On moving

Or, as the Brits say, moving house

Anyone need a social media manager? I have openings starting in July!

The movers come in twenty-one hours. I’m here alone this week. Mark did much more than his share of packing, but he had to head to Connecticut, so I’m by myself for the last stretch. Packing. Cleaning. Crying a bit, on and off. Moving is hard. Finding an apartment in Boston is hard. Transitions are hard, and life is full of transitions.

When I’m feeling overwhelmed, sometimes the only way through for me is to write about it. I’ve been writing a lot lately.

For me, it’s so incredibly important to hold onto hope. I don’t just dream of everything being okay, I dream of love, I dream of beauty, I dream of abundance. An abundance of friends, of space, of trees, of clear blue sky. I imagine my world in pieces, not as a disaster, but as a rearranging before everything gets put back together again in a newer, better way. The hope needs to be big enough to fight back the despair. I’m sorry for mentioning despair in a paragraph about hope. But that’s the thing—the hope doesn’t exist without the despair. Joy doesn’t exist without pain. And, for me, none of those things can be processed, can be understood, without naming them. Writing about them.

And so this post shows up in your mailbox. I’m sorry. But, also, I hope for you as well. I hope for things as beautiful as your bright mind and soft heart can imagine. I hope for tears of joy and healing. I hope for love you can sink back into like an easy chair. I hope that the pain will be redeemed.

I believe it will be.

Okay, I have to get back to packing, but a couple of quick notes:

One, if you’d like to support my work here, or help pay for the move, there are paid subscriptions available:

And, two, I have openings for more clients for my social media management work, starting in July. I’ll write more about this soon, but if you are an author who is overwhelmed by social media (or if you know someone who is), why not let me take over the endless posting? You can find out more, and see samples of my work, at jessicakantrowitz.com.

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P.S. I’ve had this last line of Kim Addonizio’s beautiful poem To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall in my head since my friend Tim shared it last week:

I’m going to type it again, because that’s how it’s going through my head—over and over like a mantra:

And if you need to hear it one more time:

With love and hope,
Jessica