do what makes your heart sing

What a difference a year makes.

This time last year, I was heading back to New Jersey after a week at home visiting friends and family and volunteering. After a weekend in Nashville, as I got into my car to head back to Memphis, knowing I'd be on a plane in 48 hours and knowing that said plane would take me back to a miserable, un-air-conditioned apartment and a miserable diet of hot dogs and toast and a miserable job and miserable MISERABLE, I just lost it. I bawled.

I bawled the way you do when you're a kid and you cry so hard that you lose your breath and struggle to catch it back between hiccups. It had been a few months since I'd come to terms with the fact that everything I'd ever wanted in life -- to move to New York, to work for a magazine -- maybe wasn't what life had intended for me, after all. But I still hadn't figured out what was intended for me, and the feeling of limbo, of being stuck in the purgatory that was Jersey City, making just barely enough money to pay the rent each month and invest in more off-brand hot dog stock, that feeling was tearing away at my insides, pulling me apart piece by piece, and as I bawled, all of those pieces were flooding out through my eyes. And through my hiccups.

When I think back on that stunning display of maturity and the feelings that it represented, I am overcome with gratitude for what life has delivered to me in just 12 short months. Sure, there are no accidents, and I worked my ass off for every last inch of it. I found a loop hole in my lease, I planned and orchestrated an incredible 36-hour road trip to retrieve my belongings from a questionably secured mini-storage, I hit the ground running and made connections and found a job and an apartment and one morning I woke up and I was happy.

So this weekend, when I got a call from the Memphis Music Foundation and was asked to join their team as Marketing and Development Coordinator, I had a brief out-of-body experience. Ex-squeeze me? A job doing something I love, surrounded by Memphis music, promoting Memphis music, living and breathing the soul of the city that first taught me to love the soul of a song?

Seriously?

It didn't quite seem real. It still doesn't. And it probably won't until the morning of May 17 when I arrive at the Music Foundation office on South Main for my first day of work.

Last night I said to my parents, "I have a job that uses BOTH OF MY DEGREES! Someone write a newspaper article about me! I'm an anomaly!" And though I was joking then, I know that red-faced, hiccuping, bawling me from just one year ago would have seen such a job as out of reach and perhaps even non-existent.

But y'all? It exists. It's in reach. It's less than two weeks away.

I've always thought of my life as a series of adventures, and this next chapter promises to be one of the greatest yet.


cheers,
elizabeth