So I moved! Didn’t leave the Bay Area but crossed the actual Bay and settled in a town my friends and families respond to with Where?

Moving is exciting, but the process of literally moving your things kind of sucks. Moving is messy, chaotic, overwhelming, dust-filled and nostalgia-laden. Digging up things you haven’t seen in years can bring up a lot of old emotions and memories – like those cringe-worthy middle school yearbooks or those cringe-worthy senior prom photos or those cringe-worthy YA books you indulged in as a teenager (you’re either lying or were too cool for your own good if you say you didn’t go through a Twilight phase). You weigh the value of each thing, and decide whether you’re going to hurl it into a box or trash it, with a final “whatever!” to make it official. It is when moving that you truly begin to become aware of your relationship to your belongings, as well as a sentimentalism or a ruthlessness that you didn’t know you possessed. “Am I a hoarder” may be a question you ask yourself more than once as you find things like your high school art class set that you never used after high school, but that you’ve kept for so long with the justification that one day you may just want to start painting something. “Am I a heartless witch” may be another question that you ponder as you toss trinkets, cards and photographs gifted to you since they had been buried in some obscure corner of some rarely opened cabinet.

Moving also gives you a greater awareness of place. There are likely few forms of snobbery as strong as that of people born and raised in “the city”, whatever major city that may be, and I admit I am guilty of this. Every place outside the city limits once seemed so out in the middle of nowhere. And yet, maybe those city limits in a way are just that—limits. Contrary to what many city-dwellers may think, living in the city isn’t the only way to live a happy or exciting life – and the drawbacks to living in the city are becoming increasingly harder to justify (exorbitant rent and overpriced everything else, tiny apartments, overly high demand). Who’s to say a change of pace and environment wouldn’t be exactly what you needed, especially if it’s something you’ve never considered? Isn’t it limiting to think we’re going to spend the rest of our lives living in a particular kind of space?

However, living in the towns on the peripheries of the Bay Area in particular doesn’t mean you lose the city altogether. Bart weaves together the entire region so you can live out in “where the heck is that” and still come work and play in the city.

It’s all very different, and at times a bit surreal (I can see stars at night??), but a welcome change. Perhaps it’s just the all too familiar fear of the unknown, and a fear of such change that brings about city-snobbery. But ultimately we realize moving from one place to another very different place is just that—change.