It's been a busy two weeks. I moved! Not far--right across the bridge into a sweet little 1920's building in Oakland that's close to bookstores, coffee shops, cafes, and running trails. I'm vowing not to move ever again for a very long time (please, please hold me accountable for this if you start to hear any restless musings in the coming months). So far, I'm settling in just fine. I'm happy to be close to friends who are doing amazing things. Like opening a restaurant.

It's been awhile since I've written a 'sigh, I'm alone' post. And god, I thank you for sticking with me through those. In one sense it feels like just yesterday and in another it feels like it's been a decade. And I haven't written about it much because most days I'm doing pretty darn well. I have great friends, an amazingly supportive family, exciting writing jobs popping up left and right, and interests and passions that keep me busier than I'd like to be. But to have just a moment together here--a little bout of honesty--it sucks eating alone. I haven't gotten over this part of being single. I hate it. And as you can probably tell by now, I'm a big fan of eating. So we have a little problem on our hands.

My friend Autumn recently pointed out an article in The New York Times all about living alone. Not like me in my city apartment, but like folks who choose to be fiercely independent and move somewhere isolated where they can truly be away from it all. The author, Sarah Maslin Nir, profiles three individuals (all men, interestingly enough) and discusses their compulsion to live in isolation. One man describes a feeling of freedom when you’re by yourself: "you don’t have to answer to anybody.” There's also a feeling of self-sufficiency. Others choose a reclusive lifestyle as a political statement. A 27-year-old British man spent the last year living in a hut he built in  Sweden as a way of being environmentally responsible. Regardless of the justification (and I suppose there doesn't really need to be one) "Embracing the Life of Solitude" made me really think about what it means to deliberately choose to be by yourself.

Some of you have very sweetly written me to ask how I'm doing after this post. Truthfully, it's day by day. This Thursday is the first day that I'll be living alone...for the first time in my entire life (with the exception of a very brief period in Boston that didn't work out all that famously). Yep, and I'm 31. When you've been with someone as long as we have been together, it's just the way it's always been. So I have days where I'm excited to rearrange the furniture, and I have a lot of days where I'm really anxious and worried. I bite my nails, watch bad late night  TV, and eat strawberry jam out of the jar. Today's  been one of those days. I've discovered days off from work aren't necessarily great for me--there's a little too much time to think and be in my own head. It's important to stay busy. But the more I try and figure out what it is I'm so worried about, the more I realize it's really just the unknown. It's not knowing how I'll feel next week or this summer or who I'll go to first with exciting news or wake up in the middle of the night with a terrifying dream. So I'm trying really hard to just sit with that. Sit with the unknown and try and not figure it all out this second. Because I can't. And I'm guessing it's not ready to be all figured out.