A Los Angeles Love

Hi! Hello! Hey there you wonderful readers and friends! It's been a while. I'd say I'm sorry for the absence but... I'm not. I needed time. I needed space. Life got really really hard for a while in ways I couldn't talk about publicly. This blog, which for so long was a space to sort through my own messy wedding planning thoughts, became a burden. I didn't want to write about the hard dark moments this summer but I felt so guilty about disappearing on you. However, I needed to disappear for a while to work through some private issues. Taking that necessary step back showed me that I've outgrown this blog.

This space has been so important to me over the last two years. This space gave me a lifeline to a community of like-minded people navigating wedding planning and life transitions. This space - and my readers' ongoing comments, cheerleading, and friendship - gave me new confidence in myself as a writer.  Even more than throwing some words on a screen, I feel like I built something, carving out a little corner of sanity for myself that apparently resonated with others too. I learned to trust my own voice, buoyed by the support so many of you showed me, and I grew stronger in my professional life in ways that are just starting to unfold. I discovered new passions. I discovered new talents. I made so many friendships, some of which I've been lucky to grow in person and so many of which I treasure online. I planned a wedding. I learned about marriage. My life grew immeasurably richer because of this blog.

I'm not interested in talking about weddings anymore, but any moving-forward writing felt constrained by the history of this space. I felt stuck. I love what this space is, but I no longer cared to expand on these conversations. My relationship, unlike my wedding, is a private thing. And my daily life, unlike a year ago, is no longer consumed by wedding planning stress. These days, I'm much more passionate about my career, mentoring women, politics, social analysis, striving for some semblance of balance, and learning to forgive myself when balance remains elusive. 

For whatever reason, I couldn't find a way to start these new conversations here. So I started them elsewhere. I have a new blog. It's different than this one. It may be more overtly political. It may have more career topics. It may be a bit more personal. It may be a bit more flippant. We'll see. It's a work in progress, much like myself. It's also just progress, which feels so important as I grew beyond the wedding and my words here. 

Thank you to all of you for reading my words. Thank you to everyone who commented, emailed, engaged me on twitter, and voted for me in the 2010 Wedding Channel contest. I can never thank you enough. I am so grateful for this blog and the experience it became. But it's time to say goodbye to A Los Angeles Love and hello to the next step. 

I hope you will join me, but I understand if you don't. I'm blogging now at Stumble and Leap.

Love and gratitude always,

Becca

Any cat owner who tells you they don't have a list of embarrassingly silly behind-closed-doors names for their cat is lying. Even the men. And we occasionally (okay, often) say them in snookums-wookums baby voices. Unless the cat has knocked something over... again. In which case, the names we call the cat aren't exactly appropriate to share in polite company.

-T.S. Elliot, The Wasteland

Things have been a bit mixed up for me this year. April and our springtime wedding was truly a time of rebirth; though its joys were certainly complicated by twists of wedding madness, the fear of cold Spring rains, and honeymoon amoebas, April's mud wasn't cruel. It gave way to something new for us. But it was July - July with its sunshine and summer and easy weekend pleasures - that surprised me with its cruelty. 

In many ways, we've been very lucky this July. Jason found a job, and he loves it. We finally finished decorating our wall and made progress on sorting through our post-wedding mess. But things have also been hard. My health has precipitously deteriorated, due in large part to stress. Life became both much larger, in my desperate desire to experience it, and much smaller, when my days contracted around immediate physical pain. 

July forced me to take a hard look at my life, and finally conclude that my current situation is untenable. This situation includes the way I eat, the way I exercise, the way I relax (or don't), and the way I work. In other words, I'm reevaluating everything, leaving me a bit overwhelmed and confused as much of my day-to-day foundation crumbles around me. There have been nights when Jason and those commitments we made in April are the only things tethering me to hope. Watching him find a job, in an entirely new field, and how he's begun to re-imagine his life on the outside of a dying music industry, reminds me of what's possible... with a lot of hard work. And only after I get better.

I can be brave and re-imagine my life. Our life. But it will take strength and reserves I don't yet have, because I have to focus on physically healing first. And then I need to build new dreams from scratch before I claw my way towards achieving them. And in the meantime, I know something needs to change and I'm dangling one foot out into empty space, searching for a next step, knowing I don't have the security of turning around and stepping back. I've been there, and know it's no longer working. 

So I'm a little bit scared. And a little bit overwhelmed. And very very tired, as I sort through my immediate health needs. I'm trying to focus on the teeniest of teeny pleasures. I don't have energy for much else, but I still need the momentum of action and the reminders of small simple pleasures. I kept up with my small-but-manageable promise to accessorize every day. I made new promises to integrate relaxation yoga at night. I made new promises to clean up my diet and eat nutritious, vegetable-filled, from-scratch food. And I made progress in each of those goals. And so, like I promised at the beginning of July, I'm sharing a celebratory cocktail recipe. It's filled with real food and summer joy.  We picked lemons from a friend's tree, mint from my parents' backyard, and made a pitcher of the incredible mint lemonade recipe from Anna at Braising Hell, pouring it over a shot of citrus-infused vodka for a perfect Saturday sunset drink in our backyard, making July (or at least Saturday) just a little bit sweeter.

- J.D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye

There are certain passages in literature that stay with a person. They hit upon a deep truth, presenting it in a way you'd never thought about before. And at the tender age of 16, I had that moment with J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. Not the whole book (though it was great too) but the specific passage above. Because when I read it, I was finally able to put words to my personal shame: I am a secret slob.

I'm not a secret slob in the "I take great yearbook photos but I'm actually average and have a dirty razor" sense: I'm rarely the most attractive girl in a room or a photo (I do live in Los Angeles, after all), and I take pretty decent care of my personal care items. I mean it in a life sense.  As in, superficially, I am a shining example of success: I have a job that sounds very impressive with a good salary with room for growth, I have a great husband, I have an apartment I love in a neighborhood that should be trendier than it is (which means it's on the cusp of being discovered... and we are therefore the "cool" kids who were here first), I can handle myself in a yoga class, I love the farmer's market and homecooked meals, Jason keeps me up to speed on the cool bands and pop culture happenings, I read the NYT/Atlantic/Economist regularly, I like going to museum and art exhibits, I know where actual microbreweries exist in Los Angeles, and I can even fool people into thinking I have a sense of personal style. In other words, I seem to have some modicum of my sh*t together and I am conversant in the hip buzzwords for urban living.

But secretly, I'm falling apart. Behind the scenes, things are a mess. There's never enough time. I'm always one yoga class away from a panic attack. I'm an intellectual mess, barely finding time to write, to reply to emails, or to cross things off my to-do lists... at work or in my personal life. I barely pull myself together to even make the to-do lists and, when I do, my spur-of-the-moment thoughts are scattered on post-its all around the house, hidden under piles of unopened mail.  In fact, I am a major piler: piles of mail, piles of paperwork, piles of clothes that I tried on and discarded at 7:30am and never bothered to re-hang, piles of books I've been meaning to sell... piles that attempt to contain my messy life into some semblance of precarious order. Piles that a cat can easily knock over as she runs across the table, scattering things in every direction. Piles that become heaping overwhelming mounds until I breakdown and toss half the papers. I actually manage to clean dishes regularly and clean up after the cats and their tumbleweed hairballs (because I may be messy, but I'm not dirty).  But oh, the piles. Any dinner party at our apartment necessitates weeks of planning and, um, hiding piles of crap in closets.

That's right. I'm a secret slob. I live with piles and mess and survive because we have a lot of closet space to hide things when guests come over. But, since the wedding, things have become worse. We had so many piles (gifts, goodwill leftover wedding crap, new photos) that it became emotionally overwhelming to consider having a dinner party. How could we invite people over when we didn't even unpile our new photos or art pieces and get them on our walls? We couldn't. We were failures. We were never going to finish cleaning or decorating our apartment. Instead, I was going to be left with this d*mn Ikea bag full of picture frames on my floor for the rest of my life.

This Ikea bag became everything I hate about my secret slob self. It's full of picture frames and plans that are seemingly abandoned to piles of "someday, I'll get to this." It's bright blue, ugly, and crackles loudly when the cats leap on it. It makes my failures known. It reminds me of all the other piles that are sitting around my apartment, all the other half-done projects. And even worse, it taunts me because I've been trying to get rid of it for months.

The Ikea bag reminds me that, despite all our hard work, the pile never seems to go away. Every seeming step forward feels like zero progress, because the darn bag is still there. Despite braving Ikea in the weeks after our honeymoon (on a Saturday afternoon!!!) and buying 18 picture