Karma is… My First Summer in Long Beach

I’m loving my first summer in Long Beach and feeling so grateful to be here. At the same time, I’m still grappling with how I got here at all. For one thing, I call our move The Great Escape. I wanted to escape so many things. We lived in a conservative, white part of the country where we only got a few short months of sunny summer weather. The family I grew up with lived nearby; however, we weren’t close. Not by a long shot.

Needless to say,we weren’t doing well in Pullman. Every day I fought to keep myself feeling sort of sane as I watched Mr. Sexy slowly die before my eyes. That might sound extreme. That’s because it was extreme. And it felt fucking scary.

Now I’m experiencing my first summer in Long Beach and feeling better than I have in many years.

You see, I used to live with a piercing pain in my chest. I felt that pressure almost constantly, especially if I tried to still my body with a practice like meditation. The Body Keeps the Score taught me this chest sensation was trying to tell me something about myself.

Living the lifestyle we did in Pullman, I felt stuck. I felt like I had no control over our lives. Everything just happened to us, around us, and we were forced to work through it. I lived in general misery, alone, feeling like I didn’t have a place to belong.

But not anymore. And to be honest, did I ever really feel like I belonged there? We lived there because we had to. So, when the doorway of opportunity flew open for us to think beyond that small college town, I told Mr. Sexy he could apply for work anywhere but the Pacific Northwest.

I wanted a new town, a new life, a fresh start.

The move felt exciting for me. While I wasn’t going back to the Bay Area (where I’m originally from), the move still felt like closing a loop and going home somehow. One of the highlights during our three-day trip to Long Beach was driving through my old neighborhood and looking at the house I grew up in.

The memories flooded in as I pointed out what would have been behind certain windows back then and all the parties I threw on our front lawn. I remembered the drug bust happening next door that scared the shit out of my parents, learning to rollerblade down the big hill we lived on, and the scary dog that lived next door.

The way I look at it, when I was 11 years old, my parents relocated our family from the Bay Area to a place called Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. They told me specifically the two reasons we moved: too much traffic and too much family.

My parents didn’t like their families. Although they never outright said those words to me, I sure felt that energy and listened to how they all talked to each other and about each other. Gossip runs rampant in those circles, which I found fascinating as a little girl.

For me, I felt like I lost a lot with that move during my childhood. We no longer attended the big family gatherings I grew up with. Presents from family dissipated over the years, as did my relationships with them. As I got older, I started to wonder at my parents’ choices. On one hand, they made it clear to me they didn’t care for having their families too close, but they also made significant efforts to visit family constantly which always left us stressed as hell.

So, the way I see it, my parents did half of the right thing, and I happened to close the loop and finish it off right.

You see, I didn’t move to Long Beach to escape the family I grew up with. By that point, we had no contact and we had enough space between us so we didn’t ever have to worry about running into each other or anything like that. I moved to Long Beach because I saw opportunity, a light in a world of darkness.

Getting to my first summer in Long Beach meant walking through hell to get here, and saying thank you to all the people who helped us along the way.

I feel empowered by how I closed this loop in my life.