With my tenth move underway, I can safely say that relocation is a strange and disorienting thing. It's both refreshing and incredibly exhausting. The first move is exciting; I was a spring chicken, long-ready to fly the coop. It was so great starting to acquire things like...dishes and furniture. Which now, again, on my tenth move in [laughably] just over five years, I am annoyed to have acquired so much, namely because I have to carry it from one place to the next what averages to be every six months.
Each time, I've either been naive or optimistic - given the context I can never tell which - about a variety of factors. It seems my track record has proved me wrong either way many a time, and something has caused me to only stick out one full-year lease since leaving the nest. To be fair, various things.
The first few moves were exciting, but the older I get and the more I move, I hate moving.
Now it's disorienting. Even any of the times where it was a bad situation worth leaving, moving has still been hard. It may just be that I'm wildly sentimental, but I also think that there's something to be said for the comfort of the familiar. When I started really packing yesterday, I was anxious at the thought of the overwhelming process. Once I'd gotten over the hump and the room was all boxed-up sans furniture, I felt relieved; on to a new chapter. On to the new place, I felt overwhelmed thinking about putting it all together again. I thought about making this place feel like home. Learning the fastest way to get to my usual destinations.
Even if this place hasn't been comfortable for weeks, when I have the choice of my new place, or the place where all of my things have lived for the last seven months: I am not at my new place. It's comfortable here, even if only in its familiarity.
But after many address changes, among the myriad valuable things I've learned is the importance and necessity for my home to be a safe, peaceful place of respite. And so I remind myself that I can find that anywhere, it just takes some time.
Maybe this time I really won't move again until I get married or keel over.
