The gift of perspective & transformation-- why I move out every summer.

Summer's gift of radical clarity: on moving away, transformation, jobs that make you lose your mind, Zoloft, shitty apartments and finding love.

This is not a “summer is over” post. Summer is a mood to me, not a period of time or the window between Memorial Day and Labor Day. That said, for the last three years, I’ve gone ahead and moved away in early June, returning to Brooklyn sometime between September and November.

I started this tradition when I felt like my life was crumbling, around the time I had to lay off my startup’s full team and decide what I even wanted to do with the business. I shared this in one of my first and most read essays here— and it’s still one of the closest essays and experiences to my heart.

I’d been writing it in the Notes app of my phone for almost a year before I pressed send or even knew who I was sending to. Some of the first things I wrote for First Rodeo were things I needed to say— they spilled out of me.

Packing up your entire life for a few months (I must, as I rent out the apartment in my absence to subsidize the enormous expense that is living anywhere on a beach in the summer) and then rinsing and repeating this motion each year is not for the faint of heart. I moved back in less than a day ago, and I’m exhausted, surrounded by empty bags, and gearing up to leave again for nearly a month in less than two days.

I wouldn’t have it any other way though, because when I arrive back in Brooklyn at the end of each “summer” I usually feel like an alien from another planet.

The gift of this “perspective” and the new lens through which I view the surroundings I’ve called home for the last eleven or twelve years is fleeting— in a few weeks I’ll be fully acclimated again, viewing the world through city eyes and not a beach daze.

For now though, it’s fun to feel like a tourist from another planet.

If you’re burnt out, stuck, bored, unhappy, unmoored, now is the time to do something like this! Take a leave of absence from your routine and your typical setting. More on this and my tips on how to uproot your life, albeit temporarily, in order to give you the gift of perspective and faux transformation, at the bottom of this letter.

In the meantime, I’d like to return to my roots— ahh, personal essay! Exposing my literary belly button! Turning the origami of my life experiences inside out to show you the funny insides of my brain!

The first time I turned my adult life upside down.

The first time I moved to Rockaway Beach for 6 months, it started out of necessity— on a mental health level and a financial level. I was living in a large, gray, cavernous Williamsburg/Greenpoint apartment I couldn’t afford to finish furnishing or continue to live in. I felt incredibly haunted and lonely in it by myself.

I remember my friend Clare coming to visit in May, doing a terrible job of showing her a good time, and genuinely considering dying as I sat alone in silence on the couch once her dad picked her up and I was back to my hollow life alone again. It was definitely not the only time in my life I’ve wanted to die, but it’s the one I can remember the most viscerally, like I’m back in my body, face mashed up against the evergreen velvet arm of my West Elm sectional, thinking to myself that I simply didn’t think I could continue.

With distance, it sounds silly— what can be so lonely about living alone or founding a little business?

But at the time, it really felt like an anvil on my chest. I didn’t have any of the coping mechanisms I do now— spending time outside, exercise, having a partner who lives with you and invests in you and cares for you— all invaluable things to have at your disposal when you’re dealing with stress, depression, blistering debt.

I had none of those things… but what I did have was the radical power of change and its gift of complete transformation and perspective. I could move. I could turn it all upside down, even just for a few months.

So I took the chance.

I listed my place on Airbnb and booked a bungalow in Rockaway Park.

I was barely there a few weeks before I extended my stay through November.

And it worked.