A year ago this July, I moved back to Portland, unsure of what the future would bring. If you’re me, this is a terrifying thought. The unknown? We can’t have that. Control is a prominent dictator in my decision making - whereas leaving room for ambiguity is a forethought, a little treat when I want some spice in life, like taking a different route to the produce stand. Returning to Portland, I hyperfocused on finding my former self, attempting to revive the past, digging up the “good old days” which existed when I last lived in the city a decade prior.
What I found instead was an absolute struggle of existentialism. I was attempting to ground myself through the river waters, the houses I once lived in, and through the people/friends from my past. I put all my stock in finding grounding externally, believing old memories could anchor my chaotic mind. I searched so deeply for the roots, instead of attempting to grow them - some semblance of control through shortcuts.
I moved back to Portland after three years in New York City, but largely after almost 10 years of being away from the city that raised me. My time in NYC had brought a lot of heartache, grief, and defeat. The loss of my mother, the beginning of a war in Ukraine (a country I love dearly), compounded by the loss of multiple jobs, and finally the loss of a long term relationship. My stubborn self assumed I could hold the weight of these guilt laden pieces in my arms, and still stand up. As much as I resisted leaving the “big city”, my younger sister convinced me to come visit her back in Oregon for a little bit, just to shake things up, feel refreshed. In retrospect, my whole life needed a shaking up.
“This will be temporary!” I announced to myself, as I packed my belongings into a Uhaul storage unit in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and took a flight back to Portland last May, with only some summer/autumn clothes. What was initially supposed to be for a few months, has now turned into a full year.
I believed moving back to Portland would be easy. How could the city which shaped my formative years ever bring me harm? Everything awaiting me brought me joy - friends, family, memories. All pieces to take stock, all cards to fill fulfilled. Feeling grounded felt like it would, and should, come naturally.
But a decade is a long time. And just how I had changed, everything else had too. I expected to return to the same life I had before I left for Ukraine in May of 2015 - free of responsibility, full of excitement, of purpose, of friends who I could drop in on at any moment. Instead I was met with confusion, directionlessness, and “Not tonight, we’re busy”. I couldn’t understand what had happened; I felt so unwanted, so pushed out.
Suddenly I found myself asking myself why I decided to return to a place that didn’t seem to want me. For the first time, I felt like I didn’t belong to the city I so often referred to as “home”. With NYC in my rearview mirror, I wondered if anywhere was home at all. All the streets, the rivers, and the neighborhoods in Portland were the same when I last lived here… But with so much distance between us, they all felt like a recognizable face you see in public, but cannot place.
I’ve accepted that I’m not a patient person. Time has never once felt like it’s been on my side, especially when it comes to adapting. During my first week back in Portland, my good friends sat me down and gave me “the talk” - They wanted me to wait a few months before downloading the dating apps. I stared vacantly into the floor, releasing a long sigh, knowing they were absolutely right.
My pattern has always been to find solace in an individual, and I’ve learned this to be my nature during my frequent movements around the globe. As if I could become a parasite, attaching myself to their nature, to their roots, and through this, I could quickly develop my own. A co-dependent evolution. Feeling displaced felt uncomfortable, and an uncomfortable feeling is, well, uncomfortable, and why would I want to continue to live in that? Hopping on the dating apps felt natural, and finding someone to rest this rot of discomfort felt familiar.
If I could fast track the stability, the grounding, why wouldn’t I take that path? This path often feels comfortable in theory, but the actual hike is filled with anxiety and self-abandonment, resulting in eventual resentment in whatever person I link myself to. The responsibility doesn’t lie on them to create a life for me; I should already come with one from the beginning. If I’m not comfortable with myself, how could I ever be comfortable with someone else?
So I took a few months off from the dating apps. Ok, I took a full month off the dating apps. The feeling was unnatural, especially during the summer, when “love” fills the air and pasty white horny Portlanders who have been locked up all winter flood the parks and lather themselves in 50spf sunscreen to avoid melanoma. I looked around and felt miserably alone. All I wanted was to share the experience of summer with anyone; but I wanted to share it with my old friends especially.
“I’m out here going, ‘Hey everyone I’m back, let’s hang’ ‘We can’t tonight!’ ‘But… I’m back?’ Rinse and repeat. Shouldn’t everyone be happy I’ve returned?”.
These were the words I spoke to my good friend Lisa, who was visiting Portland from the East Coast. We were out on a walk in late August, and she asked how I was adjusting being back in the city. In this moment, Lisa was the first to hold the reality mirror of my friendships up to my face.
“While you’ve been gone for 10 years, everyone here has been living their life too. They’ve created routines without you in them. When you’ve come back to visit Portland, everyone can drop things for Cory time… but when you’re here here, bringing you in is harder… Things have to shift, to adjust, to make room for the person who now needs the space, where there may not have been space to begin with.”
Lisa’s wise words were resounding in nature, providing a perspective I, selfishly, had never considered. I was so heartbroken and frustrated over the lack of companionship of my friends, I never took a minute to step back and realize they have their own busy lives now; lives they’ve been living for years without me.
No surprise, it’s still something I’m adjusting to even a year later. The adjustments come in learning my time spent with friends is now during the sandwiched three hour period between daycare drop off and swim lessons, while we run errands together at CostCo, or cheering on their potty training child about how cool it is to poop on the toilet. The contrast between 10 years ago and now is stark, but I’m learning to see these friends where they are now in life, and adjust accordingly.
As someone who has moved frequently, I noticed fairly quickly how long it took to become acclimated to a place, but especially to a community. I would tell my friend Tim, over the course of my movings, “It takes at least a year to understand a place, to feel a part of it”. Of course, I would never heed my own advice; the number of times Tim would use my own words against me during the myriad of moves I would make, I couldn’t count. During my dating talk, Tim would mention my same advice to me when returning to Portland, after all these years.
Living in the uncomfortable is awful. Do not recommend it. At some point though, this new year, a sprout began to show. I felt a need to grow, to spread my roots, because I couldn’t stand being uncomfortable anymore. Weirdly, yelling into the void wasn’t bringing any results. I return to a quote by Anais Nin time after time in my life: “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
I came to find you can’t force belonging. Belonging takes time, and one thing I have never had, patience. But I started with the one lesson I knew well from my father.
My father was, and maybe still is, the king of being a regular. My father’s long term friendships, like a majority of us, stemmed from school, but also from a breakfast spot in SW Portland called The Original Pancake House. While in his late 20s/early 30s, semi-new to Portland, my father started frequenting the breakfast establishment every Wednesday at open, sitting at the community table. The staff noticed his frequency, but so did a few other patrons doing the same thing. Like clockwork, they naturally began all meeting on Wednesdays weekly, and developed core friendships he still has to this day, 40 plus years later. OPH is probably the only place in Portland I know of that still has the same waitresses working there from when I would frequent with my father in my childhood - when we went recently, they all recognized him.
During this breakfast haunt, I would see my father in his natural state - charming, charismatic, and social. Could I apply this same lesson to my own life? I realized I had to some degree while living in NYC - frequenting coffee shops.
The baristas started recognizing me at the coffee shop I would frequent nearby off Belmont. I would grab a half-caf cappuccino with honey, and sit with the New York Times for a while. We would shoot the shit, talk drama, and life with. I was becoming a regular. I began buying a bagel from the food cart on the same block, and they noticed me. The wine folks at the shop nearby recognized me and soon we chatted about wine. I was becoming part of a community. If I had a bad day, I could at least go to this tiny block off Belmont and feel like the world was a little smaller; the blossom was pushing forth. This socialization pushed me to reach out to people from school, from my past, uncomfortable, yet necessary. Soon a chaotic short term relationship would end, and so would an absolutely heinous living situation. I would move to Ladd’s Addition. I would join the FLAG - Friends of Ladd’s Addition Gardens, adopting a couple rosebeds to maintain for the year. I would meet random people frequenting the rosebeds, they would show me their friends, and so and so forth. I would become a regular at the coffee shop a 2 min waddle from my place. Slowly, but surely, the blossom was beginning to open, to bloom.
I’ve been attempting, and somewhat successfully integrating, this philosophy of “For Now” into my daily life. “For Now” means temporary, that there is room for change, to adapt, that life can be fluid and not so rigid as I would regularly think. To convince this pink fleshy overthinking machine that progress isn’t linear in the way I’ve been taught to believe. To see there’s beauty in the absolute struggle, in the unknown, in the tears shed night after night through a mind racing of blatant frustration.
The hardest part was being ok with being uncomfortable. The hardest part is being ok with being comfortable. The duality of humans.
I’ve learned three things in the past year - how hard it is to meet new friends in your 30s, how important it is to create a community, and how long it takes for a community to develop. The hardest part comes with keeping all of it in balance.
I’m still scared to be back in Portland. I’m scared of what it means to settle, of not knowing what it means to settle. Scared to know if I’m doing a good job, or even doing the job on paper at all. I look around at all these people who seemingly have it together, knowing full well this isn’t the case, but the intimidation lingers… “Comparison is the thief of joy” and all that. I’m frightened I’ve been gone for so long, the muscle has atrophied, the movements clunky, and the realization is at the forefront of my waking life. I’m scared to be still. Because stillness means the end. Stillness means no more adventure. Stillness means I’ve given up. Stillness means failure.
I miss NYC. A lot. I miss the smell of hot garbage in August, the roar of the F train as it passes by the sidewalk grate, I miss my community garden, throwing my hands to the sky and cursing at Eric Adams, and I miss the wind in my hair while I ride the ferry across the East river. Hell, I even miss the “retired” old dudes who would blast oldies on the bench across from my apartment at all hours of the day. Portland will never have these things, because Portland isn’t NYC. Honestly, I don’t know if I’ll ever love Portland at all. I’m learning to be ok with this feeling. While I grieve and mourn these longings, I’ve come to accept substitutions that offer a similar amount of reprieve (almost). Accepting *gestures openly* all of this can be “For Now”.
My belongings are still currently in that Park Slope storage unit, collecting dust while Uhaul collects $80 a month. On a recent walk with a friend, discussing said belongings, I said, “My stuff in Brooklyn feels frozen in time, a monument to a part of my life and a place I loved so dearly, but knew I had to abandon. Keeping them in Brooklyn feels as though the opportunity exists for that life to return, an olive branch. And if I go and get them, then my life is over… I mean, that part of life is over.” My friend notices my slip up, and mentions it. Picking up my belongings means accepting I’m in Portland, full feet in the river. While logically I know I can always return to NYC, emotionally the door feels fully closed, as though the opportunity will never present itself again in my lifetime.
Who knows, maybe one day I’ll move back.
I’m in no way an expert at any of this, and frequently become tripped up. But I now have a community to hold me up now, to keep me on track. Patience still isn’t my strong suit, but I’m beginning to understand how time plays a crucial role for things to come together, not unlike wine resting in oak barrels, too unbalanced to be savored now and enjoyed.
I’m biking down the Eastside Esplanade, and the sweet smell of ripe fermenting blackberries permeates the air. I breathe in the scent, the heat of late-afternoon sun directly cooking the berries so much they’ll be sour mush by tomorrow morning. They never stood a chance. This particular smell signals the arrival of late July and early August, a nostalgic trail through my core memories of living in Portland, one which I associate with being back here. It’s also the moonrise over the Macadam bridge, picking figs from the neighboring trees, the half of a watermelon after a 6 mile run, the river waters of the Mollala, and the Burgerville chocolate milkshake at 10pm. Within all these little moments, I’m beginning to feel more comfortable within my own skin, and with the choice of returning to Portland.
“What if life really could be this easy?”, I tell myself, but also to the friends I meet over coffee and discuss the existentialism of life.
Everything, given time.