Moving house, finding Home

I can't believe how quickly time moves. Has anyone else noticed this?

I've been meaning to write for the past week, but it's difficult sometimes to kick my own butt into writing. It's pretty ironic (well, less ironic than hypocritical), considering how uppity I get when my friends haven't blogged in a WHOLE THREE DAYS or something, but that's neither here nor there.

Let's start with upcoming events and then work backwards: tomorrow we move into our new house! Which means that tonight and tomorrow morning will be a flurry of cleaning and packing, and the next week will be a mess of settling in and buying cutlery, pots, pans, and toilet paper. It's not at all real to me. In no way have I integrated the fact that at this time tomorrow I'll be moved into a new room all the way across the city. Similarly, I've only slightly taken into consideration that the weather is getting colder and wetter, and starting on Monday I'm going to have a 10mile cycling commute into work. Having only just gotten over a cold, you can see why this might make me a bit wary... if I allowed myself to think about it, that is. But at the moment, it seems, I'm content to ignore the upcoming insanity and carry on as though nothing is changing.

In my defense, I think I've earned my lassez-faire attitude towards our new home. This is because, over the past five days, I've put an inordinate amount of stress and energy into our soon-to-be-old home. It's a long story, but the short version is that the guy who was in charge of finding new tenants for the house didn't find ones for immediately after the current people (myself included) would be leaving, and when the landlady returned from holiday and found out, she freaked. As a result, there's been a lot scrambling to cover the holes, financial and physical, left behind, and most of the scrambling has been done by me (though Pablo has been very helpful.) It's actually not that bad - on closer examination it turned out there were only one or two rooms/weeks of rent that were unaccounted for, and so all is not lost. There were just a couple of hours there where I allowed myself to shake my fist at the heavens and be a drama queen. (And to secretly think "I told you so," because I totally saw this coming. But anyway.)

Regardless, most of the house drama will be behind me within the next few days (knock on wood), simply because I won't be living there any more. I will miss the house, though. Ana Mirtha, Javi, and Baerbel have been staying with us for the past week since Natali and Agnese have been in Italy and Jed and Rebecca have moved east, and it's been particularly cozy of late. Last night was Ana Mirtha's birthday, which called for cupcakes, and every other night this week has followed the pattern of dinner, movie, bed. I hope this next house will feel as much like home.

Speaking of the shifting of homes, I visited Dublin last weekend. It was... I don't know. It was a weird weekend. I mean, as always it was great to arrive in a familiar city and see lovely familiar faces in the form of Will and Simon and Cian and Conor and Kate and Nika, but I could've timed it better. I mean, the whole point of flying out was to see Will's show, and with working during the week the only time I could go was Saturday, but Saturday was their closing night and the final weekend of the Dublin Fringe, which essentially meant that everyone (understandably) wanted to go out and party and talk about the Fringe and the Dublin theatre scene and a bunch of actors I don't know and shows I hadn't seen. Which is completely understandable. And I should've seen it coming. But I didn't, and as a result I felt a little left out. Not willfully excluded, just sad. It drove home (no pun indended) the point that Dublin isn't my home anymore. Add onto this state of affairs a general lack of sleep, and you get an emotional Isabel valiantly fighting off tears in a pub as she realises that she doesn't feel like she belongs anywhere at the moment.

And it's true, I think, that there's nowhere I particularly belong at the moment. I mean yes, the sentiment is a touch melodramatic (as am I, let's face it), but hear me out. I think this explains a lot - from not being particularly homesick for Minneapolis as such to not feeling completely At Home in London - there's nowhere in the world that I feel that I Must Be at the moment, where I Belong. And there's immense freedom in that, but there's also a fair share of sorrow. I was certainly feeling the sorrowful part of it this weekend, when I very much felt on-the-outside-looking-in for most of it. But Will gave me some excellent advice when I shared my sense of loss with him, which I'm trying to implement these days and I think will help me through the year: that it's ok to be sad, but it's important to share it. Not to swallow it if it's in your throat, not to smile if the smile's not truthful. It's simple advice, but true, and a truth I need to be reminded of. (In fact, I've been reminded of it before - by Gemma, when I was in Uganda. My dear friends do know me well.) This reminder to be true to myself ties in with all the self-discovery and growing up that keeps piling on this year - that learning to believe that I am enough, that learning of confidence that builds others up with me and doesn't necessitate a hierarchy, that being ok with how I am when I am whatever I am. I get the sense it's a life-long lesson, and I'm hoping I'm up for the climb.

I also realised this week as I was paging through some old blog entries that I never wrote about the individual performances we did at the end of the year. Basically, we learned 20 movements over the course of the year (some straight-up mime, some gymnastic, some simpler and more esoteric) and for our final evaluation each person had to create their own choreography consisting only of these 20 movements (and each one only once) and then perform it, solo, in front of the faculty and their classmates. The reason I bring it up now, is because I think my presentation was one time that I was able to drop all the excess baggage, all the commentary and the flourish, and just be myself, and the movement, and the calmness onstage. I got the best feedback I've ever gotten, and the best feedback I heard, and it was wonderful because I was finally able to show something I always knew was there.

So maybe that's the moral of the story. That it's there, whatever "it" is - a home within myself as well as a Home out there in the world. It just takes a little digging, a little searching, a little hope, a little faith. And at the end of the day, chances are that it will have been right here, in my heart, in my hands, all along.