A few weeks before I decided to rebuild this blog, I wrote a recap post to bridge the gap between my prior time on The LITMO Life and now.

Then the blog was rebuilt the first time and then it was hacked (again). In that, I realized I never told you all what happened with the blog in the first place. And, of course, I wanted to give you a quick update to set the stage for life now.

So, I’m going to do all that.

About two years ago, my Google account was hacked. This lead to my PayPal account being hacked. Luckily, I was able to stop it (after a LOT of fighting with PayPal, the story of which used to be on my TikTok before I deleted all social) but I never quite knew the depth at which the hackers had my information. In that somewhere, The LITMO Life was also fully hacked and turned into some advertisement website. I had it rebuilt, on the same hosting platform and started writing again, but because the hosting platform information was out there (I guess, per the developer?), it was almost immediately hacked again. Finally, I had it rebuilt on a new, more secure hosting platform and that’s the re-upped site you see today. I lost a LOT of blogs. And I cried over that for a while because truly, I cry over everything. But, we’re moving forward.

So as mentioned, the recap post, which I hadn’t saved because I am stupid, was also gone right after a wrote it. So here we go.

When I last left you, I was newly married and looking forward to taking a bit of a break from travel. I don’t quite know why I stopped writing to be honest because I still loved it – I think I just started to develop some of my other hobbies (handbalancing, contortion, back to piano, back to bookclubs) and started working more (more on that at a later date on this blog) and lost sight of how much I loved writing and how much I missed The LITMO Life.

That said though, life was brilliant. Yes, we got married 8 weeks from our first date but that’s because unfortunately, that old cliche is true: when you know, you know. Hubs had Sonny, his cat, and I had Holly, and the four of us had a great fucking time every single day. We started in Fort Myers for a brief few months because that’s where I had been stopped when traveling to visit my parents (but it was never going to be a permanent destination because I truly can’t think of any places I hate more), then we moved to Orlando because I wanted to give it another try, then Houston for a job Hubs wanted to give a try, then finally back to Orlando to buy a house and settle for six years. Keep in mind – Orlando was never chosen because we actively, well, chose it; it was chosen because it was practical: a bigger city than Fort Myers, a close drive to our parents, and seemingly had enough to do to keep two child-free non-traditional millennial professionals busy and engaged.

We were wrong (more on that in a sec).

One thing I want to underscore about my life during the last nine years is that while Holly and Sonny were alive, every single day was a fucking gift. The four of us, our little family unit, plus the times we got to extend out to our parents and my siblings, were just about the best time you could possibly imagine. Yes, I had some issues living in Orlando, being out of New York, not traveling as much, feeling not myself to honestly a stranger because of the suburbs, but that stuff was ok to get pushed further down the priority list because Hubs, my babies, and my family were the most meaningful parts of those years.

Then Sonny suddenly passed away in 2021. Then Holly in 2023.

Now I’m going to pause here to point out that since Holly was young, I would always say to my closest friends and family that I was going to burn my life down after she left. And they knew it, even without me telling them. She was my soulmate, the love of my life, the reason I breathed. I just had a sixth sense that whatever life I was living while she was here was not going to be a life I could continue after she was gone. I knew the important things would make it – which in this case, were just my closest loved ones – but I also knew the rest wouldn’t.

I just truly didn’t understand the depth of that destruction.

After Holly left, I spent about a year frozen, unnaturally attached to my husband and my mom.

And then came the picking apart of the life we had built. Suddenly, the things that I noticed but was able to push down while she were alive became glaring: we lived in the suburbs, in Florida for fuck’s sake, surrounded by Trump-supporting idiots. Zero diversity. No real conversations. Rampant, destructive religion. People that couldn’t think beyond traditional marriage and children as a meaningful life.

I was suffocated. And drowning in grief.

Hubs, being who he is and knowing me sometimes better than I know myself, already knew. By the time I had the first conversation with him about leaving Orlando, he had already known it was coming. The prior six months had been a blur of dropping friendships left and right – and with good reason. People who didn’t show up for me the way I showed up for them and I just couldn’t handle the bullshit anymore after Holly left. I never loved Orlando before but I had begun to really, truly hate it.

And because Hubs is the man I married, he was ready to go. The question was just what we were going to do. I had bought a house in Costa Rica and started the process for residency about six months prior – our goal had always been to end up there. So we kicked around moving to CR right now, but ultimately, Hubs is a chiropractor and he absolutely loves what he does and the process to doing that is hard in CR so we decided he’d go back to Fort Myers to spend as much time with the parents as he could and I would go back to doing what I love and that I didn’t do at all in the last years of Holly’s life because I was intentionally spending as much time with her as I could: traveling.

That was a really really quick lead up to right now: that decision was about 10 months ago and I’ve been traveling for 8 of those months (the last two have been stationary for a whole host of reason I won’t get into on this blog but feel free to ask me if you wanna know!). I went to Tulum, Buenos Aires, back to our house in La Fortuna, traveled around India, went to Dubai, and then Nairobi before coming back to Fort Myers to spend a bunch of time with Hubs. I wish I had been writing all that time but I promise to provide some updates on those places later.

And yet, because this is real life, constantly moving around, it turns out, doesn’t lessen the pain of grief. It just follows you. So, I’m still drowning in grief. And traveling full-time, while exhilarating, is a life I could do for a year, or two, or maybe three. But with a husband I adore and parents who I want to spend every conceivable second with, traveling full-time wouldn’t be something that fulfilled me forever. Unfortunately, neither would moving to a house in the jungle in Costa Rica very far from my parents when I’m aware of their aging and want to soak up every single fucking minute with them. It’s not as simple as plane ride between here and there – Fort Myers sucks and it’s a small town, so it’s (1) driving from Fort Myers to Miami which takes two and a half hours, (2) getting to the airport three hours early, (3) flying from Miami to San Jose which also takes just under three hours, and then because our house is in La Fortuna, (4) driving another two and a half hours from SJO to our house (Holly House, it’s called). That’s longer than a full day of travel. So as much as I hate living in the US, I had finally made up my mind that I wouldn’t be that far from my parents because they were more valuable than anything.

Which brings me to my final update for the day: I’m going to travel for another year while I do the first year of my masters program (sorry to say this for like the fifth time but more on that later) and then: we are moving. back. to. NEW YORK!

I’ve been gone for 13 years and my heart and soul has pined for the city that raised me every single goddamn day. Since Holly left two and a half years ago, I’ve been living like a zombie, if it can even be called living, making every single practical decision I can. Every decision that will be “safe” for the future. I’m done with that. I’m ready to try to actually LIVE again. I have a strong feeling that it will never truly be living without her but I can also say that as soon as we made the decision to move back to New York, it was the most alive I have felt since she left.

I spent my formative adult years there from just before I turned 18 until 27. My first and best role models that set the foundation of who Anjali is were my parents. But after that, the city raised me. I hate to say that nearly all (save one) of the friendships I built in Florida were a product of circumstance but I look around at all the people who always made me feel weird, never truly connected with me, saw me as a cartoon or couldn’t understand any of my non-traditional beliefs and I think…no wonder you fell away when Holly died. Would I have chosen you if I had other options? Would you have chosen me? You never truly saw me or put any effort into knowing me. Then I think of the old friendships and even just acquaintanceships I had in New York – a group of people that also chose the greatest city on earth for all it has to offer: the diversity, the energy, the light, the love, the philosophy – and I think, these are my people. And I’m so, so ready to be back and build that community again.

I’m WAY PAST READY to be a NEW YORKER AGAIN.

So that’s my quick recap of where I am now. I’m about to head to Costa Rica for three months and then come back and decide what I want to do about traveling before we move.

Thanks for hanging with me on this long one – see you soon.