I’ve been writing daily about my ketamine process for friends and family so that I can track its efficacy and have detailed notes for when I write about it for other outlets—and it’s made me miss blogging! Old-school blogging about the smaller stuff in life. You may see more posts like this around here. Or not. Not sure!

I’ve written about how much I adore Maya, who was one of my yoga teacher training teachers. This morning, I took her Level 1-2 class. I woke up feeling like ass—with my period, a stuffy nose and a migraine. COOL. But I wanted to get some movement in, so an easier yoga class was perfect.

I inhaled espresso before leaving my apartment, and I was too caffeinated and jittery to really be present in class. So my mind wandered to being excited to catch up with Maya after class.

I had a sense of déjà vu as I remembered our chats after class from this time last year. Maya is a wise, wise lady, and she also moved here from NYC. So many of our chats around this time last year were me telling her that I just couldn’t decide whether to move here or not, and how would I know what the right decision was? The truth is, I think I was waiting for some magic bullet. I thought I wanted to stay in NYC, but I just wasn’t ready to leave.

One year later, I’m so sure that this is the right place for me right now.

If you don’t follow me on Instagram, you might not know that I GOT A NEW DOG!!! Her name is Lucy, she’s a rescue shih tzu, and I am in love. We went to the Santa Monica dog parade today, and she dressed up as an ewok, the perfect shih tzu costume.

I walked on the beach with one of my new friends. We met from a meetup from a Facebook group, and we were the only ones who showed up! Which was fine, because we were able to share some really deep stuff with each other that we had in common that we might not have otherwise shared. (I’m more of a 1:1 person anyway than a group hang person, in my old age.)

We always take really long walks when we meet up, and we walked, with Lucy, probably about four miles total.

It was a really grounding day that made me feel at home here. Nothing special, just a really nice ordinary day—and I’m so grateful to be able to appreciate those again.

I knew I was going to have a good run tonight.

This is rare.

But I have been feeling so much better emotionally and mentally lately. I’ve gone from not wanting to be alive or get out of bed and halfheartedly muscling my way through my days to feeling like I’m really living life again.
(I know I’ve seesawed between posts like these and posts about how I’m depressed again, but that’s life with chronic depression.)

My life feels like it’s coming together in California in ways it didn’t even a few weeks ago. I’m joining things—Junior League, The Wing. I’m volunteering with Girls on the Run. I adopted a new dog, and I am IN LOVE. WITH HER. She’s a shih tzu rescue I named Lucy. (Lucy means light, and also my mom loved I Love Lucy.)

My life just feels really full right now, and I’m happy my running is following suit. “It’s easier to run when you’re not struggling so deeply,” said my dear friend Morgan, and she is a very smart woman.

It was the 100% right decision, but I’m still a little wistful that I won’t be running NYC next weekend, but I just wasn’t there. But even starting to train brought back my love for running and how it helps you with goal-setting and pride in your hard work. I’m doing a 10K with friends in December, and I’m going to work on training for it and doing some speedwork and staying on a regular running schedule.

I’m better now at seeing that a bad day isn’t the end of the world (because some days, it did feel that way), and so I know I’ll still have some runs that will suck. But I just want some of that running strength back. I don’t care as much about pace any more, but I’d still like to improve a bit from where I am right now.

Tonight I ran three miles. Since the NYC Marathon two years ago, I’ve had a mental block of running more than two miles. I broke through that temporarily while I was training, but since I stopped, it started creeping back. But three miles is half an hour—I’ve got that. I’ve been doing some treadmill interval runs on my own and doing a class that’s similar to OrangeTheory and those short sucky interval have reminded me I can get through running slower outside. It’s come full circle. That’s how I started running originally.