Lingering in Doorways

My grandparents are leaving tomorrow. I’ve been living with them in their house in L. for over a year now, ever since college started in August and my brother made his permanent move to California, and this time tomorrow they will be on a plane to visit him. They’ll be gone for three months this time — this vacation, typically an annual affair, is two summers overdue — which means that, for the second time in a year’s time, I will be moving houses. Tomorrow I’ll be back in my old house in M., where this time last year I was a different person living a different life.

But before that: the packing. I don’t know where to begin. I’m sitting silently in my bedroom, surrounded by heaps of books and clothes, and listening to the walls breathe. Like everything in this old house, it is full of shared history: peeling wallpaper and faulty light fixtures, but also a decade’s worth of family memorabilia. Just short of a hoarder’s nest when I first moved in, but in my year of residency I’ve made it somewhat liveable. Now these shelves hold the weight of new books. Candles and incense smoking in little clay pots. String lights and framed movie posters that scream ‘teenage girl’, although I technically haven’t been teen-aged for 6 months and 9 days. I’ve laugh and cried and rotted in this bed, made a pretty nesting space of this human-sized bubble, and spent so much care putting it all together that there’s violence in taking it apart. As I’m packing my belongings now, putting my old things in new boxes, I can’t help but sense that I’m witnessing the end of yet another season.

Ever since the pandemic started, I feel like my life has been upended in a million tiny different ways. Each miniscule diversion felt earth-shattering. I spent a good chunk of freshman year in constant misery, and clinging to constants was my only solace. My room. My bed. Things that were solid and real, things I could touch. It felt almost like I was locking myself in a bunker while the world burned around me, á la Kimmy Schmidt. Haunting my room like a ghost drawn to a past life.

I feel like my reluctance to leave, if anything, is the separation anxiety speaking. I love M. It’s my home, the place I’ve lived all my life, and I miss my grandma, my cats and the parks and streets of my childhood. But I’m tethered to this space now, and to my grandparents, which is what a year in self-imposed isolation will do to you. And ever since my old bedroom was taken apart, the house divided during the renovations, my childhood home feels like a stranger. I try to imagine my things in their new space, the differences in routine, and the next three or so months adjusting before I’m plucked from it and moved back. As much as I’d love to enjoy the return, the sudden shift makes me uneasy.

I’m sure there’s a metaphor in here somewhere. That my aversion to chance can be applied to a lot of things in my life. For instance, this habit I’ve developed of running away from my fears. Like when I stopped talking to my friends (for a year). Or when I ghosted my online therapist-for-a-day. Or every time I’ve opened Google Classroom and instantly burst into tears (twice. or maybe more). Sometimes I think I don’t want to get better, that a sick, twisted part of me likes not being okay. Sadness, I know, can be a familiar comfort too — a refuge of constancy, especially when it’s all you know.

This is the case for a lot of people, which a quick Google search confirms. “First of all,” (I quote from a random thread), “Your natural state has been one of unease and despair, and it’s natural that you’re comforted by this — it’s what you’ve known for so long, and we stay in places we find familiar.”

“Getting better is hard,” someone else follows in the responses. “When you’re bad for so long, you’re used to it, and getting better is something stranger and somehow terrifying. However, things which feel normal doesn’t mean they’re good for us. Getting better is hard, because it’s something good.”

Combing through the thread, as I expect, feels like being shocked by a douse of cold water. It’s different to read the words directly from people who are going through the same things I am; that our thought patterns are so alike, despite our situations being different. It is also simultaneously sad and reassuring — knowing firsthand now just how damaging depression can be, and how much it has destroyed my life, it’s upsetting to know that it has ruined many others. But it also helps to know that there is hope: that people before me have gone through this exact problem and survived. That I can learn from their experiences, and that they can teach me how to deal with mine.

For the longest time, I’ve been trying to convince myself that my current lifestyle is a unique form of healing. I’ve been saying that my isolation is self-care, not sabotage, and that I’m hiding from the world because I just need time. But maybe that’s not the case. Maybe that’s the lie I tell myself because the thought of relapsing is so painful. Maybe my room is only supposed to be a room, not a lifeline to cling to, not a barricade to hide behind when things get hard. Maybe this move is life’s way of coaxing me out into the world, and maybe packing up is my way of finally letting it.

As I sit on my bed, surrounded by both the things I will take and the things I will leave behind, I try to remind myself to be brave. None of this is easy. In fact, this choice — the choice to actively want to get better, and to take the steps to get there — is one of the hardest I’ve ever had to make. It means forcibly ripping myself away from what feels good, from the state I’m used to, and stopping myself from running away even when every nerve in my body is screaming at me to. I think it’s a lot like withdrawal in that sense; loneliness can be addicting. And giving into that addiction has lasting consequences.

But as much as change scares me, no change terrifies. I don’t want to live this way forever. I don’t want to remain stagnant all my life. As difficult as the move may be, I know in my heart how necessary it is, how important. Life has brought me to where I needed to go before, and now it has led me here.

And so — I think I’m doing it. I’m making that choice.

Tomorrow, as we load the luggages in the trunk and tidy up the kitchen and the living room and the beds, I will be saying my goodbyes. Not only to this house, but to the life I’ve lived here — a life I love and am grateful for, but a life I need to leave behind. And when I get back home, to my new room and new season, I will in turn be saying hello: to old friends, to better habits, and to more dreams, big and small. It feels right, I think. It’s time.

The door is finally open.