(July 12, 2008)–So who am I really, anyway, and why am I driven (pun intended) to write CHICAGO CARLESS? I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out both answers on here. This entry is my attempt at the Cliff’s Notes of my life and blogging journeys. The details of my soul searching fleshed out over time can be found in my Backstory and Spiritual Awakening archives.

I was born and raised by a poor single mom in Queens, New York with my brother and sister, both around 20 years older than me. They were both also drug and alcohol abusers, and many childhood memories include me and my mother ducking from the latest drunken tumbler of iced tea to be thrown across the living room in a fit of our common rage.

Catholic elementary school didn’t make matters any better, so mom sent me to live with cousins in New Jersey for a couple of my teen years to get me away from the drama. But that didn’t help much either. So back I was shuttled to NYC–straight into a specialized high school for sardonic brainiacs (obviously, some things never change). Still unsettled inside, and eventually failing out.

What did actually help was coming out of the closet at the age of sixteen and making dozens of what last year proved to be lifelong friends through America’s first-ever peer-run gay youth group, Gay and Lesbian Youth of New York. So did my introduction to Eastern spiritual thought, which happened through people I met at GLYNY.

Going to college also helped me begin to learn I didn’t need to feel limited by the tumult in which I had grown up. Enter one sardonic brainiac, exit one trained urban planner.

You would have thought finding out my siblings and I shared different fathers when I was 24 years old would have settled some of the confusion inside, too. It did for a time. I felt a lot of compassion that my mom felt she had to hide from me that I was born out of wedlock after her husband passed away and she met someone else whom she liked but perhaps did not love.

Eight years in (my still beloved) Brooklyn as a student, working urban planner, and early blogger (I stole my own CHICAGO CARLESS thunder by scribing about my life in Brooklyn in the late 1990s for About.com) made me think I was safe from the addictive behaviors of my family of origin. The growing unease in my own skin, in my own city, and with my old friends should have shown me the lie in that.

When mom died not long after my move out of Queens, I thought the experience had taught me to face into my fears about life. Instead, my eyes, ears, and spiritual quest had long already come to be foreclosed by an ego too fearful of life to dwell on anything else but anxiety.

So in early 2003 I packed my apartment into an SUV and rode shotgun with Camoes, the Portuguese danger cat, on my lap as a friend drove me to a new life in Chicago. The two years of crap jobs and crappier apartments that met me here showed me how dangerous it can be not to look before you leap.

But the transformation I began to feel inside almost as soon as I got here told me, little by little, in a whispering voice that would eventually turn into a shout, that leaping holds within it an incredible transformative power. Just not in the way I at first thought.

On the outside, a shiny new (then-) boyfriend, Devyn (the still awesome, now NYC-based urban photoblogger), a new career as a communications strategist, and an unexpectedly popular blog made me think I had it made. Discovering Buddhism made me think things were getting better on the inside, too. They were about to. Just as soon as the loss of Devyn and rank discord in my career pulled the rug out from under me.

A summer of groundlessness and uncertainty–last summer–opened my eyes to the codependence that had lived in me since childhood, coloring my entire life experience since then without me ever knowing what was wrong. Hello, oh real transformative power of leaping. And didn’t I wish I could have learned before the loss of my hometown, my love, and my sense of self.

To my amazement, I found I had come to believe in God and to recognize a higher purpose in my journey and my move to the Windy City. And I found the transformative power of Codependents Anonymous, a fundamental part of my life.

Until falling for my former boyfriend and still very good friend, pastry-chef-extraordinaire Chris. Anyone who ever falls of their wagon of choice is always cocksure that they don’t need it anymore. (And who wouldn’t want to fall off the wagon for pastry?) That’s why they can never see the destructive old patterns re-emerging before it’s too late.

Before it ended, Chris and a well-meaning communications colleague helped me learn that I also have Adult Attention Deficit Disorder. Codependence and ADD. Just my luck: I want to grasp onto everything in my life, but I don’t have the attention span to ever do anything about it. God has a sense of humor and it’s obviously British.

Then Chris called it quits in late spring of this year and I found myself once again in the same emotional place I was in last year after Devyn. I knew I could either have another mournful summer or follow my Buddhist teachings, face directly into my pain–and into myself–and take another leap.

I cried for hours, sat down, and meditated. I opened my heart to the pain of keeping someone I loved in my life, but not in the way that I wanted. I just let it be and, for once, didn’t turn away.

I woke up transformed. Like a trickle of water through a faulty dam finally becoming a flood, all at once I realized that what for my entire life I had considered love, and compassion, and even joy were nothing more than echoes of their boundless, true natures.

Much as you may have just done, trust me, I rolled my eyes, too. I also rolled myself back to CoDA and into therapy for ADD. I reopened my spiritual quest as wide as my surprised heart could manage.

And I realize that, unlike last summer, everything really was different now. I have come to see there’s a lot more to life, love, and spirit than I ever considered. I used to think sentences like that were for the weak-minded. Now I know that is an opinion of the weak-hearted.

Me, I found my heart. It only took me 37 years to do it.

I know this isn’t an endpoint. The spiritual awakening (for I cannot find a more apt term) that I have gone through has transformed the way I view myself, my life, and the world around me. That’s perspective I get to celebrate and explore moving forward.

As you can tell, the experience has also transformed my blog. Inspired by Devyn, I began CHICAGO CARLESS to give myself a chance to return to the web after years away and celebrate the wonders of my newfound home, downtown Chicago. Now, inspired by life, I want to share my renewed perspective with those who care to listen.

As it turned out, the point was never finding answers to the questions I have so long wrestled with. The point was asking them in the first place. Why did I come to Chicago? No more calls. We have a winner. I came to Chicago to wake up. Without asking the questions I have pondered for so long on and off of this blog, I don’t know if that would have happened. I’m glad it did.

It’s a liberating realization: the point was–and always will be–the journey. Thanks for coming along with me on mine.