It’s been a little quiet here on the blog. Life has been so crazy, I don’t even know what to tell you. But I told myself I wanted to write a new post before the end of July and now it is the END of July so I am doing it. Today.

So hello again. ❤

The other day I walked along York Harbor Beach in Maine on my way home from Portland, where I’d been visiting friends for the weekend.

In this new phase of life I’m in, I go where I want. I’m on my own timeline. I’m not beholden to anyone else: I have the car and can drive down the coast and stop at as many or as few places as I want. I could drive straight home from a visit to Portland, or I could stop at every beach along the southern coast of Maine.

I decided to drive to the beach in York. It was raining. I sat in the car for awhile watching the rain on the beach and it was so beautiful. It was gray. There were only a couple of people on the beach. I ate some leftover Thai food sitting in my car, looking at the rain.

Finally I decided I wanted to swim, despite or maybe because of the rain and the gray, so I walked down onto the beach, put my clothes under the empty lifeguard chair so they wouldn’t get soaked, and jumped in the water.

It was so
so
so
so
so
cold. I had also swam (swum?) the previous day at Cliff House Beach in Portland, where the water was equally freezing. I guess this is as warm as the water ever gets in Maine? It was invigorating. It made me go numb and gasp with the feeling of being alive, and I lost all the sensation in my toes.

After my dip, I walked down the beach and found some beautiful seashells. Then I heard a voice reverberating around and it seemed to be coming from everywhere or nowhere and it said: There is more beauty for you. There is more beauty for you. There is more beauty for you.

This is something I’ve sometimes doubted, with all that I’ve lost in this year. My marriage. My job. My career, or at least the first act of it. My apartment. Raja and I separated a few months ago, and this terrible time came a few months after I lost my job due to the DOGE cuts. In the middle of all that, our landlord sold the apartment we were renting, so we had to move out quickly.

I suppose when you lose so much at once, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking: well, I guess it’s over for me. There was some beauty, I had a good run.

In York, I fingered the shells and felt the icy ocean water lap over my feet. The rain was still sprinkling when I walked down the beach and the sand was dark gray, soft and silky. I kept hearing the voice telling me about the beauty still to come.

^{York Harbor Beach and Cliff House Beach, Maine.}

This is a powerful message, and I think it applies to all of us. Whatever moment you’re in right now, there is more beauty for you. Maybe you’ve just gone through a phase of loss (let’s talk!). Maybe you’re in a season of stagnation, or hope – the kind where you desperately want things to work out but you just don’t know how, or if, or when they will. There’s always so much uncertainty. The other day I said to a friend, I just want to know what happens in the future, is that too much ask?

In the loss, in the stagnation, in the waiting: There is more beauty for you.

This beauty can come in wildly unpredictable shapes and forms. That is something that this year has taught me, too.

We never know what good things will hit us. I tend to spend more time waiting for the other shoe to drop. My mind likes to come up with scary possible scenarios that could happen, but it less frequently serves up beautiful, delicious scenarios that could (just as easily) happen.

I paused at the end of the beach and turned back, looking for more shells. I considered the fact that I might be quite late to meet my friend at the Lowell Folk Festival, my next stop along meandering home, because I hadn’t been paying any attention to the time. I considered that it didn’t really matter. On the other side of loss: great gusts of grief. Great gusts of freedom.

I want to explain what I do and don’t mean by freedom, because talk of losing my marriage implicitly references another person, and I want to be sensitive to that. This is not a narrative with one good person and one bad person; this is not an easy, black-and-white story you can grasp onto.

But what I mean at the moment is: no one is expecting me home at a certain time, now. There is no dinner plan. I live alone. I no longer share a car with someone else. If I stayed in York all day or even drove back up to Portland and stayed another night, it would not pose a problem for anyone. The friend I was going to meet wouldn’t mind if I arrived on time or late, or missed it altogether. Each of these points could be “good” or “bad” depending how you view it. (Nice, there’s no dinner plan, or, ugh, there’s no dinner plan.)

Recently I was sitting at my desk and staring vacantly at my laptop screen, contemplating the fact that I need to apply for new jobs. Then it occurred to me that I could get in my car right at that very moment and drive all the way to San Diego. The possibilities, the freedom of this, felt kind of terrifying in that moment.

On the first day of 2025, I didn’t expect I’d be living alone and not working a nine-to-five office job for large chunks of this year. The combination of those two things has created in my life a level of freedom I’ve never had before. It can be a scary abyss, and it can also be sweet, delicious, a wide-open day.

But these days, one way I cope with being cut loose from all my moorings is to keep most decision-making limited to one day at a time in my head.

From York, I decided I did want to go to the folk music festival and see my friend, after all. So once I was thoroughly soaked from the rain, I walked back up the beach, threw the seashells into the sea, and went on my way.

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