Slipping Through the Filter

When who we think we are determines what we think we can do.

The metaphor:

I live on a wooded hill between two glacier-carved lakes. Our house here is no bigger than the Brooklyn apartment where Steve and I lived until 2020. Beyond the similar square footage, our house contains the same stuff – and residents – that the apartment did. It sometimes feels like we got picked up by a tornado, like Dorothy, and transported somewhere as foreign as Oz. This makes me feel amused, because I love living here, and bewildered, because that love made me reckon with my self-conception.

The story:

It’s snowing steadily as I write this: flakes with ambition, small and fast. Last night, just a dusting covered the yard, but it’s a billowing blanket now, and still building. Snow is sticking to the trunks and branches of the pines and ashes surrounding the house, muting the deep greens and near-purple browns with a white that’s just a few shades lighter than the gray and glowing sky.

The air smells like chimney smoke, and it’s so cushiony-quiet, it feels like I can almost hear the crackle of burning logs. I picture my neighbors nestled inside. I can’t see them for the most part, just part of the house next door through gaps in the lot line’s skeletal trees. The couple who lives there is deeply invested in “doing the neighborly thing,” which both delights me and worries me that maybe there’s something neighborly I don’t know to be doing. When we moved in, they welcomed us with fresh eggs from their chickens and when the snow really builds up, they offer to plow our driveway. We typically accept food and decline favors, because moving here has activated something primal in Steve, an ingenuity and independence from his rural childhood that I didn’t develop in my soft suburb.

Did I think, in a million years, that I’d move to the woods? Absolutely not.

And yet. When Steve and I first fell in love, back in college in Connecticut’s capital, we learned that a few of the books in our English classes had been translated by a couple who lived in the Alps. That’ll be us, we told each other, though we spoke no other languages and had no desire to leave the country. We’ll get a dog and live in the foothills. We’ll write and read together all day, inspired by the sweeping scenery.

We bonded over a love of hiking and camping, growing up with trips to the Adirondacks for me and White Mountains for him. We took canoe trips together, timing our paddles, pointing out loons. We registered for outdoorsy gear when we got married, moving it from DC to LA before back east to Brooklyn. Most months, it sat in our closet, as I fretted about when we’d get time to go again.

Now that I know I like living here, I can look back and see a throughline. But that wasn’t how I understood these interests before we moved. I saw myself as a city person who liked parks and occasional camping. I’m only here now because getting here didn’t challenge that narrative. It wasn’t one big decision: I never would have agreed to simply move from Brooklyn to here, based on what I knew. It happened through a series of choices small enough to slip through the filter of my self-understanding.

First, we came up to my grandma’s Finger Lakes cabin for a long weekend in July 2020, delighted to see family and decompress in the country. We came back for a month in August, working remotely and quarantining before my sister got married. This went so smoothly that when the small house next door to my grandma’s came up for sale, we were psyched at the idea of buying it as a weekend getaway. We figured that even when our jobs returned to in-person work, we’d be able to work from here for the Friday and Monday of enough weekends to be worth the five hour drive.

So we bought it. Then, because it was Omicron winter, we sublet our Brooklyn apartment and stayed here. Packing up the apartment in anticipation of this longer stay, I’d been nervous about feeling isolated and lonely. Every day I waited for a wave of cabin fever that thankfully, confusingly never came. There were plenty of bad feelings and bad days, but our location became a source of solace and self-expression to help us endure them, rather than their cause.

We went back to Brooklyn in April ‘21, got vaccines and had friends over for dinner, joyfully, awkwardly. Then we found a new subletter and packed up again: we wanted to spend summer upstate. This is when it started to dawn on me that maybe my city-kid narrative, which had made it this far intact, was not a perfect fit. As soaring as it felt to love the new location, the work of confronting an outgrown self-image was completely disorienting. People kept asking if I missed the city, and I’d say I felt like I had the answer key to the wrong test: it didn’t compute that I would remove myself from my home and community and then feel…good?

When Ezra Klein interviewed poet laureate Ada Limon in May 2022, I was stunned to hear him describe the same experience. He and his wife “spent almost three months in a little cottage…near the beach on California’s Central Coast,” and even as he wanted to “let life be small for a while, to just shrink everything down,” he was skeptical of it. He braced himself the way I had done in fall 2020: “I thought I would go a little crazy with boredom, [even if it was] in a really healthy revitalizing way.” Instead, to his “genuine shock,” he felt a sense of wholeness outside his standard social plans and city hubbub: “I’ve almost never felt bigger as a person.”

I felt the same way: I kept using the word “expansive.” It wasn’t always easy or actively fun, from the isolation and fear of COVID to my general feelings on lack of structure, but the more time we spent in the woods, the more I felt like something tight in my chest kept unfurling. Though that was a nice feeling, it was borderline alarming that my feelings ran so counter to my self-narrative. Ezra captured this exactly, explaining how the contrast between his expectations and his experience “infected me with this horrible lurking suspicion that I am wrong about what my own preferences are as a person. My sense of being an urban person is incorrect.”

For me, this tension came to a head in fall 2021. By then, it was clear that I wouldn’t need to return to work in person. At the same time, I was realizing that the house we’d bought for occasional weekends was the place I wanted to be most days.

Still, the decision to give up our apartment was the hardest one to make. It turned out that apartment was the home residence of my self-identity. Though giving it up had little impact on how I lived my life, it overhauled the way I thought about it. Over tacos in October, I told a Brooklyn friend that I was pretty sure we were moving out, words halting like I was confessing a shame or speaking a new language.

“Gwen,” my friend said, half-pity, half-pep talk, “You already moved. You’ve been gone a year.”

Oh. The narrative fell away and I could suddenly see that she was right about what had happened. What I’d done. My throat tight and my eyes wet, I understood I’d already left her, this dear friend and the others I’d shared the city with. I’d already ended the second time I’d been able to live near close friends. The first had been after college, in my DC group house, filling my early twenties with happy hours and house parties, before leaving for LA. When Steve and I moved to Brooklyn, many of our DC friends had done the same, and we spent another five years at evening drinks and dinner parties.

This time, leaving felt different: more permanent. More painful. Less of an experiment than LA, and more of an acknowledgment that each period of life has areas of plenty – new bonds with my family, learning I don’t have to wait for camping trips to wake up amidst the trees – but also areas of loss or lacking. People and ways of living I miss, as well as old ways of understanding myself. These aren’t reasons not to move, but reasons it hurts to make it – reasons I would not have let it happen if I’d fully understood.

I’ve been thinking about all this because we've been saving money to add a guest room to our house. I’m so excited to try and make it easier for friends to visit, to come more often and stay for days. To lessen some of the loss I feel acutely, even as I love it here. I’m hopeful about continuing to tweak the balance. Making this decision has meant returning to the reason we bought the house – the vision of spending some long weekends here – and correcting it: embracing that we live in the woods as an active choice, not just a passive how-it-played-out. It still hurts to stop thinking of myself as someone who’d never move away from my close friends, even though it’s been more than four years. It still amazes me to see how close I came to never getting here, if I’d had to confront that loss head-on.

I have friends weighing decisions about where they’d like to live: hunting for houses, considering new towns. I can’t really offer advice. In fact, I feel lucky not to have had to go through what they’re doing: to squint into the future, guess at who they might become and what will serve that stranger best. I stumbled into something I’d never have imagined, much less accepted. I caught myself wishing all decisions could be like this, could just gently happen to you, and then I thought, wait: maybe they do?

For example, I came to love my college experience, but for reasons I never could’ve guessed back in high school and could not have known to look for. When I realized that, I thought it was a lesson about college, but maybe it’s a lesson about life: that the ways we rationalize our decisions are not so much wisdom as just the security we need to move forward. Maybe we get that security through a false sense that we know what will be best for us, or in my case, by not realizing what I’m deciding at all: by having circumstances sneak up on me before I had the chance to struggle.

Next year, we’ll have been upstate as long as we were in Brooklyn. Next year, if all goes as planned, we’ll have a guest room at the ready. I hope you’ll consider coming to visit. Maybe, like me, you’ll never go back home.

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