Contraction & Expansion

Tyler and I started taking long drives together during quarantine.

It’s not an entirely new habit of ours; the night I found out I could fall in love with him was on a late night trip up PCH. It took being confined in a Ford Focus for me to let my feelings pour out into honest words for the first time.

I know that highway like the back of my hand for all the times we’ve driven it since—from summer beach days, to the day he proposed, to the hours after we were officially married in a courthouse with plastic rose petals. Since the time we began dating, we’ve gone on dozens of road trips together. Road trips to the mountains near my hometown, to a coastal town six hours away for a plate of gnocchi, to a winding road along the cape of South Africa. Tangled hands, loud, obnoxious singing, talking about all of the things that we forget to think about when we’re spending all day in our one-bedroom apartment together. 

This year though, going on drives isn’t something we save for special occasions. Living alone in our apartment every day of the week, having seen nobody but each other for months, going on a drive is the only time we have to connect with the world again. Letting the streets, birds, the ocean flash by from my passenger’s seat window, rolling it down to breathe in the breeze, letting it tug the baby hairs out from my ponytail. I’m energized by the world around me, even when I can only access it from inside a car, behind a mask. 

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I didn’t think I would write about quarantine. About the pandemic at all, in fact. It feels like everywhere we turn, there are more articles, more opinions, more feelings being shared about how we should and should not feel about the changed world around us. I’ve been sitting aside, silently, trying to figure out what it all means to me.

I’m not by nature a social person. I have a pocketful of friendships I pour into, cherish quality time with my family that has turned into phone calls and Facetimes, Zoom meetings and glasses of wine paired with my couch and blurry pixelated versions of their faces. It’s different, but something I find myself adjusting to almost too easily. 

It is too easy for me to fall back into the habits I’ve spent years trying to break: staying in my bedroom, saying ‘no’ to plans, forgetting to go outside for days at a time. Staying small; staying solo. I have a husband now, someone around me all the time, but I even find it easier to spend my nights in the other room, to forget to talk to him about what’s happening inside my head. Quiet has always been easy for me, despite having spent the last few years unraveling it slowly by the thread, out of my identity.

My word in 2020 was ‘expansion.’ I wanted to take up more space, breathe more air into my lungs. I wanted to stop feeling like I didn’t belong, or that my presence was too much. I wanted to expand my accomplishments, my self-worth, my Amanda-ness. 

When we first went into isolation, I thought I’d need to pick a new word. How could I focus on expanding when my world was shrinking by the day? 

Eventually though, I realized that even though I’ve barely left my apartment, this is the first year I’ve truly witnessed my worldview expand. From starting to wade through what it means to be an antiracist and an ally, to taking on more responsibility in my work, figuring out how to show up for my family and friends from a distance, and feeling more connected to the rest of the world than ever before as COVID-19 changed all of us, it’s been a year of work and change.

“Contraction: to draw together or nearer”

I’ve learned that you can not expand without the contraction that comes before it. One day when normalcy does feel like it’s returned, I’m grateful that I’ll never be able to say I’ve gone back to my normal life. In 2020 I’ve embraced a new version of myself; one that’s been given more time and space than ever before to expand. It’s more important to me now not to shrink from hard conversations than shrink from spending time on my own. It’s more important to me now to choose the safety of my husband and family over stacking up new experiences for my memory books. It’s more important to me now to keep up with the news and do my part in helping my community than to tune out anything that doesn’t bring me joy. I’ve learned to be energized by doing my part to show up for the world.

I’ve expanded my life to prioritize more than my own comfort. If this year is good for anything, let it be for us learning to center our worlds around more worthy things.