November is the first month in over a year that I allowed to go unremarked upon here. It was a crazy month that had a lot of looming questions. They are the kinds of questions I would like to be able to look back on asking myself but were also the kinds of questions that I couldn’t exactly sift through in so public a venue. A thing I find myself saying a little more often than I would like.
Here, then, for my own benefit is a quick summary: in October I applied for a job. It’s the only job I’ve applied for in about a year, which is to say that I wasn’t really looking, but also desperately wanted this job. VA life wasn’t always great for a variety of reasons, but it was good enough that I was only going to leave it for something I dearly wanted. At the end of October I was called for a Skype interview, which happened in the middle of November. It was probably the only work-from-home day that month in which I put on real pants. I drank too much coffee and nervous laughed my way through most of it.
I sent my bestie and human resources wizard a panicked email about the interview taking less time than I expected. They said 30–45. It only took a little over 20. Clearly this is evidence that they hated me and wanted to end this call as quickly as humanly possible and that’s the only explanation.
A few days later I was offered a job as Assistant Editor at Crash Course, which I accepted without hesitation. I don’t really remember the content of the call, quite so much as standing around the kitchen at my very part-time not-at-home job, looking out the window. And I remember being the peppiest damn facilitator the world had ever seen for the rest of that day. Just two weeks after that phone call, on the day after Thanksgiving, I was putting the last of my stuff in my car and heading off to my new home in Montana.
So, you know. a crazy month.
For all the things I didn’t discuss in the entire month of November, there’s even more to say about my first week in Montana. In short: it has been a weird week.
My 23 hour drive was largely uneventful until I entered Montana and the sky was all, “LOL, girl, you don’t know what you’re doing.” I clutched the steering wheel as I crept along icy highways and watched my ETA get later and later, but I was getting here.
And then I spun out, just 15 miles shy of my exit. After getting so frighteningly close, I lost control with the end in sight. That’s really why it happened, to be honest. I got a little more eager and a little less cautious. More on that another day. The good news is that I was so close. I got towed to my hotel and got a rental car in the morning.
I spent most of Sunday getting to know some of my new coworkers, still a little overwhelmed. Drained from the drive and the car and the exhausting, all-consuming activity of “desperately needing to be liked.” On Monday I started my new job and it was a great day aside from the part where I had another epic debacle in which the quick errand to sign my lease turned into a 3+ hour nightmare of standing in different lines. It’s the worst kind of torture because on top of being utterly miserable, there’s not even a worthwhile story to tell at the end of it.
All of that is to say that things are good at my shiny new (to me) desk. Questionable things happen away from it. Also: I’m never moving again because moving is the worst.
But I have an apartment and this job that I adore. On Friday I went out and explored my new home with some of these fantastic new coworkers and ended the night by winning a rigged game of bingo and then a race in which I was a horse’s ass. Or, rather, a unicorn’s ass.
The last year and a half has seen some turbulence and I mentioned over the summer that in the middle of all of that I think it’s really important to stop and appreciate those upswings. I’d also like to get better at being honest when it’s shitty, but just documenting, “Here is where things were wonderful,” is — for me, at least — an important record-keeping exercise. It’s useful to have done that in those times when they are not wonderful. I think of it as a personal road map — a means of finding my way back.
I’m carless for another week and a half and I spent the last of the money I had to get up here on sorting out my vehicular drama, but I still feel as though things are going incredibly well. I’m happier at my office than away from it. I’m finally in a position where my job is actually something that I deeply enjoy instead of just “a way to facilitate things that I enjoy.” That’s a novelty I wasn’t entirely sure was possible.
A lot of what I wasn’t writing about in November was thinking about that. On the one hand, if I hadn’t gotten this job, I suppose it wouldn’t have been the end of the world. I could have kept doing what I was doing: Working mostly from home. Saving money. Preparing to move anywhere just because I could. I was stalling, though, because I wanted to know that I could leave for good, and I was still feeling very uncertain about that element of my plan. The hardest part would have been reconciling the seed this job planted: the idea that I could actually love the job part as much as the things it enables me to do. I’m not sure I would have been able to keep on just as I had been.
And thankfully, I don’t have to find out. After a month of mulling that over, I couldn’t be happier with the end result. (OK, fine, maybe a little happier if I had my car — but for a day or two there I was convinced it was going to be totaled, so HEY, it’s all relative.)
November was a quiet month in appearance only. It was the beginning of some very good things. Some very good things I wasn’t sure I could talk about because it had this vague feeling of delicacy — that if I got too close I’d drop it and it would all fall apart.
But it hasn’t. Life is good. X marks the spot.