Road Maps and Reclamation

Chicago seemed incredibly vast to me when I first moved here one year ago Labor Day. Everywhere and everything in the city was new and I didn’t realize how conveniently concentrated so many restaurants, stores and entertainment venues were, and that neighborhoods really weren’t as far apart as they were in my head. I mean, if you took a look at a single square mile in Chicago, you’d be amazed at the wealth of resources therein, and how many neighborhoods would fall within the bounds.

The whole time I lived in Uptown, I felt somewhat removed from the hustle and bustle of the city. Even after I moved farther south, however, it took awhile for Chicago to shrink in size for me, and I have only recently gained a more realistic perspective on this city.

In June, I moved to downtown Chicago, because it’s something I’d wanted my whole life. But then I didn’t really take the time to immerse myself in the reality of my dream coming true, to sink my teeth into it, to savor it, to make it mine. I allowed my devotion to someone else to overshadow the fact that I was reaching goals I’d set for myself many years ago. Even after I stopped spending so many hours in the suburbs with my now ex-boyfriend, I managed to cloister myself up in my apartment, preferring to grieve over the relationship in solitude. Sure, I still did things in the city—I’ve always be fairly adept at doing things on my own and my blogs reflect the continued enjoyment I was deriving from Chicago—but a certain degree of confidence was lacking, my view was restricted, and I still wasn’t living the city to its fullest. I had allowed myself to feel, and become, defeated. The way I felt was incongruous with the person that I know myself to be and it didn’t fit with the place in which I was living; to use a hackneyed metaphor, I felt like a fish out of water.

When I finally started to explore, I learned that so many of the places to which my ex would drive us are practically right around the corner from me. Zanies is a casual four or five blocks away, as is the Cold Stone Creamery across the street where we’d all gone for ice cream before a show a few months ago. I mean, Old Town is, literally, right around the corner, and I adore its charm and character! I don’t know how I could have left it sit there unexplored when I lived so close by. Lincoln Park is also a hop, skip and a jump away. I had a vague understanding that all these things weren’t really that far away, I just didn’t realize how incredibly close they actually were. This is partly due to the fact that God did not endow me with directional sense, but undoubtedly it had a bit more to do with the fact that I just kind of let my ex do all the driving, and I was along for the ride (a pretty wonderful ride, really, but in retrospect I should have asserted myself a bit more).

I don’t know why the healing process is taking so long, or why it has taken me so long to start reclaiming Chicago since the break-up, but I do believe that something started this past weekend. I have a long way to go, but the wheels of change are in motion, and I feel a sense of the confidence I’d lost rekindling inside me. Sometimes you can get lost in another person and lose sight of the world around you. You can forfeit pieces of yourself not because someone else asks you to, but because you just get so wrapped up (even when you’ve convinced yourself that you’ll never be one of those people). You can let friends slip away so that when it’s all over, you find yourself alone and heartbroken, in a big city that suddenly feels remarkably empty. I mean, we all know I have a terrible sense of direction, but this time, I allowed myself to get almost irreconcilably lost.

Luckily, however, there are people in life who will toss you a road map when everything around you starts to look unfamiliar. Having Wendy here this past weekend, combined with my mom’s visit the weekend before, was the boost I needed to pull my invented view of Chicago out of my head and wrangle its intimidating size and emptiness down to the inviting sense of reality for which I’d moved to the Windy City in the first place. It’s so very true that we get by with a little help from our friends.