When the Ground Shifts

A year ago today I was sitting on the floor of my studio apartment surrounded by boxes.

Not packing boxes. Not yet. Just the regular accumulation of a life I had carefully built - the books stacked by the door, the little things on the shelves that had made a rental feel like mine. I had made that apartment so perfect. I was paying an arm and a leg for it and I did not care because it was mine. And it was good. And it was exactly where I was supposed to be.

Except that it wasn't anymore. I was going to have to leave it.

Let me back up a few days.

It was April. I had been studying for my licensure exams for months. The kind of studying that restructures your whole day around it. I was at my desk by seven-thirty every morning. I left at four-thirty every afternoon and booked it to the local wine bar with my books and studied until I couldn't anymore.

I had just finished the first of two exams. The second was coming the following week. I remember the particular feeling of that window between them: tired but steady, the finish line close enough to see.

I was at my desk, drafting, doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing, when the head of the construction department appeared in the doorway.

Hey! Can we speak to you for a moment?

Nothing alarming about that. I got up and walked down the hall and turned the corner into his office and saw the COO sitting there.

My weeeeee studio apartment. All mine :)

And I knew.

That specific, physical knowing. The pit dropping in your stomach before your brain has caught up settled into me as I sat down. His face was white. Strained in the way faces get when someone has been assigned to say something they would rather not say.

I don't remember much of what was said. I remember the projects I had open on my desk. I remember thinking about the exam the following week. I remember the strange, almost administrative quality of my own thoughts as everything I had been building toward quietly rearranged itself into something unrecognizable.

I walked back to my desk. Grabbed my bag. Started shoving things in. The books, the little tchotchkes that had made the space feel like mine, everything I could carry. I called my boyfriend and he came to help because I had accumulated approximately ten thousand books and there was no version of this where I was making one trip.

I held it together through all of that. I think, and I hope, I handled it with something resembling grace.

I made it to my truck. Sat down. Placed my hands on the wheel.

Then the tears came.

I made it good. It got me through.

I failed both exams.

The one I had just taken and the one I took the week after. I want to be honest about that because I think it matters… not as a confession, but as a true account of what happens to a person when the ground shifts mid-stride. I had been studying for months. I knew the material. But grief and shock are not conditions under which anyone does their best work, and I was in both.

I moved out of the apartment I loved and moved back in with my parents, who did not have a room for me. I stayed in a trailer on their property.

I want to be careful here not to perform more suffering than I actually felt, but I also want to be honest: that period was hard in a way that was hard to see the bottom of. Six months of genuinely not knowing if the spark was coming back. Of looking at everything I had been working toward and not being able to feel the point of it. Of considering, more than once, whether this particular path was still the right one.

The spark did not announce itself when it came back. It crept in quietly the way it usually does… through a move to a new city, through new people, through the slow accumulation of days that started to feel like forward motion again instead of just waiting.

I am writing this exactly one year from the day I sat on the floor of that apartment surrounded by boxes.

In the last twelve months I have moved to Tucson. I have built something from scratch, something that is entirely mine, that no one handed me and no one can take away. I finalized my LLC. And this spring, I sat for both of my licensure exams again.

I passed them both.

I don't have a tidy moral for this story. I am genuinely suspicious of the version of this narrative where everything happens for a reason and the hardest moments are revealed to be gifts in disguise. Blah blah blah.

Maybe they are. Maybe they aren't.

I think the more honest thing to say is this:

If I were still at that job, Drawn Outside would not exist. I would not be in Tucson. I would not have met the people I've met here or built the things I've built or discovered that I am more capable of starting from nothing than I ever would have known if nothing had never been required of me.

I didn't engineer any of that. I just kept going on the days when keeping going was the only option available.

And I'm proud of that. Quietly, truly proud.

Not of the ending… there is no ending yet. But of the year. Of the distance between the floor of that apartment and where I'm sitting right now.

That distance is mine.

If you've ever had a plan fall apart mid-stride? I'd love to know what you found on the other side of it.