completing my Masters degree, but it was hard to complete it knowing that I wasn’t certain how I would be putting it to use any longer. I pushed through anyway because I was so close to completing it, it would have been a waste not to. And as my therapist reminded me every session for that stretch of time, Education is never a waste.

I applied for work in New York, trying to see if I could stay, trying to see if I even wanted to stay. Nothing stuck. I was overqualified and under-specialized for everything that they’d give me an interview for, if they’d even give me an interview. And without a reason to stay… It was just too expensive to justify another year. I made my peace with the reality that my time in the city was just going to be a short chapter of my ongoing story. Shorter than I had envisioned, but so damn important nonetheless.

I prepared for a move back down south. I graduated. I packed the life I’d built for two years up in a truck. I drove home to the mountains. And I cried a lot.

Then my grandmother got diagnosed with cancer. My family, who holds me up through everything, all had to quickly adjust to treatment plans, changes in our day-to-day, and the new reality that our time with her has become much more limited, much quicker than we’d anticipated. Any way you slice it, cancer sucks.

And as if my career being in freefall, my familial life running the hurdles, and my place of living completely changing both states and cities wasn’t enough, 2023 put a massive shit cherry on top with my relationship ending. I don’t talk too much about my personal relationships online, mostly because I value my privacy immensely and my anxiety doesn’t need any additional reasons to keep me awake in the middle of the night. So when my relationship ended this past summer, it was a quiet, solemn affair that I kept close to the chest. I still probably won’t talk about it at length publicly, not for a long while, even if it gets processed onto pages of my stories.

But there’s the rub—to process most of anything, I must write it. First in my head, then out loud, and finally onto the page. Words are the only way to know that something is actually true for me.

No one wants to announce that they’ve ended an engagement. It’s embarrassing to admit that you went from thinking you’d marry someone to breaking up with them. It’s humiliating to tell everyone that you were wrong about something you thought you were so sure about. It’s hard to own that you were part of the problem. It’s difficult because there’s a whole other human, a whole second side to the story of what happened, and even though you’re empathic about that, it’s still painful. It’s terrifying to uproot everything you’d worked on for the last three years. It’s scary to say that what you thought you wanted, you no longer do.

And really, when you distill it all down and set aside the did’s or did-not’s of the whole situation, that’s the truth. What I thought I wanted, I realized, I simply no longer did. While making that choice was probably the hardest thing I’ve had to, it was the right thing. The right thing is often the hard thing.

A lesson I’ve been learning lately is that we are only as happy as the limitations we allow ourselves to impose on our lives. I’m sure I’m not alone in having lived my life with a certain set of of boxes I thought I had to check off along the way. There’s a certain narrative that American culture seems to press on its youth, specifically its women, and I think its an easy one to fall for. Find true love, marry it, give it babies, and spending the rest of your life making everyone else around you happy.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not here to say I don’t believe in love (I do), or think marriage doesn’t work when two partners are evenly matched (it does), or creating a family can’t be a joyful, fulfilling adventure (it can). But I think the trouble is that sometimes we tell our young women that all they can amount to is a wife and a mother, and that those are the main goals they need to strive for. The rest of your accomplishments are just extracurriculars on your way to that final destination of homemaker.

We get told to sit down, shut up, look pretty, and be polite. We get taught to make ourselves smaller so we’re more palatable, more digestible. Every corner we turn reinforces that we are not meant to have desires or dreams of our own.

You know what I realized this last year? Fuck that.

I want to be heard and seen for who I actually am. I want to take up space with all of my complexity. I want my aspirations to lead my life, not be a secondary afterthought of “wouldn’t it be nice?”. I want to be loved for who I am exactly as I am, and not who I might one day become. I want to live fully and completely, even if it means it looks rather unorthodox and it doesn’t make sense to everyone. I want to be allowed to want. And I want more.

And that’s okay.

I’ve spent the last few months scrapping my soul back together, finding my pieces that make me me, and remembering what it’s like to live each day in the present moment unabashedly and with true peace. Everything completely changed and yet, I am still me. My resilience anchored me through the turbulent transitions, as I know it will continue to do so.

I’m still figuring it out. I’m still untangling grief, battling anxiety, and processing massive changes that have irrevocably altered my life’s course. But I’m the happiest I’ve been in forever. I’m so very loved. I’m so very lucky.

It’s taken months, but that itch to write has surely, steadily crept back into my fingers.

So I took a deep breath, and I said to myself, Okay, let’s try this again.

The person often most deserving of second chance is yourself.

I hope you give yourself one today.

xoxo, Lyn