Today’s almost daily dispatch comes to you from a very cluttered desk, surrounded by an equally cluttered living room. Years ago, a supervisor told me, “You are either a people person or a paper person.” I am very much a people person. Connecting with others, sharing, receiving, and learning from someone else—that is where my heart is. Paper, minutiae, details? Not my jam.

Paper, minutiae, and details are my honey’s jam, and he is really good at it. If you have had a chance to read his long-form blogs about our adventures in Japan, our personality differences are readily apparent. He is the yin to my yang. 99.9 percent of the time, it works amazingly well. But we are light beings living a human existence; inevitably, there are going to be lessons to learn.

Case in point—

One of the primary selling features for us in choosing a retirement home was the likelihood of having a white Christmas being as near certain as possible. I want what I want, and I wanted the quintessential German Christmas market experience. Unfortunately, buying a home in Germany was far out of our price range. Additionally, Germany did not fit into Scott’s passion for Asian culture and history. When Scott approached me about the Japanese island of Hokkaido, I am ashamed to admit that I had no clue it snowed in Japan.

As mentioned in previous blogs, I have a penchant for utilizing Google Maps and other online forums to window-shop for neighborhoods and potential homes. I jumped on my laptop and saw that yes, indeed, it snows in Japan, and that the winter Olympics had been held on Hokkaido twice. Clearly, if the Olympic committee had chosen Hokkaido not once but twice for their winter setting, the island must get a smidge of snow.

When we traveled to Japan for the first time, it was October of 2025. The weather was textbook, perfect fall. Midday, the sun was warm and welcoming; by afternoon, the ocean breeze off the Sea of Japan cooled the air.

There was a crispness to the salty sea air and blue skies that felt very familiar to us, living in the Pacific Northwest. We stayed in our new home for about a week to get it as ready as possible for Scott’s return in the winter. He was going to live in the house for the allowed 90 days on a tourist visa and see what, exactly, we had gotten ourselves into.

Scott arrived in Otaru the first week of December 2025. The snow started out slowly and was easy enough to manage, especially with his Ohio roots. As the winter rolled on, the snow piled up. And up. And up. Scott’s days were filled with intervals of shoveling snow and helping to keep our little neighborhood street clear. He made friends with the neighbors and built a foundation that I was not a part of in real time. We did our best to stay connected every day via video calls, texts, and phone calls, but it is just not the same as being there, in our Otaru home, in real time.

It was now the first week of February, and I put on my big girl pants and flew internationally for the first time on my own. I was headed to Otaru to spend 10 days witnessing and experiencing the winter season. This was THE major selling point for me for this entire adventure, and I was both super excited to get back and very nervous to be traveling this far alone.

On a surface level, I knew that Scott had established a rhythm to life that did not include me. We live very interdependently regardless of where we are, and this structure works incredibly well for us. Some of you may recall that Joy Behar on the View described her living situation with her lifelong partner Steve. They both kept separate residences and it worked beautifully for them. Even back in the early 2000’s the thought of living that independently from a partner set well with my soul. But for some reason, this specific evolution of our circumstances left me feeling so vulnerable. He had returned to “our” home alone and made it his. Or so my wounded self thought.

To fully understand this—and mind you, it took me days to get to the root of it—one needs to look back at my relationships post-divorce in 2011. In all the relationships I entered into back then, I believed myself to be in the power position. As I navigate my life lessons, my mind and spirit often speak to me in pop-culture references, and that power dynamic was all I could see.

In an effort to protect myself, the relationships book-ended by my first husband and my honey, Scott, were completely out of balance. For many of them, I was the primary wage earner—and I liked it like that. I paid for most of the dates or adventures, and therefore, I got to plan where we went, when we went, and what we did. I paid for the dinners, the shows, and the admissions; therefore, I got to choose what we ate and what we saw. It placed those partners in a “less-than” role, tipping the balance of relationship power firmly in my favor.

AND I LIKED IT.

But here I was, in a foreign country, in a balanced and fair relationship, and I was clawing my way to tip the scales back in my favor. Scott had done nothing but forge ahead, as he should—establishing routines, taking care of our home, and carving a path for our retirement years in a new community. He was doing the physical, mental, and emotional labor so that WE could enjoy this leg of the journey to the fullest.

I wish I could wrap this all up with a pretty bow and say, “It all worked out. The end.” But that would be a disservice to you, my fellow sojourners, and to the actual process that took place. Coming to terms with this very fundamental piece of my operating system was a bit ugly. There were a few snot-inducing cries, some moments of throwing my hands up in despair shouting, “I don’t know what’s wrong!” and fighting back fierce fears that I was going to destroy the best thing that had ever happened to me, all due to my fragile ego.

The days of my stay in Otaru were slipping by as quickly as the cars were sliding down our snow-covered street. I was either going to fly home alone, wrecked on the inside, or I was going to buckle down, get real, and figure this shit out. There wasn’t a magic moment where I finally had clarity; it was a bit more like a slow knowing, like a shot of Tequila slowly warming the body as it makes its way down to the belly. Eventually, you feel the liquor working its magic all the way down to your toes.

Likewise, the magic of healing was a slow burn.

I stared out the window at the snow falling gently—big, fatty flakes that Scott had labeled “perfectly perfect Joy snow.” I sipped my coffee, listening to the neighbors’ snowblowers firing up, when my honey, bundled up like the Michelin Man, came into view. Shovel in hand, he had a rope tied around his waist so he wouldn’t drown in a snow berm (yes, it snows that much).

And it finally, completely clicked. He was doing all of this for me. For us. For our “we.”

We are light beings living a human existence, and human existence is messy. It’s cluttered living rooms, snot-inducing cries, and old defense mechanisms that fire off when we feel exposed.

But at the end of the day, I am still a people person. And this man is my person.

The snow will return in a few short months. Scott will head back to Japan and spend the winter tending to our home. I, forever the people person, trust that this man is fully my person. We are building something beautiful out here in the cold—not a “him” dynamic, not a “me” dynamic, but a strong, resilient, perfectly imperfect We.