It’s been nearly a year since I posted. Not since I wrote or had a thought about blogging. It’s been a year since I decided something I had to say was worth sharing. Or that I could spend the time getting it up to my standard of posting, a shifting standard that gets higher as I get older.

I’ve decided that this will be posted without careful editing. It will go online when I’m done writing it. First edit vibes here.

Because why? Why does it matter? If I don’t feel the impulse to blog regularly, why keep this site? It’s a question I ponder at times and then answer with a simple, “Writing is still a part of me. A HUGE part of me.” Journaling has been therapeutic since childhood. Blogging helped me verbalize my shifting worldview. Writing has taken me through a dark tunnel of my own missteps and given me tools to approach life and communication without as much fear. Writing has made me accountable to those I care about. Writing is one of my coping mechanisms for life.

So what do I have to write about today? Welp. A lot has changed since my last post when I was contemplating spending money I shouldn’t have to visit an indigenous community I don’t know (I never went) to finishing editing my book about living with a different indigenous community. Obviously, I’ve gotten a year older. I’m 35 now and feeling pretty great about it. I lost one job and then built a profitable business out of my 60 square foot kitchen. I learned about gun safety because people are crazy. I backpacked in the wilderness and learned how to cut hair. I’ve lived through a pretty horrendous global pandemic and, like you, continue to do so.

And I got married.

My upbringing didn’t present many alternatives to the heteronormative marriage and biological parenthood path, so it was always my goal. Traveling presented those alternatives that I contemplated deeply and then left behind. Perhaps that indoctrination had become real and permanent to me. Perhaps it was truly my desire to be with one person and have a companion in all things. Either way, I left myself open to love, open to the critique of marriage, open to the honest identification of red flags and real talk and the ups and downs of pairing two quirky people together forever.

After moving to Denver in June of 2018, meeting Charlie (fake name) in August, and moving in with him in October of 2019, I decided to marry him in the midst of the global lockdown. What better test of our relationship? I loved our life together. He brought intimacy and comfort and protection. We left no emotional stone unturned. He encouraged me to be a forward thinker, a decisive actor, a family-centering individual, a team player, a runner—who I wanted to be in perpetuity. We reflected on the worst anecdotes we knew of marriage, and we decided on it nonetheless. We decided to be together for as long as we were right for each other. Fifty years and one day, he jokes.

I have learned a lot from being with Charlie. We’ve had very different lives up to this point: me bouncing around the globe for work and fun, him bouncing around the globe fighting for his country and protecting its leaders. 2020 has confirmed every pessimistic instinct he has for society, and it’s given me an important counterbalance to my love of the human condition. I’ve grown sharper and stronger in my approach to situations from which I used to shy away. Things don’t shock me as much as they used to. My perspective has widened, my grit has increased, my vulnerability has surfaced as much as my reserve has fortified my weaknesses, my emotional threshold has expanded, and my heart has multiplied.

This year, my family has shrunken and grown. Our society and our dialogue have heaved back and forth between realities that seem mutually exclusive. I’ve been reminded of an old nihilistic joke with a colleague that “nothing matters, we’re all gonna die” while simultaneously giving purpose and meaning to every daily motion. And as I reflect on how this matches so much of the contents of my book (my work-in-progress littered with hypocrisies and paradoxes), I’m growing to accept this constant state of flux as the only constant. This blog post is a snapshot of a boat rocking on an ever-shifting ocean. This is where I am now, and it will never be the same as any other time, nor perfectly reflective of the before and the after.

I feel that flux in my job search, in my daily oscillation between choice of careers in education or technology or production or writing or baking bread or something so far out there I can’t even define its silhouette. I feel that flux in the packing of boxes for storage and then for someone else’s home and then perhaps for my own if that job search lands on something lucrative. I anticipate the flux in reading about motherhood and contemplating my own evolution from a single human into someone who can (hopefully) incubate more. I ponder how that flux will take the person I am now and adjust it with new (and potential) roles as wife, parent, employee, etc.

And yet… I wonder if that flux primarily pertains to my surroundings and not to myself. For haven’t I experienced enough new environments and different people and varied circumstances to know how I remain myself amidst flux? To reuse my words from this weekend, “I do.” In some ways, I feel immovable. In others, I feel at the mercy of the extremes of life. There’s so much more to learn. But in the ways that my freshly-minted husband fears that I might change over time from the woman he loves now, I feel I am stone. I am solid. I can be tossed around by the flux of life but remain who I am right now, sitting on my gray couch wearing a sweatshirt sporting my hometown, coffee-breathed and pre-deodorized and chilled by the autumn breeze.

35 years doesn’t give me anxiety for losing a little more of my youth. It gives me strength in knowing myself across time and space. And in this new legal partnership, Charlie and I continue our pre-existing partnership, the one we committed to on an alpine lake when I proposed with a pizza-flavored bagel, the partnership that pits us against and simultaneously throws us into the flux as one unit.

I’ve been meaning to “announce” my engagement and then my wedding for months now, but I never made the time. I kept baking sourdough bread to meet the growing interest from customers. I tried to look for jobs in my spare time that would give shape to my future, our future. I focused on planning an ideal, risk-avoidant weekend for our friends and family in the mountains and had to keep the circle small to decrease the chance of spread. I knew there would be many people I cared about that wouldn’t be able to attend because the fire code set our guest limit. I suspected we weren’t going to be done celebrating this union with one intimate weekend in the mountains and that we’d be able to celebrate with our wider community ASAV (as soon as vaccine).

So now, I guess, I’m announcing my marriage—in the midst of a global pandemic and an epidemic of racial injustice, in a world that’s never felt more in flux, on a planet eager to shed us humans for good—to a man who is unfazed by atrocity, prepared for an unjust world, and still primed to love his people deeply and his hard-earned life beyond measure.

It’s a huge change, and yet I remain the same.