I had been too depressed to write and as March and April passed by, I sat glassy-eyed staring at the TV. As the Deep Dark goes, it was manageable and I came-to without completely uprooting. I’m good at leaving decisions on the table.
During offline time, my rental management company raised rent by $160. I was already at the top of my budget and that’s a lie, my budget’s been topped out for some time. I’d been placating myself with a generational safety net and an adoration for my little nest, but Google Sheets and I had been cooking up a better budget and it was time to move.
This is the longest I’ve stayed put since undergrad. Two whole years. I thought I’d be out of the humid Midwest for good once I’d graduated out of collegiate structure and childhood circumstance but here I am and I channel my thoughts as to why: see below.
Now that I need (and want) to move again, not yet set on where I’ll root cross-country, I scrounge around for a new apartment. The rental market is aggressive, but I find a cheapish attic with a small square porch and a short kind landlord who lives next door. I’m told I can use the backyard firepit for “birthday parties” and that if I want to use the laundry machine in their basement it’s $60 a month. I hit my head on the ceiling because it’s slanted and the dogs are barking downstairs. There’s no central air but there’s a gas heater that looks like a bonfire; I’m told winters are warm and summers are hot.
I’m excited to move. I’ve moved 5 times since undergrad 5 years ago (if you count a season in Florida with my grandparents). “Moving is one of the most stressful times in a person’s life,” my therapist says, but I feel still. I’m choosing to move, not displaced or unhoused.
This type of moving isn’t a magic bullet. Unless you can’t help it. Unless you liberate yourself from the streetlamp outside your bedroom window. Unless you’re giving up, unless it’s a mistake.
Not a magic bullet
About a year ago, I listened to This is Where You Belong, a book about a serial mover who kept town jumping with her family. “The next one will be perfect, I’ll feel it.” Melody Warnick neutralizes the intoxicating narrative of location-based escapism. Some quotes I liked from this book:
“In his book, Who’s Your City, the demographic Richard Florida divides people into three categories: the mobile, the stuck, and the rooted. We tend to focus on the first two—the mobile, who can pick up and move to opportunity—and the stuck, who lack the resources to leave where they are…but we cannot forget about the rooted: those who have the means and opportunity to move, but choose to stay…because they’re content where they are.”
…
“The more uprooted I felt, the more I longed to be moored in place. In a world that’s supposedly flat, loving where we live still matters, even when we move a lot. Maybe especially when we move a lot.”
The key points I went away with were:
That walking and/or biking allows you to experience your city or town in ways that driving deprives you of
Getting involved in local politics aren’t as laborious as we think
Go to as many things as you can and talk to strangers when you’re there
People aren’t “stuck” in places, especially small towns, they like them for the same reasons other people don’t
A new apartment, city, or country won’t make you miraculously happy or different and it won’t make you filthy rich. The housing market 20 years ago was drenched in investment opportunities, but now prospective home buyers are dodging natural disasters, cost of living, car-centric infrastructure, inflated prices, and—the worst—poorly flipped houses. Owning a home isn’t in scope right now and renting keeps people like me agile… but exhausted.
The term “sliding not deciding” from The Defining Decade (here’s an honest book review for those unfamiliar) illustrates romantic relationships that “slide” into living situations or unions by the path of least resistance. I think this is partly a result of renting. The choose-move-choose of life spins so much fatigue and financial anxiety that when the opportunity comes to team up and start a capital L Life with someone (hello heteronormativity), it’s a fast yes. That pool of personal and financial goop muddies the water, but I vouch for a good hearty relationship risk and alternative living situations across the board. I wonder what the trajectory of relationships would be like without the stress of renting and moving. Would we move faster or slower or maybe not feel the need to “move” anywhere or towards anything at all?
No kids and no house and I figure, why not bike around the Netherlands or sun damage my face in Croatia? This is the real heavy-hitter magic bullet bust and it comes from Tiktok, unfortunately. The series features adults who’ve moved abroad for various graduate schools and record feeling intensely isolated from their communities and the familiarities they hadn’t realized were necessary. I’m very happy the algorithm thought this content was relevant to me because it was. It made me angry for how negligent I’d been.
I guess I could bike here. I could participate in local politics to fight for more bike lanes and mixed-use zoning. A little big Europe. There’s a body of water along the city's edge. Moving can’t absolve. It won’t do anything because it doesn’t care. It’s a neutral party.
Unless?
Say you’re keen on making sweeping decisions because it makes you feel alive and free and a change of scenery is the only way you’ll stay at your job or in one city. (Me, I’m pointing at myself.) Then I’m fortunate to do that and, respectfully, I need to get a grip.
Where we grow up, our neighborhood, our high school, our climate, it shapes who we are. It can be radically self-advocating to move when the shape is wrong for you. Moving away makes me think of queer culture and minority populations but it also makes me think of RV kids on YouTube. I’m serious.
The TLDR of this video: all children are different, it can be difficult and/or dangerous to reject your living situation as a child, and children and/or young adults are not adults. Nomadic lifestyles appeal to me because I work in an office job. I don’t think I would’ve said the same as a 6th grader. It’s a personal journey to relocate as an adult and the complex likes and dislikes of your childhood hold the pen as you write.
Moving for a career had been anticipated and almost expected until 2020, but now that forced mobility stems more from transformative events like divorce, death, or choice. Everything Everywhere All at Once (EEAAO) was a lot of things, positive and/or negative depending on who you ask; it was about choices for me. One choice cracks our lives like a mirror and moving is a sharp edge for carving. This sometimes makes me feel paralyzed. I don’t want to cut myself on my own mistakes. A move to Wyoming in 2019 was brave but it was also hurtful.
Neutral or a sharp edge? Traveling and touring as mini-moves, moving our bodies and our minds, helps ease our possessive grip on places—an especially helpful exercise for North Americans including myself, who’re accustomed to individual servings at restaurants (so to speak). We’ll say we “Did Rome” like the city itself was an activity, but the city is people.
I recently returned from my first view of the Pacific Ocean and I have a massive emotional hangover. I’m the one cradling my head in the photo above. I could see my path branch there like one of the what-if montages in EEAAO. I was undressed by the mountains and the ocean, the social scene was so exciting and I could picture what California-me would be like. My midwestern grit would disappear, which is okay because I never actually had any, not really. I think I would wear light blue denim. Maybe take a year or two to learn surfing.
But my path branch is here in Chicago. I remember.
I believe in the choices I’ve made that brought me here. I have love for the people I care about. I’m moving into an apartment here. An attic apartment with Dove, my cat.
[Fin]
As someone who romanticizes the cities (or states) I used to live in you voice so many of my thoughts here. I want to live everywhere all at once and also nowhere at all. Such a needed read on the realties of why moving somehow always seems to be the best choice when that's the furthest thing from the truth