This morning I'm headed to Charlottesville, Virginia for a couple days to visit my friend Patrick before he moves to Connecticut for a new job and to be reunited with his husband after a year of long-distance.

Charlottesville is such a special place to so many people I love--it was Patrick's home for ten years, where he met Chad and started a life together with him; it was where Shawna took a post-bac program before med school; it was where Rob and I first really lived together, on our own; and it was where I went through what I look back on now as one of the hardest times of my life--getting over the death of a childhood friend, dealing with depression and anxiety, modifying my diet in a life-changing way, finishing graduate school, wondering what could possibly be next.

But it was also one of the best times of my life--morning trail runs with my best friend, followed by farmer's markets or big pitchers of mimosas, afternoons spent paging through the University of Virginia's gorgeous libraries, living across the street from Patrick and Chad, working at a sweet little coffee shop, coming to the beautiful realization that Rob was the man I wanted to spend the rest of my life with.

And then, suddenly, it was time to go. We packed up our stuff and I dropped Rob off at the airport for a month-long school trip to China before a six-month stint training for his new job in DC. I headed back to my parents' house on the lake with no real plans for anything; missing Rob, missing Charlottesville, with no clear vision of the fun and amazing and love-filled life that was in store for us.

Lately I've been thinking about all the other "ends" in my life--some sad, some happy, some both--that were really just wonderful beginnings: The end of long-distance when I finally joined Rob in Minneapolis. My last day at a job I really thought I needed. The end of our time in Minnesota. And so many others. Almost nothing lasts forever--but your heart can break and mend and grow more than you ever thought possible.

"There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind." --C.S. Lewis

Overwhelm. Having it all. Working hard, working from home, making dinner, cleaning up, all things entrepreneurial. Podcasts, blog posts, articles about meditation. The strange, thin line that lies between self-employment and unemployment. It's all I think about lately. I told Rob the other day that between blogging and freelance work, I'm making more money than I have in the past, but I feel unsatisfied in some way. Obviously money is not everything, but it is something. Either way, I love what I do but sometimes it feels like something's been missing.

Last week I drove through the city on a weekday morning and felt nothing but jealousy as I saw women in pencil skirts walking down the sidewalk together, with bags on their arms and Starbucks cups in their hands. And yet, when that was me, I dreamed of working for myself--of a big white desk in my apartment and a life where I got eight hours of sleep and cooked and made it to they gym every day no matter what. The grass is greener on the other side, some say; and others tell you that no, the grass is greener where you water it. I have found that both of them are true, but it's impossible to water your own grass when you can't stop staring at the neighbor's.

Here's a thing I've never said before: Sometimes being a lifestyle blogger feels really stupid. You write about everything and in doing that, you're almost always alienating one reader from the others. This person likes you because they want recipes. This person wants you to write. This person wants more style posts! And this person understands why you do sponsored posts, but wishes you wouldn't. And I'm over here, somehow trying to do all of it, but not always doing a very good job at any of it.

But Freckled Italian was born out of a desire to write.

And I'm trying to find a way back to that.

I walked along the beach last weekend by myself--barefoot, listening to the waves, waving at black labs and golden retrievers busy chasing frisbees, smiling at young dads up early to set up umbrellas for their new families--and I thought, this is what they're talking about when they say everyone needs time to recharge, reset, reconnect. To stand in shallow water, watching the tide come in. To ignore your phone, leave your laptop at home, and laugh until your sides ache with friends. To have a couple glasses of wine and face your fear of the ocean--to dive under the breaking waves and feel more accomplishment about that simple feat than you have in months. To simply slow down.

“Allow the luxury of time, dreaming out the window, a little noodle walk through a dime store...

I know more but I don’t push it because there are things I don’t know that I want to come to me. I’m calling up understanding beyond myself. If I get too determined, to linear, I’ll miss the tugs of intuition at the periphery of my perceptions, the things I don’t want to say, the things I have never said, these things that enrich the writing.”

— Natalie Goldberg, "Old Friend from Far Away"

I've written about this exact same thing multiple times, but most recently here. I feel like I finally might be getting somewhere. But, like most things in life, it just takes time. And, I guess, a trip to the beach.

A couple of weeks ago, I decided that my next life goal is to do a split.

I have never been very flexible--in life, maybe, but definitely not physically. I have been a runner for as long as I can remember, and for me that was a very low-maintenance identity. You put on your shoes and you went, and I never made the time to stretch before or after. I still drag myself out of bed in the mornings for a quick run, but there's a lot more to me these days.

I've been thinking a lot about what it means to stretch lately--to find yourself doing new things when you thought you knew who you were already. A runner then a CrossFitter then a not much of anything-er, suddenly finding herself at the barre six times a week, daydreaming about split stretches and standing up on tiptoes.

"The whole of life becomes an act of letting go," Yann Martel wrote in Life of Pi.

But maybe life is more of a stretch than anything else.