The Green Side of Town
April 20, 20222021 was a year of jubilation and heartbreak, and I’ve found that these often go together. Great heartbreak leads to great expansion, and in my experience, these opposing yet collaborative forces seem to work with such swiftness that cries of joy often come within days of cries of sorrow. However, for those of you who’ve experienced heartbreak, which is—I imagine—all of you, then maybe you too have learned that joy does not eliminate pain, that grief finds its way to linger, and that while there is a magic in heartbreak that seems to make way for the bestowal of great gifts, the gifts themselves merely bring perspective on the pain and the awareness that life goes on.
Joy is always available, and pain it seems is simply sometimes its culprit.
This summer, within a span of ten days, I fired my PR person, my literary agent, and released the final issue of The Magic Guide. I wiped the slate clean. The reasons for this were clear and unquestioning, but the grief was real. And to my former employer who once told me “you can’t be upset if you’re the one who ends it,” I say bullshit. I’d made all the right decisions for myself, and I was sad about it. I felt the loss of everything I’d built and the sharp pain of having had my trust broken by people I’d chosen to trust. But I also felt the sweet sense of relief. The freedom that comes with open space and nothing on your calendar. The freedom to just be.
What would I do with all this freedom?
On my very first day of freedom, I drove myself to my favorite restaurant and sat outside on a covered balcony, overlooking a waterfall. Dragonflies danced in twos on the railing while I ate honey covered biscuits, sipped my cappuccino, and wrote without obligation and simply for joy.
This is where I’ll stay. I’ll stay right here.
But eventually, I had to get in the car and drive the twenty minutes back to the apartment where my husband and I were living.
The apartment was on what I had dubbed “the grey side of town,” which opposed where I was now—on “the green side of town.” I felt the passage between the two sides every time we crossed the same street. As we’d drive from grey to green, I’d quickly pronounce, Things are so nice over here! And my husband would laugh about how I said the exact same thing at the exact same point in the drive every time. But it was different over here. I felt it every time, and eventually I looked at a map and saw that there really is a very clear vertical line running through town. On one side of the line, the map is grey, and on the other, it’s green. It wasn’t just in my mind. It really was greener, more lush, which for me equaled “nicer, better, where I wanted to be.”
And on my first day of self-selected freedom, I drove to the green side of town, and I decided to stay.
An hour later, a house was listed on the green side of town that checked all our boxes, and over the next four days, all things came together for us in the place that CNBC had just declared the fastest real estate market in the country. My husband and I raised glasses in celebration. We couldn’t believe we had just bought a home. We didn’t think this was remotely a possibility for 2021. Yet here we were, flooded with joy and excitement.
This all happened in ten days - the firing of my team, the release of the final monthly Magic Guide, and the purchase of our first house. It all wove together in a tapestry of emotion that was less of a pendulum swing from grief to joy and more of a sweet surrender to everything as it truly was—not separate, but working together, hand-in-hand.
…
As I processed the events of those ten days, I couldn’t help but think of a vision I had in June.
I was lying on a massage table, receiving physical touch from a stranger for the first time since Covid, and it was like every subtle stress point, every locked feeling, everything I hadn’t quite admitted to myself about how hard the last fifteen months had been was released from my body, and I saw clearly there on the table how I didn’t want any of it. I didn’t want public attention. I didn’t want to be on Instagram. I didn’t want to be typing up a bunch of interviews for people. And I didn’t want to be producing a 50+ page, fully illustrated, publication every month for the rest of my life. I was exhausted.
All I wanted was to live in peace with the messages that flood my being, to create all the things I’m inspired to create, to live in a nice little house with my husband and cat, surrounded by friends and family, and I saw us in my mind — in a house on the green side of town. I saw myself there, writing and creating. I saw myself sharing my work through new channels that didn’t put me as a person on display but simply shared my work. And here I was, just two months later, and it was like everything had been reset in my life according to the vision that rose from my heart that day in June.
I’d closed the doors I needed to close.
And the one I really wanted was opened for me.
