The Cost of Compromise

As I sit here this Saturday morning in an unnaturally quiet home, my Apple Music is taking me on a journey through my life. Songs from my teenage years stir up old dreams — wild, untethered ideas about what my life would be. A fantasy of freedom. I imagined I’d travel the world, live a jet-set life full of art and parties and deep friendships. All modeled, of course, after the musicians I admired. I was going into music somehow. Radio, I thought, at the time.

But here I am, forty years later, wondering how life took me somewhere else entirely.

I trusted other people more than I trusted myself. That’s the truth. I went to college in New Jersey — too intimidated, too unsure to go all the way to New York. South Orange felt “close enough.” But as my friends and I used to joke, Seton Hall was five miles from Manhattan as the crow flies and still a world away. Not cosmopolitan. Not cool.

That was the first time I chose proximity over possibility. The first quiet compromise that would echo for decades.

I made the most of it, I think. But when I realized I was becoming friends with people who had never taken a bus or a train—when I, a girl from Philly who loved the freedom of city transit, suddenly found myself stuck in suburbia—I started to feel like a fish out of water. I had placed myself in the very setting I never wanted: safe, bland, disconnected. I wanted grit. I wanted energy. I wanted the city.

The choices we make at seventeen or eighteen don’t seem like compromises at the time. They feel like common sense. Like doing what’s expected. Like love.

A suburban college led to a suburban boyfriend. I was with him for nearly nine years. I put everything I wanted on hold for him. When the dream of radio faded and advertising took its place, I was already too rooted in New Jersey to make the leap to NYC, where the real industry lived. Instead, I found myself in pharmaceutical advertising —mostly in New Jersey—and I justified it. It paid better than consumer work. The cost of living was lower. Did I really want to share a studio with three other girls? In hindsight, maybe I should have. Especially considering the roommates I ended up with in Jersey.

All the while, I ached to be back in Philadelphia. That’s where my friends were. That’s where I ran anytime I could.

New York had changed for me. It used to be a beacon, the center of cool. My friends and I spent long days there, wandering through museums and record stores and coffee shops, trying on adulthood. We never lived like New Yorkers, but we soaked it in when we could. And then, in 1989, my uncle—a real New Yorker—died of AIDS. The city lost its shine. It became a place of grief. I avoided it for years.

And so I stayed. I stayed in a life that never quite fit because I believed being with him mattered more. He was in radio, and I hoped his career would take us somewhere else. Somewhere better. But he lacked ambition. He felt responsible for his mother. We weren’t going anywhere.

It took cancer to wake me up.

By then, I had already left advertising, not by choice, and landed in an IT job in Manhattan. I was miserable. The commute wrecked me. The job and the people intimidated me. I was unraveling.

And then came the diagnosis.

Three weeks later, just after my 30th birthday and two weeks before surgery, I ended the relationship. I broke up with the man I thought was my soulmate. It felt like cutting off a part of myself. From the day we met, we were everything to each other. Or at least, that’s what I thought.

I’d love to say it was a clean break. And in some ways, it was. But in others, not at all. We stayed in touch. There are still parts of each other that only we will ever fully know. That’s what nearly a decade together in your twenties does — it weaves you into each other.

After four months of treatment, living at my parents’ house at the Jersey Shore, I had to return to the life I already knew I didn’t want. I wished desperately that my mom would step in — call my landlord, my boss, a moving company — and make it all disappear. But instead, she told me I had to go back. To that life. To that job. And find my way to a new one.

So I did.

I returned to my apartment and that job for another nine months. At first, it was miserable. I cried all the time. I wanted to be anywhere but there. But therapy helped me see that what I was feeling was normal. That grief, confusion, and fear don’t vanish just because the doctors say you’re okay.

And once the clouds began to lift, I started taking small steps toward joy again. I let the city in. Met friends for drinks, for dinner, for dancing. Little rituals that made me feel alive again. I also started spending more time in Philadelphia — the place my heart had been trying to return to ever since I left.

It’s hard to explain what Philadelphia means to me. It’s not just a place. It’s a feeling. It’s the one place where I feel most like myself. Where I fit. Where I breathe easier. Where the tension in my body releases without effort. I feel lighter in Philly. More me. Always have.

And I felt that every time I took the train down with my soon-to-be roommate. We were both aching for something new, something real. And Philly—beautiful, imperfect Philly—held that promise.

One afternoon in mid-June 1999, I got a Pennsylvania quarter back in change from a deli. And I just knew. It was time.

I resigned. Told my friend I was moving. She wanted to move too. And by mid-July, we were in our new rowhouse — the one we nicknamed The Mantrap.

That stretch of time, those years back in Philadelphia, will always be the happiest days of my life.

I was free in a way I had never felt before. I cried from joy, from a kind of peace I didn’t know was possible. I thought, for a long time, that feeling came from surviving cancer. That it was some kind of divine clarity, the kind people talk about when they “make the most of their second chance.”

But now, more than 25 years later, I understand what it really was.

It was agency.

It was living for myself. Doing exactly what I wanted. Not negotiating with anyone else's needs, or dreams, or timelines. Just mine.

I spent years trying to figure out what I had tapped into back then. What source of joy had cracked me open. And the answer was always right there:

That’s what happiness feels like.

And then, I gave it up. Again. For someone else.

At the time, I thought happiness would come through sharing a life. Through building a future with someone who promised something I hadn’t yet imagined. So I left Philadelphia for the West Coast. For love. For a leap.

It was exciting at first — being in love, stepping into a new life on the other side of the country. But it didn’t take long, after the thrill wore off, for the loneliness to set in. A deep, bone-level loneliness. Even before we got married, I knew. Somewhere inside, I already knew.

There were red flags. Gut feelings. Cracks in the foundation I didn’t know how to name. And every time they surfaced, I turned inward. Assumed I was the problem. I needed to change. I needed to try harder. I needed to sacrifice. I had made a commitment, and I was going to honor it — even if it cost me the truest parts of myself.

I was desperate for somewhere to put all the love I had, so I pushed us to buy a house. I told myself it was about stability, roots, a future. But really, it was about getting a dog.

That dog was Tasha.

And once that well of love opened again — once I felt what it was to be needed in that pure, uncomplicated way — I knew I wanted more. I wanted to be a mom.

And then came Ryker.

Through all of it, I worked so hard to shape a life I could love. And in so many ways, I did. This home. These babies. These ordinary sacred days. I built beautiful things out of a foundation I now realize was always cracked. Maybe that’s what we all do — try to build something whole from pieces that were never truly ours to begin with.

But now, with Tasha gone, I’m left questioning it all again.

She was my compass. The measure of my days. My constant companion. The one creature who needed me most. Without her, the house feels hollow. The quiet stretches long. The loneliness presses in again, sharp and familiar.

It’s only been a few weeks. I know I’ll heal in time. But I also know this grief has pulled a thread I can’t ignore.

Because what I’m grieving isn’t just her absence. It’s the loss of that deep joy I once felt. The kind that only came when I was living fully for myself. When I had agency. When I chose me.

And I want that again.

I feel, maybe for the first time in years, like I have time. Time to fill with love. With meaning. With connection that isn’t built on obligation or compromise, but on truth.

My capacity for love is enormous. It always has been. But it can’t go toward everyone else anymore. Not first. Not by default.

I don’t know what’s next.

But I know it has to start with putting me first.