Small Steps Create Big Shifts: Seven Years After Leaving Seattle

I didn’t have a polished plan when I left Seattle seven years ago. Instinct led me. I left because something in me knew I could not keep living the life I tried to maintain there. Some endings arrive with finality, like when you load the last of your belongings into the moving van and drive away for the last time. Mine arrived like the weather here in the Pacific Northwest, mostly unpredictable, always morphing.

On June 19, seven years will have passed since I packed up my life and moved to the Long Beach Peninsula in Washington. Seven years since I traded traffic for tide charts, crowds for gulls, and an outdated version of me for an updated me built around healing.

Change did not arrive all at once. It wasn’t easy, though some may think so.

This new version of me came in quiet ways. In learning the rhythm of fog and wind. In the mornings, by the ocean. In making art without needing it to prove anything. In the slow work of rebuilding a life from pieces that once felt irreparable.

There were years when progress looked very small. A day survived. A habit changed. A risk taken. Confidence, I learned, does not always announce itself. Sometimes it arrives disguised as repetition. You keep showing up. You try again. You make the thing. You begin to trust yourself a little more than you did the day before.

This year, June 19 carries another first.

On the exact anniversary of leaving Seattle, I will spend my first day as a vendor at the Columbia-Pacific Farmers Market. Seven years ago, I arrived here trying to figure out who I might become. This year, I get to show up with work made by my own hands.

Bookmarks. Gelli prints. Small pieces of a creative life I once worried might never fully return to me.

I do not think healing happens in a straight line. I do not think reinvention comes with a dramatic soundtrack. Mostly, I think it looks like continuing. Like trying again. Like building something slowly enough that one day you look around and realize the life you hoped for has quietly begun to take shape.

Seven years feels like something worth honoring.