With a Little Help

The day I received a key to Victoria and Nick's house was one of the happiest days of my life.

 To clarify, their house is the epicenter of my life in Minneapolis. They've let me crash on their guest bed more times than I can count, they never get upset at me when I make a giant mess out of their kitchen, and they don't mind letting me have free run of the house while they go along with their normal weekend plans.

More than anything though, their house is a place where I know I can truly come as I am, regardless of what that might entail.

My social circle when I'm in the city revolves around a six or so block radius around their house and whenever I'm in town we do much the same things. Cook, eat, laugh, drink wine, make inappropriate jokes, and academically parse comic books or kink or writing or history. It's fun and always a relief to be among people I love and trust.

Anyway, about a month ago, Victoria gave me a key to the house and I almost cried. Because she gave the key with the expectation that I would use it to come and go as I wanted. And because her home and this neighborhood in South Minneapolis feel more like home than where I'm living now. It sounds a little overwrought, I know, but receiving this key felt like coming home.

I come from a pretty independent family. We reroof our own houses, fix our own cars, butcher our own venison, and generally handle things one our own. It's been a point of pride for me, as I've grown into adulthood, to learn how to haggle with landlords, work with banks, juggle work and a social life and a nascent spiritual journey without relying on a whole lot of people.

In conjunction with self-reliance, I tend to be a deeply private person. I may write a first-person blog, but I keep Back many of the salient details behind the stories I tell here. Once, after breaking up with someone I had been dating for six-ish months, I lamented the emotional catastrafuck of breakups to a friend and she replied "I didn't even realize you were in a relationship."

Like I said, private.

I feel like the luckiest person in the world. I have interesting, passionate, engaged, stimulating people in my life. I also have people with pretty highly tuned bullshit detectors in my life. In the past few weeks two close friends, both social workers who live out of state, asked how I've been. When I told them I was coping their responses where, essentially, "bullshit, we'll be on the next bus to see you." When they arrived they didn't pull any of their social worker shit on me. We didn't talk about my feelings or my deep-rooted fear of death or my anxiety disorder. I made them dinner. We exchanged lots of hugs. When I had a minor meltdown about (and not about) packing for the holidays, Krista packed my suitcase for me. We told bawdy stories and they straightened my hair. 

It's hard to describe what's been going on for me, emotionally, over the past few weeks. On one side, there's all of this emotionally draining chaos. On the other, there is an incredible network of support and love that I always new existed in theory, but is suddenly here in reality. I feel, I suspect, not unlike a scientist whose experimental data finally proves a hypothesis they've always suspected to be true. The people I love have come through for me in amazing, breath-taking ways. There have been the big things, like a last minute trip to New Orleans, but there have been a lot of very small things that make life just a bit easier too. A packed suitcase. A new Garrison Keillor book. Emails with links to pictures from NASA. Texts that say, simply "I love you." 

A month ago, when Victoria and Nick gave me a key to their house, I realized that home doesn't have to be the place where you grew up or even where you currently reside. My family, my blood relations, taught me self-sufficiency. My other family, the ones who live in El Paso and Boston, Minneapolis and Oklahoma City, are teaching me that while self-sufficiency is appropriate in a lot of circumstances, it's all right to get by with a little help from my friends.