I don’t know if this is every human or not since I’m stuck in my own experience, but a quality of mine that often gets in my way is the wide gap it can take for my thought to catch up to my feeling. The feelings take no time at all, they know what’s up in an instant—they might be wrong and not totally understand the situation, but they know how they feel. The thoughts, on the other hand, come more slowly—they evaluate, re-evaluate, and then they have to find the words to express themselves. This can take hours, weeks, years, a lifetime. Work meetings, personal relationships, responding to a simple “how’s your morning going,” I have always struggled with this disconnect, this gap, this utter lack of cooperation between heart and mind. And it’s at its all-time worst when it comes to my relationship with myself. For purposes of this particular entry, there are two gaps I want to touch on. One took 6 weeks and the other 3 years.

It has been 6 weeks since my last blog post because shortly after the last post in May, George Floyd was murdered, one of many proof points that we are not all equal and free in the land of equality and freedom. Writing about or striving for happiness just felt wrong. The tasks still felt important, I kept those up for the most part, but something didn’t feel right. People are dying from an epidemic, police brutality, and systemic injustice, and for some reason we’re arguing about the existence of this fact. Personal happiness seemed disrespectful to the community wounds and experience and sitting in the muck for a while felt important.

And as I sat with this and thought about the resurrection of this blog, the word ‘inauthentic’ kept coming to mind. This leads me to 3 years. Three years ago, I moved from San Francisco to Detroit, a decision that was made with equal parts reason and haste. I loved/I love San Francisco in a way that I have never loved a place. It felt like home in a way that no other place has. I felt protected, understood, accepted; I felt like I belonged. But the cost of the city and the growing disparity between the rich and the destitute was too hard to watch and too difficult to maintain my place in the middle and the constant, tiring swim against that current. Staying would mean more of the same and no opportunity to grow. That was the reason. The haste was that we chose a city with no friends, ties, or personal history and made decisions that would lock us here for a very long time. And I said goodbye to my beloved home and my chosen family there, and I had little understanding of the gravity or emotional impact of that decision.

San Francisco was very much a bubble—I could assume political alignment, acceptance of my sexuality and experiences, it was compact and walkable so meeting people was easy. But I tapped my reserves of bravery in the move here, and instead of building them back up and venturing out to explore my new home, I created an even smaller bubble of my own house and that is where I’ve stayed. I was discussing this with a friend who suggested that I should have a funeral to honor the death of my life there, but again feeling came without thought. It felt wrong but I couldn’t say why. Finally the word “expansion” started rattling around in my brain, and I began to understand that killing my life there wasn’t the solution. I didn’t want to turn away from the people I love there, the city I love that I can always return to for a visit; it wasn’t a death. I moved to Detroit for growth; expansion is the key. I should be spending my effort on finally saying hello instead of ritualizing a goodbye, popping a hole in all the bubbles and expanding my idea of community and place.

And I realized, that’s why the blog felt inauthentic to me. The experiences in the posts were right and real, but it wasn’t telling the whole picture. Happiness is not always the end goal, and that’s how I was viewing it. It’s the work that matters, and I forgot that lesson in this round. And there is more work to be done than just those 5 tasks. There’s finding ways to best support my fellow humans who are not free or equal, there’s doing what I can to keep my community healthy, there’s honoring the giant life change I made and its continued impact, and there’s opening up my arms to embrace this new life, this new place that has been mostly kind and welcoming and still has so many things to reveal.

I don’t know what this all means for this blog yet. I’m still working through the feelings and toward more thoughts. But I wanted to get this down, as I feel I owe you an apology for a lack of explanation and for hiding the whole truth. I had a very revealing dream last night – I’ll spare you the details – but the theme was that this poor guy with no thumbs had convinced everyone his fingers were all there. No one knew he struggled and it was preventing him from real connection. So if you’re reading thing, I’m missing a thumb. You probably are, too. Let’s connect.