Emotional move

In May, my friend Jen wrote a blog post in which she poignantly differentiated between a physical move and an emotional move. What she wrote–and what I have also found to be true–is that the physical move happens and then the emotional move keeps happening. We moved to NC 13 months ago and for the first six months, I felt pretty much uniformly bummed, lonely, and pissed.

Being in a new physical place is hard because the comforts of knowing your physical geography well are absent. It is just unsettling to not know where things are, to get lost going to Target, and to get stuck in traffic and not know any better. It’s also hard because you don’t run into people you know, you’ve left behind an entire community available for spontaneous social interaction, and even if there are people you know in your new location, they have their own social rhythms established. Sometimes they want to incorporate you into them and welcome you to everything (in these cases their kindness overwhelms you to the point of tears) and sometimes they don’t. The emotional move is less financially expensive and physically taxing, but it lasts much longer.

But it does get better. At 13 months out, North Carolina feels like home. Our animals are settled and happy. We have art hanging on the walls. Communities around yoga, work, the gym, and our town have emerged. In some ways, we still really miss Nashville, especially the food and our family and family of friends, but our life here is rich and, for the most part, lovely.