Just like the most exciting stories, this one started due to chance. Except, this one is not as exciting.
When I grew up, I was impatient to move out of my hometown. I hated living there with a passion, and I couldn’t wait to find a nice and cool job far from that horrible place full of memories consisting mostly of loneliness. So, when I finished university, I started applying for jobs left and right. To be fair, this wasn’t just a selfish thing: my family wasn’t in the best economic conditions, I had to find a way to take care of myself as soon as possible.
Four months after getting my Master’s Degree (yes, I know it’s a short time, that’s the perk of an Engineering major) I started working in a city that was two hundred kilometers from my hometown. Not very far, admittedly, but far enough to force me to move there instead of commuting.
That’s the start of the story of how I became an adult.
Table of Contents
The calm before the storm
I am a weird person. Sometimes, when a life-changing event is coming up, I go on with my life as if nothing is going to happen, and moving out of my parents’ house was one of those occasions. In the weeks between accepting the job and actually moving, the change felt abstract — something that was happening in a very distant future, totally unrelated to me.
This lack of feelings lasted long, very long. Literally the day before I started working, I had to say goodbye to my family and my girlfriend at the time who were about to go back home after helping me with the move. That was the moment I burst into tears, that was the moment I knew things were never going to be the same.
But why would I want things to be the same? I hated things, I had always wanted them to change. Turns out, the last years of university I was getting comfortable. It’s not a coincidence that my weight had been climbing — I was over 90 kilograms (198 pounds) by the time I moved, and that was just the physical manifestation of a mind that was growing complacent of its life and didn’t want it to change. I had a girlfriend, some kind of social circle (both things there was no trace of during high school years, just to frame the situation), so the base conditions that made me hate my life in my hometown were kind of already out of the way. The thing is, I was just realizing that.
The start of my journey
As I’m sure every single reader is already anticipating, the first months were insanely difficult for me, there’s no denying that.
I had the wrong job – which easily happens, when you accept the first job you can because you’re desperate – and the commute was also insane, exceeding ninety minutes each way in the worst periods. By the time I got home in the evening there was almost nothing left of me.
The home situation was also pretty awful: I was living with flatmates I didn’t get along with, and the apartment had its own set of problems. I went back to my hometown every weekend, which felt like relief at the time and in retrospect was a mistake, because it delayed the adaptation and gave me a weekly escape hatch that prevented me from building anything in the new place.
I always blamed myself hard for my decision to spend my weekends in my hometown, but now I’m cutting myself some slack for that. Life was awful enough without me forcing myself in a place where I saw absolutely nothing. There’s a serious chance that if I didn’t do it I would have come to hate it there even more. Probably so much to ask my company to relocate me to my hometown (where they also had an office, although they hired me for another city’s location). There’s no way of knowing for sure, but there’s also no reason for hating myself. That’s a sentence I want everybody to know, it’s going to be very useful when you’ll be looking back at your life. A mistake? Yes, but a smaller mistake than the alternative. Sometimes that’s a win.
The kind of life I was leading in the first months was full of surprises, and the most unexpected one was the solitude. I had lived with solitude for most of my life, I had learned to be comfortable with it (at least as comfortable as you can be). This was a different solitude, though: not the familiar kind I had metabolized over years, but something raw and disorienting. At home I had family, a girlfriend, a handful of people I knew. Here I had nothing, and what little I had was actively working against me to make my life unpleasant.
I had not understood, until that point, that there are different kinds of alone.
The turning of the tides
I still live there, although there’s been a period in which I didn’t due to force majeure (see: COVID-19 pandemic). That’s my choice, nobody has forced me to do it. I grew to like living there, but how did it happen? How can an obese, lazy, out-of-place fresh graduate start enjoying his time out of his comfort zone?
Let’s take the foot out of the gas pedal and see the causes of this change, because the process of the city becoming home didn’t happen in a single moment. It happened in several small ones, spread over about a year.
The first was a new flatmate, three months in, who I actually got along with. It sounds minor, but it wasn’t — the quality of daily life at home changed significantly. I’ll also add, thanks to him I started to go out and eating at restaurants, discovering new places and living life. It really did a number on my mind.
The second was reconnecting with a former university colleague who was working in the same city. We started going out occasionally. I discovered that life there wasn’t entirely hostile — it had things worth finding, if you were willing to look for them. Just as a side note, also I ended up being the best man at his wedding; it was the second time it happened in my life, which is not bad considering the struggle I live with social connections.
The third was changing roles at work. My first job was genuinely wrong for me — the work, the location, the daily reality of it (and, I would also add, my boss). I asked for a change, and after some months I became a software developer, which was much closer to my inclinations and, dare I say, interesting.
Last but not least, about a year after moving I got my own apartment. That was probably the biggest single change. Living alone, in a space that was entirely mine, with no flatmates and no compromises — that’s when the city started to feel like somewhere I actually lived rather than somewhere I was surviving. It’s probably thanks to this step that I started accepting that loneliness was not my enemy, but I could turn that into a precious ally.
Now it was my time to shine.
The bonds back home
Inevitably, the relations I had with the people I left behind had to change. It became especially true since I started enjoying my life there, since that’s the moment I actually became a different person.
My family remained part of my life, but gradually moved out of my daily reality. With time I started to feel that they didn’t quite know me anymore — and I didn’t quite know them in the same way either. The shared reference points of daily life were gone. That’s even more true as of today, with my parents getting older and my sister moving out herself and starting a family even further away than I did.
The same happened with friends. Slowly it became clear that we were living in different dimensions. I couldn’t fully understand their life anymore, and they couldn’t fully understand mine. That’s just what happens, there’s no need for drama about it. I’m not currently in contact with those people anymore, but I do remember them fondly.
The relationship I had at the time became a weekend relationship by necessity. We tried to make those weekends count, and for a while we did. The distance during the week wore on both of us in ways that are hard to articulate. It was ultimately my move (and especially the improvement of my living conditions) that set off a chain of events leading to us breaking up.
None of this is unique to my situation, it happens to almost everyone who moves. But it’s worth knowing in advance: moving doesn’t just change your location, it changes you , and with you it changes every relationship you have. It’s no reason for running away from the future, but you’re allowed to take your time to elaborate it, if you need to.
Who I am now
Before I moved, I was essentially a twenty-five-year-old child. I’m a little ashamed of admitting it, but it’s just the reality of life – certain things don’t develop until circumstances force them to. That’s totally ok, as I’ve come to understand with time.
Now I manage my own adult life in my own way, without leaving anything to my parents to think for me. I know what I’m capable of when nobody is available to help, I know my resilience and determination can bring me amazing results, when I’m disciplined enough to apply them. I made mistakes — some of them significant — and I still make them, but that’s the only way to learn. Somehow, I think it’s probably better this way.
The start was hard. Really, really hard. Now, it’s not.
What you won’t find on any guide
There are some things I want to tell you, if you’re about to move to a new city alone for the first time. They should make the transition more manageable, and that’s probably the best anybody can do for you.
A difficult first period is not a sign that you made the wrong choice. It’s an expected sign of the adaptation you’re living through. Did you know you are human and you’re allowed to have feelings? Yes, even bad ones! You have the power to walk to the other side of those feelings mostly unscathed. What will come to the other side is a person worth becoming. A person you’ll be glad to be. The process is different for everybody, but the surprising end result is the common factor.
Your new city will eventually become home. You’ll progress in your job, you’ll find better housing, you’ll build new connections. If I did it, you can, too.