In the summer of 2007, I finally moved into my one-bedroom apartment in upper Manhattan, Washington Heights near Ft. Tryon Park. I’d continued running and the year before had stood on the sidelines cheering on my friend Shazna as she ran her first marathon. We’d begun to do miles together on the weekends, entering various NY Roadrunner races to tick off the list so I would qualify for November 2008’s marathon. At the time, this activity was honestly the thing that saved me from swirling down into an emotional sinkhole. Something about doing something that completely centered me around endurance distracted me from wallowing in sadness as I began to figure out what had happened over the last almost-decade that led to my marriage imploding.

Honestly, it’s not as if I’d thought the guy and my relationship was solid in all ways but it hadn’t felt altogether perilous either. When we’d told people we were divorcing there was often a funny reaction to do with “Oh, shit. If it could happen to you guys, then what about us?” This wasn’t really a selfish response across the board but more to do with the fact that we always seemed to be enjoying each other’s company, never any tension. And really, perhaps that was the problem. Or more to the point, there was so much more going on under the surface that even I was unaware of, or rather, unwilling to explore, which led to the ending.

So when the house in Brooklyn was finally sold and my apartment finally moved into on a hot summer’s day, I was unpacking more than just boxes of books and cutlery. I was unpacking a whole lot of trust issues along with sorting through how to begin again. I’ve always enjoyed spending time alone—perhaps this is a byproduct of being an only child—but obviously this was a new kind of alone. The kind where it became important to think about what I wanted for myself in romantic relationships, or rather whether I wanted one of those again at all. My trust had for sure been blown up because although when the split first happened, I’d been under the impression that the guy was being brave having just discovered something about himself that he needed to reveal in order to step into and begin his authentic life. But, as it turned out, and as he ended up telling me right after I’d moved into my new place: He’d been disappearing regularly during workdays and in the middle of nights for the previous year before our break and engaging in riskier and riskier sexual behavior. He’d been living that double life for a while and now that I knew that, I couldn’t understand how I hadn’t actually known that. This was where the trust disintegrated, certainly in him but also in relationships in general, and specifically in my own emotional meter. The one that I had always thought would quiver with a “something’s not right” breeze in the still of the night or the quiet of a feeling. But that hadn’t happened, which shook me.

Also, my body. I hadn’t listened to it intimately maybe ever. The running felt good in a physically exhausting kind of way, which was a joy on its own merits. But there was another movement moment I became involved with at that time in my life that connected me to myself in a more inward way, although it was something that also required a helluva lot of strength. I’d stumbled across it copy editing a story about Kate Hudson where she talked about a place called SFactor where she’d taken some classes maybe for a movie role or some-such. She had described her workout there as “feminine movement and pole dancing” and I’d immediately been curious. Pole dancing? This appealed to me on a lot of levels that I couldn’t immediately put my finger on. It sounded taboo, which appealed to me. I’d immediately gone online and found SFactor had a Manhattan studio and an intro where you could go take a two-hour class to see what it was all about.

I did that and for 120 minutes, I found myself in a darkened studio with no mirrors and about a dozen other women. When I say found myself, I don’t mean that passively. It was an incredibly active thing that was going on inside of me as the instructors led a class of floor movement and then for the last 15 minutes did some things on the pole that were so incredible that I both fell in love with them and thought I need to be able to do that. I also cried. A lot. At the time I wasn’t altogether sure what I was crying for but it felt necessary. When I looked around in the dim light at the other women in the room, I saw groups of friends laughing, buddies bonding, and maybe one or two other women like myself having some sort of emotional reckoning, but honestly, as I think back on it, I didn’t care at all about anyone else in the room except for the two women leading the class. In that moment I felt I might follow them into any number of dimly lit rooms in order to understand and go deeper into the hows and whys of this movement. Power and abandon, two things I’d never really known how to achieve yet desperately wanted to explore.

Within the year I would have a pole of my own in my new apartment. I would meet and build a fierce community of women both at the studio and in running. I would begin to discover a lot of things about myself while also learning how to submit receipts for pole dancing to the Condé Nast fitness program for reimbursement. And I would begin to find my way into a more real sense of myself. None of it without some trips, falls, and weird-ass moments.

Those will come during the next series: Body Parts. Suffice to say that this series, Hustling, has been clarifying. Writing about how each of the places I’ve lived in all the boroughs of the city since the jet plane from California touched down at JFK and released me into my Manhattan life has brought me around to understanding the ways I’ve grown and how that all prepared me, during my third summer in that one-bedroom uptown apartment, to be ready when I met a man who lived a dozen blocks south and we had our first date, riding our bikes to the Little Red Lighthouse where we ate a picnic and I decided I’d like to enter into another chapter. It’s an ongoing series that he’s still a part of, and which is also changing constantly. I’m so happy for that!

I may take a break here for a minute as I gather my thoughts for the next series. It won’t be long. Thank you for being here.