Happy One-Year Anniversary to Me

I took this picture when I arrived home on Dec. 18, 2017.

Today, December 18, 2018, marks exactly one year since I left Israel and arrived back in New York.

You may have already picked up on this from reading my blog, but dates and anniversaries mean a lot to me. I rarely let one pass without seizing the opportunity to reflect, analyze, ponder, dissect, and record. Every birthday, every holiday, every time I mark a year’s passage from one designated moment in time, I have to stand back and look at it.

Usually this just means a particularly introspective entry in my journal. But I’ve used this corner of the internet to share many of this past year’s moments with you, and as this is an important one, a new blog post seems appropriate. Bear with me if I go over some old material.

One year ago yesterday, December 17, was a particularly stressful day. I was packing up every mote of my existence in Israel. Throughout the day, several different sets of movers came to my apartment to pick up various pieces of my remaining furniture. Other people came by to take things I was selling or getting rid of. Friends dropped by to say hi, help, bring snacks, say goodbye. I enlisted neighbors to help me carry the dozen boxes/bags/duffels/cartons that contained most of my life down the stairs of our building and into the cars of the saints who had agreed to hold onto it for safekeeping. As dark was falling, I began filling all the holes in the walls with spackling and covering marks with white paint. (As it turned out, this paint job turned out to be wholly unacceptable to my landlord, who demanded my security deposit to pay for a professional. Sigh.) Eventually, the time came, and another friend came and picked up me and the three suitcases I was taking home and brought us to the airport.

The remnants of my life in Jerusalem.

I was so caught up in the tangles of moving, taking care of all the little details required, that I barely took a moment to think about what was happening. I was leaving Israel. Even as I boarded the plane and we took off, even as I landed in America and hugged my parents hello and we drove home, I still felt that the impact of my decision had not yet fully descended upon me.

The first thing I did when I got home was run to the fireplace and hug DJ.

Sprawled on the carpet, next to the fire, cuddling my cat, in my house, still in my sweaty, rumpled, smelly airport clothes, the happiness was so complete that there was no room for regret.

DJ died two weeks ago. He was 21 years old. I had one last year with him, snuggling him on the couch, burying my face in his warm belly as he woke up from a nap, feeding him treats as his appetite waned, bathing him when he grew too arthritic to bathe himself. (Okay, my dad mostly did that.) But that first day back, he was healthy, whole, and happy to see me.

The next thing I did after greeting DJ was go to visit my Nana (again, still in my airplane clothes). DJ’s happiness was nothing compared to hers. She hugged me, kissed me, told me how much she loved me and how happy she was I had come home. We sat at her kitchen table and kibbitzed.

This picture popped up as a suggested post on my Facebook feed in honor of its one-year anniversary today. It was a bittersweet moment. My Nana died three weeks after I arrived home, following a sudden stroke. Every time over the last seven years that I had said goodbye to her before leaving for the airport, I always felt a moment of panic walking out the front door. What if it was the last time? What if something happened to her while I was gone? But it didn’t. She was still there, safe, so happy to see me coming home, on that first day, and we would spend many hours together over the next few weeks. The last time I said goodbye to her wasn’t on my way to the airport, but in the hospital a few hours before she passed away.

I wish we had had more time with her. I wish she could have met Phil. I miss her and think about her every day. Our family’s life changed drastically after we lost her. And at the same time, I’m still so grateful that I got to say goodbye. That I was here.

My Nana’s death — and I’ve written about this before — so soon after I arrived home was a major sign for me that I had made the right choice, and there was just no looking back after that. It was so clear that I was in the right place. I didn’t question it again. I haven’t questioned it since. How could I?

And Phil was here. All those years looking and hoping, being miserable and lonely in Israel, waiting and waiting. But he just wasn’t there. It was as simple as that. I wasn’t ready to be here; I wasn’t ready to find him.

Subway selfie!

When I left Israel, I told my family, friends, employers and myself that it was just for a year. It was an experiment. I was unhappy and I wanted to see if I could be happier elsewhere. I wasn’t making plans past this year. I wasn’t making plans, period. But nobody was very surprised when I said I was going back, and I’m sure that no one was very surprised when it became clear that I would stay.

After all, I complained about Israel A LOT. I expended so much of my energy in hating the way things worked there, hating the interactions I had with people, hating my life. I spent half my time obsessing over how hard everything was, how complicated and frustrating. It was so draining to be constantly unhappy with the basic elements that made up my world. I knew how miserable I was, how challenging I found life in Israel to be, but not until I left, really left, on a one-way ticket, did I understand how deeply oppressed I was by my Israel-induced anxiety.

Thousands of pounds of stress and worry and misery lifted effortlessly from my shoulders as soon as I arrived back. Life suddenly simplified. I didn’t have to be afraid of the smallest interactions, the littlest tasks, the most mundane activities. I didn’t have to rehearse what I would say before opening my mouth. I didn’t have to be silent for fear of sounding idiotic — I didn’t have to be angry or pushy to get anywhere — I didn’t have to face mountains of obstacles and inconveniences over the tiniest things. Oh, my God, what a relief.

The first few months I rarely talked about Israel, or thought about it. I often said, whenever I got a glimpse of it — heard people speaking Hebrew in the street, or saw articles on Facebook about Israel, or met up with people who had been there — that I was traumatized, suffering from PTSD. It was too soon to talk about it or process my time there; I was too freshly scarred from the experience of living there to face it.

I’m sure there are many people who find living in Israel perfectly tolerable, and even enjoyable, and I am happy they do, and hope they always will. I myself loved it for the first few years. I hope it’s clear that all of these experiences were wholly personal. It’s a beautiful, special, holy place. And it was also an environment in which I could not flourish.

I haven’t really spent a lot of time this past year reflecting on those things about Israel that I loved, the things that were really precious to me. But the truth is — those things barely existed for me by the time I left. Yes, it’s a holy place. But I couldn’t feel its holiness. I couldn’t feel God. That connection, for me, had withered away until the pain just wasn’t worth it anymore.

The decision to leave Israel was torturous. I spent months making it. I filled an entire notebook with charts, graphs, lists, more lists. I consulted everyone I knew. I was so afraid to let go. And yet once I did, I didn’t have a single qualm. No doubtful voices in the back of my head, no questioning, no guilt. I still don’t.

I only miss two things about Israel: my friends, and the wide availability and selection of kosher food.

Now I think I’m settling into a more neutral place. I think, now that a year has passed (I can’t believe it), I have enough distance from Israel to start to think about it differently: to look back fondly on (most of) my time there, to appreciate what it gave me and what I learned and gained from living there. This is a journey that I will be on for a while, I think. I’m still happy, every day, that I’m not in Israel. I think that after a while, in another few years, I’ll feel more nostalgic.

Maybe. Maybe not, honestly. I remember thinking to myself, in those awful, single, depressingly, lonely years, that I would look back on this time as one of the worst periods of my life. That wasn’t Israel’s fault; I probably would have had a similar experience in the U.S., too. It’s that age. In your early twenties, your life is ahead of you, there’s so much time, all your friends are single. Mid-twenties, okay, you’re growing, maturing, you feel ready to calm down a bit, some of your friends are pairing off, but not many, they’re in the minority. Late twenties, panic starts setting in, most of your remaining friends desert you for husbands and babies, you are one of a tiny handful of survivors, and the pool is thinning all the time. Dinners and parties and simple hanging out becomes less and less frequent. Your married friends move away. They have second babies. You’re at home alone, eating tuna fish for dinner.

It doesn’t get any better. There’s no going backwards at that point. I mean, sure, some of your friends are already getting divorced, but that doesn’t mean things go back to the way they were. Now they’ve gotten engaged, married, had babies, AND gotten divorced before you’ve even met someone.

So yeah. I think that phase of life would have happened to me there, here, anywhere, really. But there’s definitely a difference between being single and childless at 30 in a religious community in Jerusalem, and being single and childless at 30 in the U.S. There are a LOT more single and childless people here. And they’re not all stewing in their loneliness, feeling like society’s outcasts, feeling like there’s no place for them. I mean, yes, some of them are. But lots of them are just laughing at relatable memes on Instagram and enjoying Buzzfeed articles about adulting, and it feels like we’re all in this together.

Are we using social media to fill the gaping hole in our lives where partnership and family should be? Maybe. But is that still better than having a gaping hole? Yep.

Anyway, that’s not what I did, as you all know. I grasped the bull by the horns. I rode it to California. I traveled all over this huge, gorgeous country, alone. I did everything I said I would! Ha! And I was deeply, miraculously, amazingly rewarded.

I said earlier that that sense of leaving Israel didn’t hit me when I left. And honestly it never really has. I don’t think that at any point during the year since, I ever really thought about what it meant not to be there. Instead I was full of what it meant to be here.

One year. A lot has changed. A lot has happened.

And yet this doesn’t feel like a closed loop. There’s no real ending to this first year back, no sense of finality. My future is so wide open right now that it feels like heading into something even bigger, like the new life that I stepped into when I stepped off the plane one year ago today is only growing, expanding, like I’m still exploring, and there’s still so much more to know and see and do.

I know I have a habit of ending these posts on an annoyingly optimistic note. What can I say? The future looks bright.