When New Beginnings Aren't New

Have you ever wished for a fresh start? 

I know I have. 

Sometimes, you just get to a point in life where the things you see everyday and the people you're surrounded by no longer feel right to you. Maybe you've outgrown them, or maybe you never fit in from the start. Either way, what you end up wanting more than anything is a chance to be somewhere new––to start over. 

There's something endlessly exciting about the prospects of moving somewhere new: you get to see beautiful places unlike anything you could have dreamed, and you meet people who end up meaning the world to you that you may never have even met otherwise. Each time you go somewhere new, you get to be someone new. It feels, sometimes, like doing the impossible and escaping your own life. 

Most people experience a new beginning at some point in their life. Maybe your family moved as a kid, or maybe it happened when you went off to college or got your first professional job. These experiences are often bittersweet, leaving behind things you love to start a life that feels foreign to you. But more often than not, they push you to grow in ways you never would have had everything stayed the same. 

But what happens when you've had too many new beginnings? Is that even possible? It's honestly not something most people have to worry about, but in my case, it's a question I've started to take pretty seriously. 

Over the last 4 years alone, I've lived in seven different cities in Oregon, California, Utah, Arizona, and Mexico. In addition to moving to new places, I've traveled through cross country road trips and study abroad programs, and started countless new jobs and attended new schools. There have been new beginnings for me at every turn. 

And honestly? I have actually grown to really love it. I've seen some wild places and met people who, even if I don't still talk to them, meant so much to me. In Oregon, I spent my senior year of high school ditching classes to go to the coast or to hike up Saddle Mountain with a friend, and explored forests and swimming holes throughout the state almost every summer since moving. When I lived in the Bay Area, I worked at a rollercoaster park during the day and spent my nights getting high with coworkers, all of us laughing together while huddled in a little play structure. In Mexico, I spent my days teaching english at an elementary school and my nights dancing at clubs with my prima and eating the chalupas that street vendors sold at ungodly hours of the night. 

All of this is only a small taste of all the adventures I've been able to have with a constantly changing cast of places and faces. I haven't even begun to touch on my travel stories: living on the road for three months and driving cross country, studying as a field biologist in a Panamanian rainforest, countless road trips up and down the western half of the US, volunteering as a social worker in Northern Peru and exploring the country on weekends. I've had some incredible adventures, but it's come at some real costs. 

I'm not quite ready to share my whole story here yet, but I'll just say that the life I've led has come from a slightly unstable home environment that required me to be ready to pack up and leave at a moment's notice for some time. Then, I lost my mother, who I lived alone with throughout high school, to cancer. I won't try to explain the excruciating pain I have felt with this loss, or how my heart is still so broken even three years later, and I fear it forever will be. All this independence I have only came through that loss, and I would give it all back to have my mother again in a heartbeat.

More than that, traveling costs money. While I've learned to travel on a budget and spend my money wisely, I've still spent so many hours of my life working two or three jobs at a time, sometimes even as a full time student, to save up to do these kinds of things. It's been a pretty exhausting way to live, wavering between working constantly or traveling constantly, but for the most part it's been worth it for me. 

One of the hardest things about moving around so much is that it gets so lonely sometimes. Though I have some wonderful friends scattered all over the country who have stuck with me as I've moved from place to place, for the most part it's really hard to maintain relationships. Almost every time I've settled into a group of friends, I've had to leave, and just as suddenly as they came into my life, they're gone. 

This week, I entered what feels like yet another new era of my life. I've officially moved to an urban homestead in Utah where I will be living for the rest of the year and just started a new semester of school, this time entirely online. I am happy to be here and feel incredibly grateful and fortunate to have such a wonderful place to spend my time, yet I can't help but reflect and wonder when all of this change will end.

Ironically, my life feels most familiar when it is changing. It's honestly gotten to a point where I'm afraid to settle down, to commit to just one life and one version of myself and stop getting to explore all these new things. Movement and travel have become a huge part of my identity; I barely know who I'd be without it. And while I've loved all the strange adventures and precious experiences all this change has brought, I'm curious to know who I am on my own. It may be awhile until I find out, and I am perfectly happy with that. I just hope the day comes where I'm no longer afraid to be in one place and alone with myself. I think the person I would find by doing that would be just as wonderful as the person I am now, and I'm excited to meet her.