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I Moved Across The Country And So Can You
A Roadtrip Tale
I moved across the country for the first time at 28.
It was both terrifying and exhilarating. It became real after I signed a lease for a new house in Denver and committed to moving out. To gathering my entire life and dogs into my car and travelling 1600 miles across the country to the mountains.
Why you movin’? asked Virginia, who always cut me a tomboy pixie in twenty minutes flat despite fighting tendinitis hell. Because I want to.
In the years leading up to moving, I thought I needed a much better reason to leave. A job (everyone asked me if I moved for work), a move in with a partner, some external force that pushed me to embrace change. I was 90% happy on paper — great engineering gig, partner who lived a 5 minute walk away, lots of friends… I loved Baltimore. But that ache in my bones got stronger and stronger until all the paper reasons couldn’t convince me to stay. I was unhappy because I wasn’t growing.
Being raised evangelical Christian taught me to be content in my current bubble and that personal desire would reveal ungratefulness for what I have. I was taught to ‘deny the self.’ After seventeen years of brainwashing, I am immensely proud of myself for following a gut feeling to uproot my entire life. The truth is, I didn’t need a…
