It’s hard to believe that we left Manhattan over 6 months ago. For half of a year, we’ve been living in the suburbs and it still feels so alien to me. Since my last update, our new life has started to become a reality in a deeper way for better or for worse.
I think the long, hard, cold winter didn’t help my case, but I’ve been feeling a pretty intense amount of loneliness over the past few months. I watch my friends on Instagram going out to dinners and drinks in the city and I am sitting at home alone waiting for my husband to come home. Granted, now that it’s starting to warm up I’m doing more after-work activities, but a lot of those are done alone as well.
Creating a group of friends has been a challenge. While I definitely have a few friends in Connecticut and that number is growing (slowly), I don’t want to be the weirdo who is always asking to hang out in an annoying way so I try to keep it to once a month with each of them. I’m not close enough to anyone yet where I can just show up out of the blue. Everyone says when we have kids that will change because I’ll become close to other moms.
Because of the fact that I’m lonely and don’t have too many people to spend time with, I’ve found myself throwing myself into work whether it’s for Nourish or my blog. I spend way too much time on my computer and look forward to getting outside more this summer. When I don’t do this, a pretty intense feeling of loneliness and regret washes over me which is something that I never want to feel.
The one person that I spend a whole lot of time with is my husband, Anel. He works a lot during the week so he wants to spend most weekends relaxing at home where I would rather be out and about whenever possible. I think the isolation has definitely put a strain on our marriage but I realized in the last month or two that going into the city to meet up with friends or my sister on Saturdays is a great solution for me. He can be home and happy and I get my fix of girl giggles.
Even though there is a gym in my building, I’ve also been working out less which is weird. Now that the sun is shining, I’ve been more motivated for sure, but not being able to walk 2 blocks to Soul Cycle has put a real damper on my work out routine. I’m hoping to get a beach pass soon so that I can run outside on the water and enjoy the beauty around me.
Despite how hard it’s been on me in the last few months, I know that this decision was right for our health and longterm happiness as well as the well-being of our future family. I cannot imagine raising children in New York City and the thought of that reminds me that we’re in the right place and it will get easier the longer we live here.
I’m so excited for the summer because we travel a lot in those months and because there are a lot of outside activities in our area that we want to do: hiking, swimming, beach trips, picnics, antiquating, and exploring. I’ll give you an update at the end of summer but I expect that things are on the upswing!
