Stop the Presses: I Have Fallen In Love.

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Dear Everyone,
Yes, it has happened – the unthinkable – I have fallen in love. I know, this must come as a shock to most of you. I never thought it would happen either. But it’s true: for the second time in my life, I have fallen head over heels for a place that is not San Diego (the first time was Thailand).

I’m sorry if you were expecting a rather different kind of news. But as you probably know (if you know me at all), romance is just not a huge part of my life. And here’s the thing: a fundamental truth I have discovered (or finally admitted) about myself is the fact that place accounts for about 90%!o(MISSING)f my happiness at any given time. Sure, other things can bring me up or down – friends, family, work, stress, romantic upheavals, existential quandaries – but the truth is, my emotional baseline is set by the place I’m living and, even more importantly, how often I see the sun.

I’ve resisted this fact for a long time. In college I would weather the Philadelphia winters in the library, telling myself that work levels accounted for whatever bad days I had, that my 1000%!m(MISSING)ood elevation at the first sunshine and daffodils of spring was just a reaction to the proximity of rugby season, Spring Fling and, imminently, summer. Grad school was even worse. First of all, grad school is freakin HARD, man. I mean seriously just more work than you have EVER had before (I mean maybe this was just my grad school, but probably not). And difficult too because it’s somehow so much more real than college – the problems you’re working on are real, your professors are really the foremost people in your field trying to solve those problems, and there are truly no answers to the questions you’re trying to address, a fact that can be seriously emotionally exhausting. Plus the whole time you’re thinking, Is this REALLY what I want? I mean, I’m spending tens of thousands of dollars I don’t have on it, it damn well better be. ….But is it? Add to that the very real possibility of being published if you manage to miraculously pull something worthwhile out of whatever independent research you do, and grad school is just a big, solid wall of OHMYGOD hitting you square in the face. So that’s tough.

But more importantly, the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies is in New Haven, Connecticut, which just….sucks. I mean, I would never allow myself to hate it while I was there. I told myself I was happy. I told myself that it was a nice town, Yale was a nice campus, there was even some good food! All of which were more or less true. But I remember so many nights sitting on my bed – in my room basically swathed in rainbows and million-watt lightbulbs to make up for the fact that it got so little natural light – and wondering why I felt like nothing would ever be right again. I would think of the grad school I loved, despite the stress; the amazing people in my program, really just some of the most accomplished, awesome, yet down-to-earth fantastic people I had ever met; my incredible friends, the MOST fun people EVER. I’d think of how engaged I was in most of my classes, how much I loved learning, how much fun I was always having – the Forestry School events, champagne brunches, dinners with friends, theme parties, cookie parties, dance parties, you name it. And I wondered why everyone seemed to think that I was the most stressed-out person they’d ever seen, why I felt like crying myself to sleep at least 50%!o(MISSING)f the time for no ostensible reason, why every obstacle I encountered seemed like it would make my entire life come crashing down around me even when I knew very well it wasn’t that big a deal (I mean seriously, my life is ending because I didn’t do the reading for the next day? Let’s be real, people). I would wonder, It can’t just be the weather...Can it? No…It’s the stress/social difficulties/employment fears/existential angst. Or something. It must be. Although I had, as always, ups and downs, the best way I can describe my grad school life is to say that I went from a baseline of “content” in California to a baseline of “just okay” in New Haven. It was rough.

But then I moved here. Here in Grants, New Mexico, where I have almost no friends, where I’m not particularly in love with the work I’m doing, where there is no Trader Joes to supply me with capers and frozen shrimp at reasonable prices and most of the people I meet have never tried sushi, where one day on my way to work I drove past a sign advising me that the temperature was -15°F – I wake up smiling pretty much every day. I walk outside at noon and it’s literally freezing, but sunny, and I soak in that delicious Vitamin D and wonder just why exactly I’m so happy. I drive home in the afternoon and just stand in the middle of my still-POW-camp-looking little neighborhood and watch the sunset, which every single day looks like something out of a National Geographic photo contest, only panoramic and 100x better. Last week my friend Jackie and I went hiking when it was about 7°F out, and when I was in the shade my face was literally burning with cold, but the sandstone was glowing in the morning sun, and the snow was powdery and fun to play in, and I made snow angels, and life just could not have been more perfect. I realized early on that I simply had to admit it to myself: when I can see the sun, I am a solid 80%!h(MISSING)appier than if I can’t, and somehow everything in life is easier to deal with.

But even beyond affirming my love affair with the sun, New Mexico has taught me something about myself that I never realized before. It is not the cold, or even mere cloudiness that every fiber of my being is horribly, existentially allergic to. It’s the grey.

Grey is not just a color. It’s somehow a color and a temperature and a mood and a state of being all rolled into one. New Haven is a grey, grey city. Especially from late fall to late spring. The sky is grey, the buildings are grey, the sidewalks are grey, the weather is grey, the people walking around outside are grey, and just the overall pallor of the whole place from November to May is a dull, matte, soul-sucking grey. Somehow even when it’s sunny, it’s grey. The greyness clawed its way into my brain and pervaded everything in my life, and I just felt like a completely different person. A person I barely recognized sometimes.

New Mexico is the exact opposite. New Mexico is never, ever grey. Even the actual grey things – rocks, clouds, plants, what have you – are not actually grey, but edged in yellow, or red, or purple, or a rainbow of these colors so subtle you can’t tell where one color ends and the next begins. The landscape glows with color, even in the dead of winter. The mesmerizing blue of the sky; the bright, crystalline white of the snow; the rich brown-black and iron-red of the lava, punctuated by wide stripes of color and glittering minerals where the elements have oxidized; the spectrum of greens and browns and yellows and oranges and ambers of all the different vegetation – from season to season, day to day, hour to hour the colors change, and shift, and you can’t help but stop in your tracks, open-mouthed with wonder. The mesas and cliffs are bright red and dull yellow, impregnated with the warmth of a thousand thousand years of sunny days, seeming to glow with life and light even when the sun is gone. The colors of the sky – at dawn, at sunset, even between the horizon and directly overhead – are so many, so intense, and blend together so seamlessly that there could never be names for all of them, could never be a way to capture the way they pour into you from all sides and all angles, all the time. If the corrosive grey of New Haven wore holes in the fabric of my happiness and emotional stability, the infinite, subtle rainbow of New Mexico is filling them. And so I smile. All the time.

I once made my mom promise me that she would NEVER allow me to live on the East Coast again. “DON’T LET ME DO IT!” I begged, vehemently. “If in a year, or five years, or ten years I get a job offer or something, decide it might not be so bad, remind me of this conversation. DON’T LET ME. PLEASE.”

“But you might fall in love,” she responded. “What if you met someone and followed them over there? You might. It could happen.”

Some deep and fundamental part of me was sure of the answer. “No,” I said. “There is no one person alive that could make me happy enough to live indefinitely on the east coast. There is no interpersonal love that could make me move there and not cry myself to sleep every night, knowing I had nothing in front of me but an endless succession of cold, grey days, cold, grey winters, one after another. I couldn’t do it.”

And it’s true. I have loved people. I have loved many people, in infinitely many ways. No, I have never felt the kind of romantic love that forever is made of, but I know that it’s something that grows, and changes, and has to be worked on and fed and maintained. And I just can’t conceive of a romantic love that would fill me – every day, unconditionally – with the assurance that everything is right with the world, that life is ultimately a good and beautiful place, that happiness and inner peace are somewhere out there, waiting for me to find them. A love that does nothing but give, that asks nothing of me, a love that isn’t really about me at all. That’s just not what a significant other does. In fact, the only kind of love I’ve heard of that even comes close to this feeling is more religious in nature. And that might be the root of it: my relationship with the place I live is more like religion than marriage. And I haven’t lived a ton of life yet, but from where I stand, I absolutely can’t see the latter ever superseding the former.

I have no idea where I will end up. And I don’t think I’ll end up here in New Mexico; I just don’t think I could find work here that would really fulfill me. But I am infinitely glad to have come here, and lived here, and learned so much about so many things. You never forget falling in love – that rush, that euphoria, the way everything else just falls away – no matter how many times it happens, no matter whether things ultimately work out or not. And as far as I’m concerned…..every time is a gift.

I love it here. And I know already that part of me will never leave.

Love,
Katie

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