This time last month, I was still hunkered down in my little bunker at the bottom of my friends' house in Cleveland, working part time at a job I liked, but also knew was temporary and was barely paying me enough to keep my existence from becoming exponentially more difficult that it already was.
As has been my habit, I was still applying to jobs all over the place, hoping someone...anyone, would realize there is a guy out there with all these skills and all this experience who just wants to go back to work and make what I can only speculate equals a decent living at this point in time. And, as has been the norm for me going all the way back to 2014, the responses I got 99.99999% of the time remained constant.
That, of course, being the word No.
Then, not long after my birthday, I got an email from one of the more unlikely places I could've received any correspondence at all from.
Bangor, Maine - pop. 36,000
Someone I'd sent a resume to back in April apparently wanted to talk to me about going back to New England to work for them in putting together the news. A subsequent phone interview somehow led to a second interview and then I was told that I'd maybe hear back before Memorial Day on if I got the job or not.
Turned out I didn't have to wait that long. The job offer came that Thursday, and by the time everyone got back to work post-holiday, I was already scrambling to pack up my life into about a hundred boxes again and trying not to lose my mind as it sank in that I had a job again. Not only that, but I was going to have things like insurance and an apartment...and dishes...and my own bed!
It took a lot of late nights, and a whole lot of money I didn't have but which was given to me by some unbelievably generous and awesome people, but 900 miles across four states later...here I am, writing this in what is now the office of my apartment, having just gotten off a shift and in a little bit, I'm going to climb into my actual, proper bed and fall asleep in no-time flat.
When life turns on a dime like that, it's hard not to get a case of whiplash. The last three-four weeks have been a surreal blur from not knowing if things were ever going to get better again suddenly, BAM!!, they are better.
And let me be clear on something. For as depressing as things were in Ohio, they could've been so much worse if I'd had to try surviving there alone like I'd had to in Massachusetts through most of 2017. That I had a place where I could be safe and allowed to exist without any major strings attached, with people who genuinely cared about me and wanted me to just be okay...?
There's no metric I know of to quantify the level of gratitude I have for those two people, because they didn't have to do that. They could've been like a lot of other people I've known in my life who offered nothing but cheap sympathies, then threw up their hands and said there was nothing they could do. That eighteen months I spent there helped rehabilitate me on several levels and that was just as essential to my getting to this point as anything else.
So here I am, in the part of the world I wanted to be in when I set out from the Pacific Northwest three years ago. I have a job and it's a good one in my chosen career path, which is pretty rare these days. I have a roof over my head, places for my stuff and space to exist in.
I have health insurance I can actually use and I've already started to, which means I can hopefully get both my mind and my body finally put right. There's a lot of other things I get along with this job that I think a lot of people would take for granted pretty fast, and I have to keep reminding myself not to, because I know better than anyone what it's like to have next to nothing with seemingly no end to it in sight.
I also now have the freedom and flexibility to explore things externally and internally, and to keep figuring out the version of me I want going forward, which isn't easy to do when you're continuously forced into a prolonged stasis. It's equal parts frightening and exciting to think maybe I'm at a point where all these things that have been packed into all these boxes I've been dragging around since 2016 will never have to go back into them again.
But all this wouldn't be possible were it not for the fact that what I wanted to happen, what I've been trying to make happen with every fiber of my being for almost an entire decade has happened. Someone gave me a job I wanted in a part of the world I want to be in.
Sure, Maine isn't the flashiest place in the world. It's not Boston or L.A. or Miami. That's fine. I don't need to be there to be happy. I tried that already and we all know how that went anyway. What I've always wanted was a place where I could exist and be comfortable.
Have I found it here? Honestly, it's too soon to tell after being here barely two weeks. But this I know.
It's definitely growing on me.
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