Moving Across Country: The Push Factors

Do you ever feel like you’re living in a chapter that’s coming to a close? Or like you’re being pushed in another direction? Last year I felt this way nearly every single day. Here were my 5 signs that it was time for me to move.

1. Everything Was Coming to a Close

   When I moved to New York in my early 20’s I had specific goals I wanted to achieve, personal and professional, and after 5 years of living upstate I felt like I had checked all the boxes. I’m grateful for the time I had spent upstate as it was a period of tremendous growth. I felt satisfied with what I had accomplished there and the memories made and I felt ready to move on to something new. Ultimately it all boiled down to a feeling, I just felt like I didn’t need to be there anymore. Sometimes things naturally fall into place. In the beginning of the summer, I had recently finished grad school and I was unemployed and looking for work, so at the time I didn’t have any priorities anchoring me down. I was applying for work everywhere except New York, and when I landed a remote job, I took that as a sign as my way out. Don’t get me wrong I love New York, and maybe I’ll find myself there again someday, but first I needed to switch things up.

2. Tired of Doing the Same Things Over and Over

   I got to a point where everything I did was a repeat. The area had lost the excitement it once had when I moved there. It was even hard for my boyfriend and I to pick a place to go out to eat on the weekend. Every time either of us mentioned a place we would be like, “Ugh, we’ve been there so many times”. There’s only so much you can do when you live in a small city. Even in the summer I began to repeat hikes I had already done before and revisit places I had been to so many times. In that summer alone, I had gone to Lake Placid four times! A lovely town, but it loses its charm after so many trips. I felt like I had run out of new places to explore. I had really made the most of my time in Upstate New York. I remember being so excited to explore the Northeast after living in the Midwest my whole life. In the first 12 months of living in Albany, I had visited NYC multiple times, Boston, Montreal, Vermont, and New Hampshire in addition to becoming an avid hiker in the Adirondacks. I was quite proactive early on. Of course there were places I hadn’t been to, but I had done pretty much everything I wanted to do (I actually made a NY bucket list, which I would recommend doing when you move to a new place).

3. Wanted to Make New Connections

   I struggled finding people I truly connected with. When I first moved to New York I was involved in a program with other young connections that allowed me to meet like minded individuals. It was a blast. I was in the program for two years and made wonderful connections and still have those friendships to this day with a few. However, over time most of my friendships I had simply outgrown and weren’t serving me any more. Additionally, several of my friends were moving away causing my social circle to shrink even further. Making friends as an adult is hard enough as it is, on top of living in a small city, it’s even more difficult. I wanted to live in a place where it was easier to meet people. In larger cities, there’s obviously more people, but also more organized events that make meeting people naturally so much easier. Stay tuned for my next blog post on how I’m meeting people in a new city.

4. Could Not Deal With the Weather

   Winters in New York are tough. It’s not the cold and snow that gets to me, but the constant gray and lack of sun. Seasonal depression is real and it makes it really hard to get out of the house November through March. I’m a fairly active person who enjoys spending time outside, but in the winter months my lifestyle changes completely, and I’m not able to do the things that I love. On top of that, the summers are so short. You basically only have three months of summer fun, assuming it doesn’t rain the whole season (like it did last year). Living in a warmer climate, milder winters, or at least more days of sunshine was part of the criteria we were looking into when considering a new place to live.  

5. Lack of Motivation

   I think this results from a combination of all the other factors listed above, but the last few months in New York I was feeling very little motivation. I was feeling uninspired by my surroundings. I was craving a change of pace. Like I mentioned before, I had done so much in the area already, I had no desire to keep doing the same things over and over again. I knew this was a bad mental space to be in, which is why getting out of New York was a priority for me. And it was a feeling I had been having for about a year. Once I was out of grad school, I know a change had to happen. I’m proud that I listened to my gut and began searching for new places to live early on, even when I didn’t know moving was going to be possible.