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Learning What Your Limits Are

Working in Wilmington is not ideal. I'm away from Jason. I'm away from my friends, my gym, my personal regime. I'm away from the city I love. I'm a divided soul.

Yesterday my relationship with Jason was strained for the first time because I am in Wilmington. And I have never felt so disconcerted and disconnected. It was the first time that I really felt that Wilmington was not, could never be, home. Not only am I not whole, but now I'm shattered.

But I also want to put across that I feel this way not because I'm dependent on Jason, or that I'm insecure in my relationship, or that I will shrivel up and die without him (although that's the way I feel. Not because I'm a woman, not because I'm weak, but because I love him with that emotional intensity that can only be described in visions of color.)

Yesterday I saw photographs with their Jim Caspar review, which speaks volumes louder to me now:

These Immortals are real people, young and beautiful, but they seem isolated, exposed and vulnerable, trapped, distant, on guard, defiant, all alone in a strange land, and confronted by echoes of subliminal fears and insecurities.

Right now, I'm learning that getting work done amidst a personal drama is tough. I have Jason tugging on me in one direction (Charlotte) and my career responsibilities and aspirations in another (Wilmington), and I'm alone in the middle, in hostile territory. I'm trying to find a compromise, and it looks like it might work out in my favor. After all, our company has been built virtually. And my immediate boss is also from Charlotte, and is desperate to move back. But it might have to work out eventually. I need to regain focus, and that's hard when you feel like you're existing in a cloud. I just want to be complete, and to move forward. There exists a limit here that is preventing me from being my best self and moving forward towards reaching big goals.

And to think, only yesterday everything was going right.

Building a Community

Walking through Dilworth with Ninja, we could hear the National Anthem being sung as the Panther's game got under way. Jason was at work, which pained him to no end since it meant missing the Panthers' first home game of the season. He had, however, made sure that Ninja was outfitted with her Panthers bandanna.

Earlier that morning, we'd gone for breakfast, one of our Sunday traditions, at Mattie's Diner over by the NC Music Factory.



Driving across Uptown, crowds of blue and black swarmed the streets, as people from across Charlotte flocked towards Bank of America Stadium. We all love the Panthers. And we're all connected somehow: I watched as Brad Hoover's baby was christened at my mom's church, and Leonard Wheeler teaches my favorite boot camp class at our YMCA (Eugene Robinson helps out sometimes too, and we love him because he actually keeps acurate time. If you've ever taken Leonard's class you'll know what I mean-- "one minute" of push-ups always becomes more like six). And so there really is nothing like watching people gather to tailgate across the Queen City to remind us that Charlotte is indeed a community.

I haven't felt this yet in Wilmington. Not because it doesn't exist, but because everything is so new. But it's important that we develop our own little working community within Loom as we grow, so we grow stronger. Great companies know that creating a great working environment means caring about your employees, so that the company not only attracts good people, but also so that the work produced and services offered are of the utmost quality. Zappos became famous for its unusual business model. And at Alice.com, the founders assign each employee an animal in order to boost their company culture.

So what are we doing at Loom to promote our company culture? Well, we all got incredibly drunk together one night. I liked that. It gave me the chance to bond with Gary over the Daily Dish and Mark over our love of our dogs. And then for us to sit together the following day, sweating vodka in a social media meeting, painfully aware of our livers. Together as a team.

I love working here.

When to Take Risks

Since I commute to work on a weekly basis, my weekends are pretty busy. I have to take advantage of being able to go to my gym, see my friends, spend time with Jason, walk the dog at our favorite parks (seriously, she never stops) and fit in any errands or jobs that can only be done at home. It gets pretty hectic. In fact, I'm becoming more and more convinced that all the sleep I'm doing is really cutting into my time. (I think Ninja agrees.)

My one big task, though, that I had set out to do this weekend was to paint our bathroom. We've been slowly redecorating our apartment, because when I moved in with Jason I found all the beige depressing, and I told him so. Everyday, until he let me paint over it. Who knows if it's even allowed. Our waste disposal doesn't work, so we'll just have to see if, when we call the maintenance guy in, he has a heart attack.

I don't know much about putting together a cohesive sense of interior design, which is why I'm practicing on our rented apartment. But I do know that I love almost every style (modern, eclectic, English gentry, bohemian,etc). And also color. Lots and lots of color. Luckily Jason partly loves all these things too, and partly just lets me do what I want. But at the end of the day, it's all about taking risks in order to extend the process of learning, and to discover what we like.

Risk taking is a big part of growing as a person, learning what works and what doesn't, and a lot of times, conquering fear. It's something to live by, because only when there's risk involved can there be the potential for magic in your everyday experiences.

Sometimes you don't even realize the risk until you come face-to-face with it, and then you have to overcome the challenge that comes with it. I mentioned that a portion of my weekend is trekking across favorite parks with Ninja. One of those parks is home to a pack of coyotes (pack? Is that what you call a group of coyotes? I can't watch the Discovery Channel anymore because Ninja jumps at the screen, so maybe I'll never know). The first time we saw one Ninja was off her leash and went right up to it. I thought she was going to end up as a midday snack. She didn't. But now I feel like walking in those woods is a risk, and I usually won't go without my mom. My mom thinks I'm crazy, but she hasn't been chased three times by coyotes.

Of course, you can lead a perfectly lovely existence by staying at home with your beige walls. But I love color, and primal fear, and jazz. Even if sometimes that means coming to terms with a garishly fluorescent green bathroom.

Work on Organization in Order to Get Important Things Done

I'm not complaining that Google is getting closer and closer to thinking for me. Actually, I can use all the help I can get in that area. But I do have a feeling that now Google Instant has been unveiled, my web life is going to become more time consuming through added distractions, rather than saving me thousands of seconds each year by forgoing a click at the end of every search.

I am not naturally an organized person. My mother would be the first person to attest to that. But perhaps for that very reason, I value organization to such a degree that I writhe in envy at the kinds of people who take off their shoes and put them straight in a fancy closet organizer in a fancy closet organized by color or season and don't even notice that they're doing it.

My lack of organization does not just intrude on my closet space. It also imposes itself on the time I spend reading (I realize that I should read work blogs first, then the news, then personal blogs, and lastly whatever book I'm ravenously devouring, but in reality they never get read in any order except the reverse). So I try to write a to-do list each morning, so I can at least keep work-things semi-organized, even if my ballet flats are lying in the middle of the floor.

At home, Jason never ceases to amaze me. He's heading towards a promotion, mostly because he knows he's good at his job, but also that he could be better. His bosses know this too. They've set Jason up with a life coach, and now he is making commitments left and right, not only to do things at work, but also beyond it. Of course, being a fundamental part of productivity, Jason already writes a daily to-do list. So now he's expanded his own daily commitments to include 30 minutes of reading, arranging one-on-one meetings with his sales team, and even running a mile every day. My busy busy, beer-drinking, chain-smoking, cardiophobic boyfriend has committed to running every single day. (And of course, the best thing of all was that he chose running specifically for the very reason that it is one of my loves.) These are just a few of the things that are stretching him as a professional and as a person, as well as requiring him to seriously reorganize his life to make room for them. And he's succeeding at all of it.

So today, while I was busy trying to organize all the things I should have been doing, and thinking about all the things Jason was getting done, I emailed him this video with the subject line "When I'm at work, I think of running away with you":

Sung Lapse from Ezaram Vambe on Vimeo.

Because one reason to stay organized at work is so that everything gets done and we can aim to do big things outside of work, together. And that's important.

(Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan)

How to Relax

Working at a start-up can be tough. You are given a lot more responsibility, and find yourself in-the-know a lot more often, than if you were just a tiny working part of a limitless corporate machine. There's always more to do. Sometimes, things go wrong, and it's not your fault. But even then, if you had had one more cup of coffee that morning, maybe you would have spotted it beforehand and drawn attention to it, or worked out how to fix it yourself and informed everyone else. There's no mindless finger pointing to get yourself out of trouble. The fate of the company has mass, the weight of which you can feel on your own shoulders. Working and living blurs, even more than it might do at a better established company, even more so when your dad is the founder and president and everyone at home is holding their breath until you can report back a sign of success, something they can write down on paper. Perhaps even something they can write down in their Christmas letter.

But even though the cases still come in on the website, and the emails keep pouring in, there still must be time to simply be. This, I hear, is called relaxing, or at least that's what it's called on a Sunday, if you're lucky.

But how is it done?

I'm not always sure. Sometimes I think it's done by sleeping in all the way until 7, maybe even 7:30, and if you're really pushing for a long day of relaxing, 8 o'clock in the morning. If this is your idea of relaxing, here's a tip: don't get an Australian shepherd. Or any puppy, for that matter. Even when I'm not relaxing, Ninja often starts licking my face at 5:50, a full ten minutes before my alarm is set to go off on a work day (she knows "sit," just about, but we're still working on "I have ten whole minutes left to sleep, go chew on a rawhide until then"). And she's on a schedule that doesn't include weekends. At least, if you play your cards right, she does take afternoon naps.

Sometimes it's not even Ninja that intrudes on my extra sleep. When a triathlon creeps up, it means getting up at 4:30am on a Saturday or a Sunday, panicking for three hours (Do I have everything? How much can I afford to eat? Can I remember how to get there? Am I even going to make it on time? Why did I sign up to do this again?!) and putting my body through a few hours of physical discomfort. Physical discomfort that is not pain because I get in daily workouts, another form of "relaxing". But then, once that finish line approaches, it becomes easy again to remember how great completing a tri makes you feel, and that now I have a new t-shirt and a series of terrible photographs that are posted to a public website.

Sometimes I feel like it should be done by escaping for a while, to read Jane Eyre or the latest Ian McEwan novel. But the thing is, walking Ninja and completing triathlons are things I would never give up. They make my life fuller, and even though perhaps I get less sleep, I sleep deeper.

Because I'm so tired from relaxing.

How do you relax?

How to Cope When You Don't Belong

I am no stranger to a nomadic life. I spent eight years moving between Charlotte and England, between family and friends, home and school. But I left at precisely the age that you become naturally restless, itching to prove your independence even though you know you're not ready (money, cooking, laundry still being burdens, not necessities). My life was compartmentalized, but unevenly so, and I rarely felt for what was left behind. Instead of never belonging, I always belonged. Now I don't have that feeling of belonging. Here in Wilmington, I ache for what remains in the other place. Because that other place isn't really a place at all.

I am touched by the beauty in the honesty of Ta-Nahisi Coates' writing (which isn't surprising, since "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," remember?):

Bonds are formed with great velocity. Lives collide and then someone you've met only days ago is opening up on how to survive child molestation or drug addiction or a tsunami. I have heard that people fall in love out here, that perfect relationships back home are sundered by the great loneliness of these Woods and old lives are left by the way. I do not believe it. I question the spine of love born in a place where other people wash your dishes.

In many ways, that describes how I feel when I am here on the coast of North Carolina. Life remains simple. I am free to concentrate on myself, and as a result I am learning, I am growing, I am meeting and connecting to people but I am not truly living, not in the complete sense, anyway; in many aspects my life is stunted here (perhaps that isn't fair, perhaps it's only divided). But at any rate, I am not at home, which means that a large part of me is absent. I am happy at work, but I am also looking forward to the weekends when I can go home and sleep next to the one I love.

Is it possible to be really happy when the things you need are miles apart? Perhaps. Like Mr. Coates, I may have changed here, but I will always be called back. And that's where I belong.