I grew up dreaming of moving away.
I was born in the midwest, but my family moved to the Gulf Coast of Florida just before I started kindergarten, and I spent my childhood living in, essentially, a retirement community. (The median age in my home county when I was growing up was something like 50 or 52 years old. There were other kids, of course, but I was always aware that the community wasn’t built for us.)
When it was time to go to college, I decided on Florida State, in Tallahassee, mainly because it was an affordable, in-state school that was 200 miles from my hometown. Higher education was a chance to get out, to live someplace else. Then I ended up staying in Tallahassee for nine years, through undergrad, grad school, and my first full-time library job. And as much as I continue to have a soft spot for the city, by 2011 I was very ready to get out of there as well, and ideally to get out of the south.
I don’t know that I fully appreciated that working in higher education provided an opportunity to move around, back when I first started thinking about becoming an academic librarian. It must have been part of the appeal, but I’ve forgotten so much from that time. Regardless of my motivations, the nature of the work meant that I could have a job lined up for me in a new place, rather than moving somewhere and trying to find a way to pay the bills after I arrived. I knew people who attempted the latter, with mixed success, but almost all of them came from money, and I couldn’t afford to live without a paycheck for even a month.
So I applied for librarian jobs all over the country and ended up in the high desert of Pueblo, Colorado. Having lived most of my life with lush Florida greenery, arriving in a place that was so desolate, so sun-baked, was truly a shock to my system. I can recall walking through a state park my first week there and being able to see for miles, and how disoriented I felt. Florida is flat, and the act of being able to see more than a couple of blocks was a novelty. When I started at my new job, my office had a view of Pikes Peak, which was 50 miles away.
And of course there were so many other differences. I remember someone at a grocery store calling a cart a “buggy” and being perplexed. I remember how odd it was to see streets named after Grant and Sherman; in Florida, we had streets named after Calhoun and Jackson. I still put beans in my chili back then, to the horror of my new friends and colleagues.
I was in my late twenties, and the act of moving to a new place made me realize how small, how limited, my life had been. It was intimidating, but I loved it.
As time went by, I saw more of the country. I travelled for conferences, visiting a few new states each year. Eventually I got a new job in Denver, and was again disoriented to learn what it meant to live in a “real” city with skyscrapers and bus routes and just so, so much happening, all of the time. I made friends with people from California, New Jersey, Texas, Nebraska. I memorized the light rail schedule and could navigate to most parts of the city without thinking. The experiences were exhilarating and transformative, and I was a very different person after living there.
Still, there’s also the old adage that “if you want to move up, you have to move out,” and I couldn’t afford to stay in Denver working as a middle manager. So much of my career path has been driven by the fact that I need to work to have money, and they pay you more money if you supervise. I mean, I enjoy managing people, and I think that I’m quite good at it, but I also haven’t been operating as if I wanted to climb the org chart. I probably would have been happy staying a department head if I wasn’t worried about how I’d pay my rent, but every lease renewal letter from every apartment building, notifying me of a 9% or 14% increase, was a reminder that my time in Denver was limited.
So I left.
When I relocated to Pennsylvania, it felt a bit like coming home. I have family in the region, and I visited Philadelphia a lot as a kid. Arriving in my new town, I really hoped “this is it.” It’s always hard to uproot a life and navigate a new community, but I mostly felt welcomed in the area, and after paying off the cost of the move, I was more financially secure than at any other point in my life. Not enough money to own a home, but enough that I wasn’t worried about my landlord raising the rent beyond what I could afford. (It’s amazing how much easier it is to exist when you’re not carrying that fear.)
Now, as I’m writing this entry, I’m going through it all again. I’m halfway through a move to Binghamton, New York, where I’ll be starting a new job next month. My living room is a maze of boxes and bags. I’m coordinating with two landlords, two employers. I’m untethered from nearly all of my routines, and I’m feeling the anxiety acutely, to the point that I’m seriously considering placing a “FRAGILE” sticker on myself like I’m a crate of ceramic plates.
I haven’t been looking to leave my job of the past two-and-a-half years, but I was presented with an incredible opportunity to work with an old friend and mentor at an institution that seems solid. Walking around the facilities during my interview, I just kept thinking “they’ve done this so well…” and talking with the staff gave me the impression they’ve been supported in a way that isn’t particularly common in library work. It’ll be the largest portfolio I’ve had, but it’s all work that I’ve done before, and, honestly, it’s the work that I still find engaging. I find myself being excited about my job for the first time in longer than I care to admit.
Additionally, after twenty years of academic library work, this is the first time I’ll make enough money to be able to buy a house in the community where I’m employed. That fact alone feels rather uncanny, after so much of the past two decades was defined by worrying about bills. When combined with the uncertainty of higher education (and, well, the world) in this moment, feeling good about my future feels… odd.
With all of this in mind, I really, really hope this is the last move I make for a long while. I might have grown up dreaming of getting out, but at this point in my life, I want things to calm down. I feel like I’ve seen enough, lived in enough places, to have a better appreciation of what I like and don’t. I want to put down roots, I want to settle in. I’m so thankful for the experiences I’ve had in different places. I’m glad that my career has given me the chance to live and work in so many settings. But I’m very tired of relocating.