"In It" Part 15

Muscle Memory

About the time I started my Substack, I committed to a series I’ve called "in it" where I've written about the messiness of life's transitions in real time. It’s not always coherent, there’s a mix of emotions, it’s raw life. It started when I left my job, continued when I started a new one and that didn't work out, and now we've picked up and moved our family to a new state. Many changes. This latest installment addresses more of what it feels like to experience what I didn’t anticipate.

I feel as if I ate an “Eat Me” cake from Alice in Wonderland. Everything around me feels slightly too small… or perhaps it’s that I feel slightly too tall? For the past 10 days in our new home, I feel physically out of sorts - the counters, my desk, the tables, everything feels lower than normal, like I am an oversized person bumbling around in a too-small space. In the kitchen, I reach for utensils where there are none, turn to stir a pot of food that’s not quite where I expect, take one too few steps to reach the sink, and search for dish towels in a drawer when they are actually in a cabinet.

At some level, my brain knows that these things are not located where I am seeking them. After all, I am the one who organized them, but my body isn’t remembering. My muscle memory from 15 years of living in the same house is strong, creating a mismatch I did not anticipate.

We love to travel and often rent homes in the places we visit. I have never struggled in this way before, but we also don’t bring all of our own pots, pans, utensils and dishes to these places. Perhaps my current lack of brain/body alignment comes from the fact that I am in a new place surrounded by the familiar. I expect that things should be somewhat the same, and yet they are not the same. My body can’t reconcile the sameness with the differences, and it’s making me feel awkward.

Until now, I never realized how effortlessly I moved around our previous house, how much I did subconsciously. I could have unloaded the dishwasher, cooked dinner, made coffee, and put groceries away on autopilot. The truth is that I did these tasks for years while engaged in conversation, listening to an audiobook, and taking care of babies. To attempt that now would be futile. I would lose the thread of the conversation, have to pause the audiobook, and thank goodness my babies have grown up!

Much of the cost of moving was anticipated:

I expected the emotional weight of bidding farewell to people and places we love.

I imagined how surreal it might feel to move to a place I’ve dreamed of living.

I steeled myself for the physical effort it takes to pack up a house and shift all those belongings elsewhere.

And I triaged the tasks of changing addresses, setting up utilities and figuring out where to get groceries.

Anticipating these things has not made them easier, nor has it made how they’ve played out totally predictable, but at least I felt prepared for them.

What I didn’t expect was the physical manifestation of what’s going on in my subconscious. I didn’t expect the lag I am experiencing as my mind and body adjust to new spaces and new routines.

It’s tough feeling like this is something I can neither rush nor control. I suppose I must be patient and give my mind time to rectify the familiar with the unfamiliar, offer repetition for my muscles to adapt to these new patterns. It will take time for my subconscious to learn that I have to take two steps instead of one between sink and stove, time to find the knives and instinctively open the correct drawer for the pasta pot, and time to learn the most efficient place to chop vegetables.

No matter how much change I bring about in my life (and lately there has been a lot!), these are the types of feelings that continue to catch me by surprise. They are too preposterous to anticipate. Yet, I do find that reflecting helps, and I can keep making space to to honor and articulate the feelings of change, even if that sensation is as disorienting as feeling a bit too tall.