Welcome to November Blue

October 5th, 2011 was my first blog post ever.

I moved to Alaska from North Carolina the day before and decided starting a blog would be a great way to share my new adventure. Prior to that, my only writing expressions were posts about being a nurse, summer vacations, and vaguebooking about my tumultuous break up the year before.

I’d journaled on and off as well, but never on a public platform. But I knew if I made actual posts for anyone who felt like reading them – I’d more than likely make an effort to keep it up.

But what do I call it? This new expression of my newly adventurous self?

I’d planned this move for about 8 months. I have this habit of making a decision and running with it. So needless to say – this decision to move came up a lot at work. I worked at a hospital on a unit where patients would spend weeks at a time staying on our floor causing us to create nurse/patients relationships which I treasure to this day.

One of these patients was born legally blind, mid to late 70s. He’d never taken disability and refined his other senses to allow him to have a successful career and lived a fulfilling life. He could recognize our footsteps down the hall. He could also hear most conversations occurring within 50 feet of his door. He also never had his door shut for this very reason.

A coworker of mine was expressing concern one night stating something along the lines of:

I don’t really think you’re tough enough to live in Alaska – do you?

This was a fair statement. Before this move, I’d never lived outside of North Carolina. I went off to college, graduated, moved back to my hometown, and got a job at the local hospital. I’d had one serious boyfriend my whole life. I lived in an apartment with my two dogs and drove a reliable Hyundai Sonata.

So...no, I didn’t know if I was tough enough.

After this, I walk into my legally blind patient’s room to give him his evening meds and to check on him before bed.

“You’d make a fine frontier woman.”

“Huh?”

“I heard you talking to someone about your move to Alaska and they said you couldn’t handle it. That’s not true. You’d make a fine frontier woman.”

And there it was – the name for my blog. ‘A Fine Frontier Woman.’

I wrote about my move (3 flights, 14 hours, 2 dog crates, 5 boxes shipped via FedEx).

I wrote about the mystifying beauty of the Chugach mountains and feet of snow on Halloween.

I wrote about it being so cold my tire pressures deflated, my eyelashes froze and my wine exploded in my car.

I wrote about how insufferable my homesickness was and how depressing 18 hours of darkness can truly be.

I wrote about dating.

I wrote about finding independence.

After a few years, my posts were less frequent due to the busyness of life and grad school and then in 2014, I started writing again.

I wrote about my mom’s uterine cancer coming back.

I wrote about my pain, sadness, fears, and hopelessness.

I wrote about how discovering hot yoga helped me free myself of addictive habits and find healing.

I wrote about loss and love.  

I realized at one point that my posts started to always end with a lesson learned. Wanting to share my lesson is what typically prompting my writing – a parable of sorts. I wouldn’t start writing until I had some idea of what my point was, what my discovery was, what my a-ha moment was.

I find the most joy in sharing these experiences when I feel like I can share some sort of insight with people I care about. I find that as I get older, some of those lessons are tougher to talk about, to articulate, to express fully. This realization is what has led to me “rebranding” my blog.

I want to shift to the uneasy – lean into the discomfort. And I want to do that with you.

It won’t be for everyone and that’s ok.

They’ll be longer and heavier. Hopefully, they’ll be more thought-provoking. Hopefully, they’ll make you think of your own story. Your own lessons.

This is no attempt at educating, proselytizing, or counseling. This is me humbly sharing my stories and diving deeper into the feelings and emotions.

But what to call it? For one, I don’t live in the Last Frontier anymore – I live in the mountains of western North Carolina. Secondly, although I will also be adventurous at heart, this time in my life is about setting roots, settling in, absorbing and enjoying this life I’ve created.

A personality descriptor that I would use to describe my mom and myself would be melancholy.

A feeling of pensive sadness, typically with no obvious cause.

That’s not to say we were or are always sad – but it happened from time to time. I remember my mom crying in the driveway before church one day and I was probably 5-6 years old. I went up to her and asked why she was crying and she just said “I don’t know sweetie, but it’s ok” and hugged me close. And it was ok.

My emotions help define me, quiet or not. We aren’t very excitable people. We aren’t the exclaimers, the screamers, the ooers and ahhers of babies, weddings, or celebrations.

We bring people together in a more subtle, subdued but fierce manner. Our love is true and our actions tend to do more of the talking because frankly, we can get worn out by talking too much.

November Blue is one of the most meaningful songs in my life. As a Type 4 (enneagram), music and songs can be irreparably imprinted on me. This song is by The Avett Brothers, a North Carolina based folk/Americana band whom I’ve now loved for almost a decade.

This song – specifically a live version done in NYC in a high school gym in the early 2000s – came on my YouTube station one night that was I terribly homesick living in Palmer, Alaska. It’s a longer song, over six minutes, and the recording is kind of shit – but I immediately fell in love. The agonal singing, heartbroken words, and enthusiastic guitar playing soothed my hurting soul.

I’ve probably listened to this recording hundreds of times – no exaggeration. When I’m happy, when I’m sad, when I’m lonely, when I’m bored. I’ve often played it over and over again for an hour on a long drive and only stopped when my throat hurt from singing (or my eyes hurt from crying). The song is about love and loss and there’s even a line about how her yellow hair is like the sunlight...

So, needless to say – November Blue is a song which is in the Stephanie Klein life soundtrack – may even be the title track.

So here I have an emotion, melancholy – or blue, and a song.

Well, as it turns out my birthday is in November. And then it just made sense.

Conscious expansion refers to my favorite nursing theorist — M. Newman and her theory of health as expanding consciousness. We are not merely well or unwell, our health and life all play a role in how we see the world and respond to it. The journey isn’t to find the lack of sickness, or sadness, but to figure out how that helps define who we are. This concept has helped me in many situations and saved me from constant anger at scenarios that I couldn’t fully understand at the time. It also helps me find peace when I accept that everything changes — so whatever I am going through — is exactly where I need to be. And this blog is my modest and humble articulation of how I see this journey.

-Steph

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