notbecauseofvictories:

So I’ve written before about how to lose yourself in activities, how to make friends, how to get out of the four walls of your apartment (which will drive you mad, if you don’t) and experience your new city on its own terms. So I won’t talk about that. 

Instead, I’m going to talk about the invariable, unmovable, awful terror. And how you will survive it.

Because it is unmoveable, at least at first. There is….a certain measure of terror inherent in moving to a new place and right then, you can’t do anything about that except feel it. You can distract yourself from it, with long walks and fun meetups, mixers, and various other assorted activities. You can drink (I do not advise this, it’s not a good long-term strategy) or engage in risky sexual behaviors (ditto) or neither and see a therapist instead (yes, please). You can throw yourself into work, you can get a dog (something I’ve seen members of my cohort do) you can choose to hone one of your hobbies. There are a lot of distractions, the world is full of them.

But at the end of the day, you will lie in bed in a strange place, and the terror will be there for you. Waiting.

I’m personally convinced it’s because your brain thinks you’re dying. 

After all, a tomorrow that doesn’t look exactly like today, or at least reasonably similar, translates as a terrifying and uncertain blankness. It’s an abyss. It may as well be death. The human brain—an extremely stupid organ, built to identify poisonous berries and remind us to run away from things with teeth—thinks you are stepping off the edge of the world.

The terror is limitless, and senseless, in that it feel endless and engulfing, and will not listen to sense. It doesn’t matter how many times you reassure yourself that this will pass. It doesn’t matter that you know—know, with a certainty born of experience—that the terror will slide, slowly, into familiarity and routine. There will be a morning when you wake up, and cannot imagine a time when your dresser wasn’t exactly there, when you didn’t take that route to work in the morning, or know exactly where to go for lunch. The blankness will give way, inscribed by all the great and small details of a new place, and you will be fine.

The terror doesn’t care. The terror is convinced that this time, this time, you will not be fine. This time, you are definitely going to die.

(Depending on how you define it, I have moved somewhere between five and nine times, and lived in over four states. It’s mostly a lopsided triangle through the Midwest: Illinois to Michigan, Michigan to Kentucky, Kentucky to Illinois. A brief couple months in Boston for an internship, then back to Illinois. The longest I ever stayed put was in Chicago: an astonishing eight years and six different addresses. A couple months in Kentucky, then on to Philadelphia, a city I’d seen for the first time when I was brought in for an interview.

I was terrified, each and every time.)

The terror doesn’t care about ambition or your wanderlust or your fancy, logical reasoning. The terror doesn’t care if you have done this five times or nine times; if you know it will be fine, if you have controlled for every variable, if you are an expert. You can stare at maps and take notes and get excited while making new and wonderful plans; you can breathe, in and out and in again. But the terror is a senseless animal, and it cannot picture tomorrow.

The terror says: you are stepping off the edge of the world. You are dying. 

Unfortunately, the only way to prove it wrong is to point yourself in that direction and walk.

I will say the distraction helps. My transition to Philadelphia has been smoother, in many ways, because now I know to search “things to do + philly + this weekend” and get out of my apartment; I take long walks, I’ve picked up photography. What used to take me a year has taken me two months simply because I’ve pushed myself to get out into the city and not be afraid. I go into restaurants and bars alone; I visit museums. I ruthlessly, shamelessly, force myself to enjoy my life here, in this specific place.

Of course the terror is still there, and it sneaks up on me sometimes, but it doesn’t have to own me. And that—if anything—would be my advice. You’re going to have feelings, they’ll be messy and ugly and paralyzing but the only way out is through. Get on the plane, get off it again. Point yourself in that direction, and keep on walking.