When my friend Chelsea reached out to say she'd be in LA the weekend of St. Patrick's Day for a bachelorette, I didn't think about it much at first beyond being excited to see her. I had already planned on spending Friday night through Sunday up in Tahoe, so we tucked away St. Patrick's Day itself for a night out in LA, making it the second year in a row we would celebrate St. Paddy's by going out together.
As the day itself approached, I began to feel not only the weight of the year between our shared festivities, but also the import of that prior night back in March of 2015.
Chelsea and I met up on the 14th, the preceding Saturday night, in a great Roswell, GA pub called Mac McGee's. Her husband David, also a close friend, was traveling with his business school program, so we connected earlier in the day about possibly meeting up after Chelsea got some studying in.
Looking back, it's amazing that Chelsea and I even made it out at all. It was the third wind of my St. Patrick's day celebration, following a coworker's house party and a meet-up with my high school friends. Then, thanks to some glitch, we'd missed some of each other's texts planning on a place to meet. Finally, after landing on the time and place, Chelsea had to double back for her wallet.
Finally, though, we made it to Mac MacGee's and knocked back Jameson's shots and a Guinness or two in the second floor bar while live Irish trad music drifted up from the floor below. After staying a while, we decided we wanted to talk without shouting over a fiddle and went back to my apartment, where I imagine I had more whiskey waiting ('twas the season). We sipped our drinks and talked more, the type of deep, thought-provoking conversations Chelsea and I really like to have (either with Dave or on our own).
The conversation that night turned to work, unsurprisingly. Chelsea and I had met when our two companies merged and our beyond-work friendship also allowed for frank discussions about our teams, our office, and the company-at-large. By that point, I had told Chelsea of my plan to leave Towers during the coming summer and, being the lucky winner of that confidence, she had to hear a lot of nervous outbursts every time I sat through a planning meeting with more information than the rest of the room.
That night, I repeated my reluctance to leave my workload to be split among my already-busy teams filled with people about whose stress and success I deeply cared. I then said that even people on other teams would be affected and that she, Chelsea, who didn't overlap with me at all on assignments, might even be left holding some of the bag.
Chelsea's response was, and I'm paraphrasing, "Yes, it will affect me, and all of the people on your teams. But you can't let that keep you from doing what you need to do for yourself at this point." Her support and selflessness moved me. More accurately, it set something in motion within me.
Within a week, I told Towers I was leaving. Chelsea did not back away from the inevitability of affecting my team members, but by encouraging me to go for it anyway, she made me realize that the best way to leave and do right by my teams was to break the news early, even if they had to show me the door that day. Luckily, since a soul-searching artistic journey was not the same as going to a competitor, they let me stay through early July. I got everything I wanted without having to skulk around for months with my secret. I feel I owe that to Chelsea.
And it seems impossible not to see that moment as a match set to the fuse of the year that followed. My departure from Atlanta, my travels to Boston and New York, my trek across the country, months of blissful retreat in Tahoe, and all of the peace I found that let me return to the job, all of that stems from someone nudging me in the direction of my own authenticity and values.
Our night out in LA this year was just as fun. We met at one of my favorite bars in my neighborhood, walked to my new home in all its serendipitous glory, laughed over dinner at a diner, and finally Ubered out into Hollywood. We hit similar beats to the year before, replacing the cozy upper floor of Mac McGee's with the dark interior parlor room at Sassafras, then once again moving along when the live music made it too hard to hear each other. Our search for a quieter scene took us to Stout, where we talked about finding the balance in life and how prior lives of high highs and low lows compare to a steady increase in one's baseline contentment.
Chelsea and I are either different people with similar approaches or similar people with different approaches. It's hard to tell which sometimes. The differences are somewhat cosmetic: hobbies, interests, approaches to work. On the other hand, our childhoods share similarities that shaped how we react to and roll with the world, but that sometimes make reacting to and rolling with ourselves difficult. We both analyze things to the bone and both want to go where other people are as much as possible. Perhaps it's these alignments that help me learn about my own journey whenever I hear Chelsea talk about hers.
Eventually, we Ubered back home and fell asleep, only to wake up early and begin solving the problems of the world again, first in our pajamas, then over brunch at Home. Ultimately, I dropped Chelsea off for lunch with the bride-to-be. We parted with a hug and I found myself saying, "Thank you, I needed this." I have been processing the success of this move a lot, but I think part of that processing needed to happen with someone else. It was a pleasant thought as I turned my car northward to further echoes of my past year.
I intended to make this post about Chelsea's visit AND Tahoe, but as usual, the topics choose their own length. I will get to my Tahoe return in the next day or so. For now, it is fit to share my enthusiasm and gratitude for Chelsea's friendship and for the geographic fortune that results in such an unlikely tradition. I owe each person in my unthinkably broad network of friends and family some form of debt for placing me into the swift and easy current that now carries me along, but, in a very real way, Chelsea started it.
Thank you so much, Chels. Who knew, when we met one-on-one to discuss a post-merger exam policy, that we'd be friends at all, much less St. Patrick's Day partners-in-crime. The world is wonderfully precise sometimes.
No comments:
Post a Comment