I have slept in nine different bedrooms over the last five years.

 I have moved into nine different places since the day I launched The Olly Project. I suppose I could say that The Olly Project is my most serious long-term relationship, the place that I come home to when home-home is always changing. Nine different front doors, nine different mailing addresses. I have lived with my best friends, with strangers, with myself. I work really hard to make each place somewhere I love to be, with people I enjoy being with. And I think have done so successfully. Some places do feel more important in the timeline than others. Which is normal, I think. 

I have loved different people in each. I have called different people to say goodnight in each. My closest friends have changed, but in some larger sense, they have also stayed the same. The ‘Favorites’ list on my phone remains largely the same as it did five years ago. A name is added every year or so, and another is taken away at about the same rate. Tracing back time through those front doors yields a powerful ache, a nostalgia for the person who lived there, once upon a time. Miles and years and time zones stretch across those memories now. I’m in the ninth bedroom writing this now, a room in the first place in which I can live, theoretically, indefinitely. There is no end-date next to my name on this lease. This is comforting and daunting for several reasons, but mostly, I am just glad that I can finally drill holes in my walls!

In each room, I have written late into the night. I have cried and processed the parts of my life that I would go on to write about. I have started my first book, and become more careful about sharing my life here as I piece it together on a page somewhere else.

The Olly Project stopped feeling novel and exciting this year. It is a well-worn garden now, one that blooms and dies seasonally, whose soil is rich with the history of what grew there and what was absorbed back into the dirt. I am a gardener now, I think. My job is to plant seeds, and then water and watch. Another way to think about it is that I write in the same way one makes maps. My most essential task is to walk around and get to know a place. What does it feel like to be here? What are the landmarks in this horizon? You cannot chart a land that you do not know. So my job as a writer is first to go out and be in the world. That’s mostly what I’ve spent this year doing.

I’m still writing. But there is less sharing. More just being there.

I want to map this place. I have to live here first.

I don’t know how to map nine places in five years. I think synthesizing is a task handed to you when you are ready – it comes on time and not a moment before. I don’t think I’m ready yet. Maybe that’s why I’m not sharing that much right now. Observing patterns and then making sense of what they mean out loud is hard for me these days. A good example is when I’m coaching soccer. I’m currently managing the micro. Getting to know the players, their positions, strengths, weaknesses, how they play at practice, and in games. Assessing and changing their system, and implementing a vision, is impossible right now because I haven’t lived there long enough. I haven’t been able to move my eyes from what’s in front of me. I’m still watching and listening. That’s all I can do, really. Gathering information and thinking about it.

On this day last year, I was lifting my vision up. Go read that article if you are interested in knowing what that was like. I was experiencing a visionary and expansive part of the year, with a clear sense of direction and an excitement about going that way. I miss that. I miss having a sense of mastery of where I am and where I’m going. I didn’t know that I would be back in the United States a year from then. Moving back to Seattle, starting two new jobs, and changing several of my close relationships in the process has been ultra-disorienting. I am living upside down. My only task each day is to get upright again. I reset overnight and begin again the next day. When I try to do more than this, stuff starts to go sideways, fast. My speech physically fails. I stutter, and lose track of my thoughts, and very quickly start making no sense at all. I have to think really carefully about what I’d like to say before I say it. Sometimes, if I take a premature stab at bringing two ideas together, it falls flat and deflates. I take this as a sign that I am rushing ‘the process’. And, that I need to go back and write about it more before I start vocalizing. This is hard for a person who loves to talk!

I love learning but hate being a beginner.

I am a beginner in every sense of the word these days. There is almost nothing that I have mastery over right now – everything – everything - is new. The learning curve is steep, and it is frustrating. I am overwhelmed with the notion that it will never get better. Because I love synthesizing. I do my best work, and feel most like myself, when I am operating at systems-level. Being an anthropologist is an interesting career because of this. The day-to-day work of an anthropologist is not something that comes naturally to me.

Synthesis in anthropology at systems level comes from an expert understanding of the lived every day. You must go to a place and live there, listen and watch and notice. It usually takes months (years) before one feels comfortable enough to be there, to become a real part of the place and start saying things about it. Arriving at a complex understanding comes from very humble beginnings. For a long time, things are very basic. Observe. Describe. Observe more. Describe more. It is a necessary part of the magic. And it takes faith that things will not always feel so rudimentary. Usually, anthropologists are living in the everyday of somewhere else – a different culture or country or community unfamiliar to them. But my ‘somewhere else’ is my life. This place is unfamiliar and strange - and my only task is to live here.  Every day.

The little comfort I hold onto about this is that that when I am unable to synthesize, I am mostly a feeling body. I spend most of the day watching and listening and touching and tasting. I speak when I have a question, or an observation. I move when my body feels it should. Rest when I’m tired. Show up where I’m needed. There’s nothing else to do, really. And this is a gift, so long as I interpret it as one instead of something unfinished about me. It is not unfinished. It is precisely a part of my becoming. So, I am trying to stop struggling against the current.

I am so lucky that I have five years of this day to look back on and think, “Wow. So much has changed.” I started The Olly Project on April 26th, 2018 out of a deep sense of curiosity. What would come of it? What would I learn about myself?

I can tell you today that I am different and I am the same, and I love differently, and I love the same. Every year I look backwards and it is like this. So much has changed. So little has. I am beginning to suspect that this might be the rhythm of all my life.

I would be happy if it was.

Something new this year: I made myself a business card with my name, my email address, and a link to The Olly Project on it. Underneath my name, it says ‘WRITER’, embossed in deep purple serif. I went back and forth for a long time on using that word. After a while, I concluded that I feel closer to ‘writer’ than any other term I might use. The only other word I could have used that felt equally true would have been ‘woman’ (which makes less sense on a business card!)

I live in the world as a writer. So I’m claiming it, officially.

When I give my card to someone, I usually say something like, “For when you think of me. Or, if you think of someone who I should meet.” They smile, I smile. Planting seeds. Charting the landscape. We’ll see what comes of it.

Thank you for spending five beautiful years with me!

We’ll see if I can map this one by next April.

:)