Moving to a City Where You Don't Know Anyone
I Left Everything and Moved to a Metropolis Where I Didn't Know Anyone
I was in my mid-30s when I left behind the but home, friends, and family I had ever known.
"Are you familiar with Schrödinger?" Aziz asks. He leans dorsum on his couch and raises an eyebrow, clutching a cup of hot tea to his chest.
The old human is wearing a down jacket and a padded vest on height of it. His apartment is chilly, but he prefers to proceed the heat downward. I don't question him. It's a rainy night, typical of Decembers in Vancouver. The city is warm by Canadian standards, just if you've ever lived in the Pacific Northwest, you know that winters hither have a certain bone-chilling quality.
"Of course I know Schrödinger. The cat," I note.
"No, he was not a cat. He was a physicist."
I try not to laugh. Aziz has misunderstood my reference to Erwin Schrödinger'south famous thought experiment. If you saw Aziz on the street, you lot would run into an elderly human being. Below the surface, though, he's anything but old. Concluding night, he got home at 2:00 later working late into the nighttime.
He continues, "Schrödinger supported an interpretation of waves without particles. This brought him into conflict with his colleagues. Christopher Columbus was rejected because he believed he could become to the due east by sailing w. Gallileo was rejected by both the church and his young man scientists, who persecuted him for his support of heliocentrism in an historic period of geocentrism. It is in our nature to reject the things we do non understand. Just when you encompass these things…when you wait at difficult questions in new means that make the mind uncomfortable, well, this is how you come to new solutions. This is how you make progress."
Our discussion tonight is far more involved than anything I was prepared for. Aziz and his wife are inventors and designers, originally from Islamic republic of iran. Long ago, they immigrated to the The states. Years afterwards, they immigrated again, this time to Canada.
They're besides my roommates. I establish them online because they had a spare bedchamber and real-manor here is some of the well-nigh expensive in the earth. This bedroom could properly be called a storage cupboard if non for the floor-to-ceiling window and my meg-dollar views of Northward Vancouver and the North Shore Mountains.
I'm here considering I've resigned from my secure job in the identify of my birth, packed my belongings into a shipping container, left my family and friends, and started a new job in a new city where I don't know anyone.
I Wonder Whose Stuff This Is?
I'thou a planner. I operate on spreadsheets, calendars, and gantt charts. I executed this move with precision. Simply in that location'due south always something.
Aziz is simmering a pot of vegetable soup on the stove. He credits his unfailing health to his diet of vegetables, beans, pulses, and sprouted grains. He offers me some soup when I complain that I'm not feeling well.
Dorsum abode, a belongings director has installed a new dishwasher for my tenant, only failed to detect a serious malfunction. Now the holding is total of water. I'k trying to coordinate getting a replacement dishwasher with the manufacturer and retailer, only the procedure is aggravating. The manufacturer won't bargain with me because I'k not physically most the dishwasher. The retailer won't bargain with the property manager because I'm the one who paid for the dishwasher.
My shipping visitor chosen today to tell me they've misplaced my aircraft container. They sent a container to Vancouver, merely information technology'south not mine. I wonder whose stuff this is? My stuff is in a urban center, just not my urban center, and they're non sure where to start looking, so they're hoping I can help (I tin can't). I don't ain much, but what I do accept is important to me. It's a weird feeling knowing y'all've packed your entire life into a shipping container and nobody knows where it is.
You Can't Accept Your Life With Yous
"What, y'all're likewise good to eat with the balance of the states?" Rachel jests as she walks upward behind me.
I'm sitting in the lounge at work, headphones in, somewhat watching YouTube merely by and large staring out the window (the views in Vancouver rarely disappoint). I hadn't noticed the tables behind me filling up with my new colleagues.
"The problem is I'm kind of a snob," I respond, chewing on my apple. I worry, for a moment, that I've actually grown so misanthropic, and that I'one thousand only half-joking.
Rachel is incredulous, though. "Come up eat with the states."
Rachel recruited me, and she's been incredibly kind to me. I realize this kindness is a office of her task, but information technology also takes a certain type of person to do her form of piece of work. I'm a calendar week into my new life, and she's the closest thing I have to a friend for hundreds of miles.
When her and I spoke for the first time, she gave me a warning nigh going through with the recruitment process. "You tin't take your life with yous," she said. She would know. She, besides, moved here from some other place.
It'due south not hard to meet people if you lot're willing to approach them and talk to them. People oftentimes respond favorably to new social interactions if the environment is right. Real friendships, though, don't happen that way. They develop more organically, rooted in shared experience over fourth dimension. Friends are not fabricated so much as they are gained. I'thou fortunate to have many expert friends back habitation. I've known near of them for ten years or more. They're still my friends, of form. But they're non here.
I experience every bit if I've gotten dorsum into the friendship game the way a person might get dorsum into the dating game after a divorce. I've forgotten how to make friends. I have to learn all over again. I'm an introvert, sure, but the crippling effects of loneliness are severe and well-documented. Even I would suffer them, in time. Misanthropic or non, we are a social species.
The Lingering Question
Vancouver is an interesting city. No affair how much money you make, it's never enough. And all the same, you don't need a lot of money to enjoy the best things about the urban center. No thing how many people are around you, information technology'south possible to feel greatly alone. And all the same, even when no i is in sight, it'south possible to feel deeply connected to the city and its people.
Nothing is purely better or worse than annihilation else. Even the best of things take their shortcomings, the worst things their moments of redemption.
In cipher is my perception of this reality more acute than in my new home. There are moments I long for the abode I left behind. There are moments of bliss and bright hope for the future. There are moments of something in between.
No affair how I feel at one moment or some other, there is a lingering question in the back of my heed, ever.
It's there when I walk forth the embankment and scout the palm trees sway in the breeze. It'south there when I await at the photo of my toddler cousin, whose affection for me is then complete that when I visit, she violates every norm of personal space to be as shut to me as possible. It'south there when I play with one of the many dogs in my canine-friendly office or follow them on Instagram. Information technology's there when I ride Skytrain and take in the vistas of the Pacific Northwest. It's there when I see news of the sub-zero temperatures and crippling snowstorms dorsum habitation that e'er made life there more than difficult.
Have I fabricated the right selection?
Y'all're So Lucky
When I began to tell friends and family that I was moving away, I expected fairly standard congratulatory responses. Perchance those responses would be tempered with sadness, and, occasionally, gladness, in the case of the private we promoted to supervene upon me at my previous job.
The reactions I received, however, were different than I expected.
Nearly everyone who learned of my plans expressed some caste of jealousy. "I wish I could move to Vancouver," they would mumble. "You're and so lucky," they would inform me.
My experience certainly didn't experience similar luck. I retrieve back to the courses I took in the evenings, the resumes and cover messages I wrote, the interviews I prepped for, the flights I took, the possessions I sold, and the romances I didn't pursue. I feel cheated that they meet only luck. I sacrificed. I lost things.
"People are chance averse," my friend Brandon notes, as I tell him this. "They're comfortable in their lives. They want more than, but they're afraid."
I suppose he'due south not incorrect. They say they wish they had what I had, but they mean something else. Maybe they're struggling to take steps to ameliorate their lives. Possibly they're struggling to ascertain what an improvement might look like. Mayhap they know what it looks like, but they're afraid of what that means.
The funny matter is, when I walk along the seawall, feel the drops of pelting on my face, or sit with a belly full of my latest bowl of ramen, I exercise feel lucky.
Possibly Tomorrow
On New year'due south Eve, Aziz and his wife host a party. It'due south my last nighttime living with them. I've establish an flat of my own nearby.
At 11:00, I put on a glaze and walk down to Coal Harbour with 100,000 other people. I could probably see the fireworks from the flat, but I want a forepart-row seat. I wait in line to buy hot chocolate and cinnamon-carbohydrate mini donuts from one of the nutrient trucks. So, I sit on the seawall and contemplate the ocean and the mountains while time inches toward midnight.
"How's 2019?" I message Jason, one timezone to the east, while I wait. It's the commencement time I've e'er missed his annual New Years Eve political party.
When I go back to the apartment, I'm greeted with enthusiastic shouts of "Happy New year!" from the group. Everything is engulfed in the glow of dinner lights and candles. The warmth of the oven and all the visitors has made that normally dank venue comfortably warm.
Aziz is sitting at the dining table with his friends, and eyes me as I walk past. "And then, Ian, did you lot kiss any cute girls tonight?" he asks.
"Not tonight, Aziz. Maybe next year."
He twists his face into a crude smile and picks up his cup of tea. He looks at me this manner sometimes, like he knows something I don't. "Maybe tomorrow," he says.
Source: https://medium.com/@ipalton/i-left-everything-and-moved-to-a-city-where-i-didnt-know-anyone-ce99f7ed5353
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