Standing on the edge of Michigan Avenue a few minutes after I took the photo below, I was suddenly overwhelmed with memories. I hadn’t bothered to look at a map before we went to Millennium Park, and so didn’t realize beforehand that the avenue runs alongside it. The last time I had been there was in early March of 2002, before the park was built. I was on my way to visit the Big 10 university where I ultimately didn’t do my Master’s, and had stopped off in Lombard to see my great-aunt Marcina. The day after a huge snowstorm, I drove into the city to see the Adams retrospective at the Art Institute and to wander through the Field Museum. Afterwards, I meandered along Michigan Avenue, contemplating the snow and the cold and the possibilities that spread out in front of me. It was my first time visiting a large city alone. For the past seven years, my life had been full of days that were all very much the same: work at International Shipping Empire, school at nights, occasional evenings with family or friends. Always the same holidays, always the same house. Everything the same, in many ways the same sort of sameness that held for generations of my family. That first trip to the Midwest was a way of thinking about stepping away from all of it.

Two months after that day on Michigan Avenue, I quit my job and became a full-time graduate student. My entire life shifted. I started teaching. I discovered theory. I discovered that I had been right all those years I had suspected that I was meant to be an academic and not a shipping queen. I met Mister Boyfriend that fall semester. And things kept happening. His father passed away, and I learned I actually could be responsible for bolstering another person. And then we moved in together, and then we finished our degrees, and then we moved across the country to start our Ph.D.s, and then I broke my ankle, and then we got married. And then there were all the less momentous, still important things: travelling, and family visits, and imposter syndrome, and falling in love with the Twin Cities.

Some days there’s too much “and then.” Some days I think No more “and then!” There’s a comfort in sameness that I didn’t notice before. But more often I love the life I have now, because I feel like I’m actually living it instead of just following along. And I’m very often thankful that I did take the step off the cliff to see what would happen. If I hadn’t, I might never have found out what suits me. And I might never have had the chance to come back to Michigan Avenue and suddenly realize that it was a different, better version of myself that returned to the spot.

(This is a post for myself so I can remember, but it is also for Miss Frizzy, who is contemplating her own changes at the moment.)