Good reminders

Yesterday I saw two friends, spending the whole afternoon and evening in my favorite town here in Colorado. 

Yesterday I found myself again — my innate energy, my liveliness, the reasons I decided to move here, the connections to people and places here. 

Part of it was certainly hormonal, the “battle of the giants” finally giving me a reprieve after two days of the worst clash I’ve experienced until now between PMS & HRT. 

But a great part was also due to the people and places I saw yesterday. 

All of it simply reminded me of why I decided to move here in the first place, why I feel so spontaneously at home, like I “fit”, that I really “belong” here more than anywhere else. 

One of the things that had really thrown me off on my return from California last week was the sudden, concrete, almost hard realization that I’m seriously here to stay now, at least for the next two years. That the six-month period of taking a break, thinking things over, recovering, working on my own self and my own textbook project, that whole parenthesis is over. Now real life here starts. Now I’m really staying, I’m really not going back. The “California door” is really shut, at least for a while, I’ve really turned my back on it for now and need to face this other way. This realization together with some forced solitude and the hormonal clashes was really tough and led me to see/feel the losses more than the gains or achievements or joys or simply even the freedom of my choices. 

All of these positive aspects came back to me clearly yesterday, as I hung out with two friends, separately. 

The first is a new climbing buddy who had to cancel our climbing plans for yesterday morning because of a sudden injury. But that didn’t mean we canceled seeing each other: we still hung out and since he needed full rest/recovery, we went swimming in the creek and just hung out with the explicit intention of getting to know each other better, to just spend time together as people to built a connection and friendship and trust — which are helpful when climbing together but also went beyond climbing, just as persons. This type of attitude was normal and natural for me in Europe but hard to come by where I was living in California, so finding it again here (I am finding it quite often and easily) is refreshing and heart-warming. 

The other is, at this point, one of my closest friends here, another non-binary/trans-masculine person with whom hanging out and talking is always a wonderful pleasure — fun and profound at the same time. 

Just being and talking with these two people yesterday, who in many ways are very different from each other, filled me with joy and good reminders of why I like it here, why I feel so easily at home here: because I keep meeting people who moved here to climb, to enjoy the mountains, to enjoy community, to start a new life, to give themselves a second (or third, or fourth) chance. Persons whose primary values are other people, community, enjoying the outdoors and connecting to nature, not making money or seeking mainly professional success. I don’t mean the latter are unnecessary or bad — it’s just that I found too much focus on the latter from people in the area where I was living in California to the detriment of sincere, spontaneous human relationships and true connections to nature. 

The conversations with my two friends yesterday were also good reminders of many lesson learned and, in particular, of how all those years with the “wrong” partner in Europe were not wasted on me: I really learned to instinctively stay away from relationships that could limit my authenticity, which includes exploring. I realized that despite some very deep crushes in the past years in California, I always subconsciously, instinctively stayed away or broke away from persons who are too “static”, too tied to one place to be compatible with me and my desire to roam. Despite resulting in some tough heart-breaks, it has served me well, after all, because here I am now: not completely settled, yet, and still anxious about my new job, but definitely happier than I’ve been in a long time, feeling more like myself than ever, and very visibly glowing from the inside out.