I moved to North Carolina six years ago at the end of August, driving over the mountains while small earthquakes rattled up and down the east coast. A hurricane hit three days after I moved my things inside and after the storm cleared I went running and fell three times, tripping over tree branches and debris strewn across the sidewalks. I limped back to my car crying with blood running down my legs. This sounds like a lot to deal with but compared to the year that preceded the move, it was nothing. North Carolina threw me a lifeline and I grabbed it with both hands.

I came there at the end of a year spent trying to reassemble the pieces of my life, which blew up around me after I quit my job to move to California with a boy I loved. We broke up two days after we got there, before the moving truck had even arrived with my things.

somewhere between Texas and California, 2010 (film)

It was a mess and it was mostly my fault, though it was not my decision (I begged to stay together, I fought for that life with every fiber of my being. I lost it all anyway). He didn't want me to stay and so I left. I moved back to my hometown in Wisconsin and descended, quickly, into darkness. I didn’t belong anywhere and no one knew what to say to me so everyone just made small talk. I couldn’t eat or stop crying. For months I lived in a basement bedroom at my mother’s house where I was, in no uncertain terms, unwelcome and unwanted. There were no windows and I physically shrank from lack of light and love and appetite. All of my stuff was in storage and I had no money but I kept buying things to surround myself with objects – mostly books – that belonged to me and me alone. I thought of him all the time and it hurt constantly.

I lived there for almost a year, working part-time gigs and doing freelance work, before I landed a full-time reporting job in Wilmington, a coastal town in North Carolina wedged between the Cape Fear River and the Atlantic Ocean. After a year of tiptoeing around and existing in the periphery of other people's full lives, living in a new city felt like a deep breath. It felt like dappled sunlight on hardwood floors, like stretching muscles I had forgotten existed. It felt like, finally, I might be ok.

Of course nothing is that simple. I had left the cold for the coast and I had escaped my own rock bottom, but there were still so many hard parts. I was angry and confused. I felt separate from my family - physically, yes, but also emotionally, like everyone's predominant feeling about my new job was profound relief that I was finally out of their hair. I was distrustful and suspicious of new people. I faced the world with armor, expecting to be hurt again, waiting for everything to fall apart.

But it was there, in Wilmington, in a tiny yellow house, that I started to deal with all of that. I faced the parts I hadn't been able to look at before. I tried to make peace with the parts I still couldn't figure out. Eventually, I started to feel happy again.

And then, I met Brandon.

through the kitchen window, Wilmington, 2011 (film)

I saw him in person for the first time there, face to face on the front porch of that yellow house. He told me he loved me for the first time in the bedroom and asked me to marry him in the living room. I left Wilmington three years ago so we could share a life in Greensboro, and when we got married two years ago, that's the place we came home to.

on the porch in Greensboro, Sept. 2017 (photo by Rebekah Williams)

So much healing, of my heart and my spirit and who I am, fundamentally, as a person, happened with Brandon and because of Brandon, but much of it also happened because I worked very hard at it, and all of it - every single bit - happened in North Carolina. There, I moved on. I remembered what it meant to love other people and to be open to new things. And it was there, in some ways, that I learned to love - really love - for the first time ever.

I saved myself, but it is not an exaggeration to say that North Carolina saved me, too.

I left it behind a month ago.

At the beginning of September we moved here, to the DC area, so that Brandon could accept a job at NASA Goddard. I was, and am, so proud of him, but the idea of the move was not easy for me, and the first month here has been difficult. I loved North Carolina and I was happy there. Things moved very quickly and there was little time to prepare or process. The upheaval, both emotional and geographical, was more traumatic than I expected. The transition hasn't been a smooth one.

There's my emotional connection to North Carolina, yes, but the more straightforward things have also been hard. The people we have encountered in Maryland so far have not been particularly friendly. I have had some health issues to contend with, which is stressful and difficult in a new place. We had made a wonderful group of friends in Greensboro, and I miss them every day. There's the itchy part of me that resists the idea of uprooting a good and fulfilling life to move somewhere for a man (I did this once before and it ruined me) even if that man is my husband and I love him more than anyone in the world.

he is my favorite of all the humans (photo by Rebekah Williams)

Perhaps most crucially, I left behind a reporting job that had its problems but allowed me to do important work that I believed in. A fair amount of my identity and my sense of self is tied up in what I do for a living, and I've lost a lot of that since I stopped working. Before we left I felt like my work mattered and that I was good at it, but the soul-crushing, defeating practice of job-hunting has stripped me of much of that. (I got a form-letter rejection from a company this week and considered it a step up because at least it was a reply, some acknowledgement that I exist here and that someone took the time to peruse the sum of my professional parts.)

I spend a lot of time by myself, and so I have a lot of time to think about all of this, which does not feel good and is not particularly helpful to my emotional well-being. To put it succinctly: life is a bit of a struggle for me right now, and I feel sort of unprepared to handle that in this place, though I am trying.

I have written snippets of this post in my head for weeks but have delayed writing the actual thing because I wish it was a happier update. There have been a few bright spots - Brandon is so, so happy at work, and I love that; our condo is right by a trail system, which Maisy and I explore every morning - but more often I find myself having to work very hard to find things to like about being here, and the things I can point to pale in comparison to everything I loved about Greensboro. Probably that's to be expected, but it still feels terrible and isolating, even on the better days.

So my goal now, I think, is to find a way to be happy here, or at least happier, and to do it with or without a job*. I'm not sure what that looks like yet, or how to do it, but for better or worse I have plenty of time to try to figure it out.

*would prefer to do it with a job, please. Hire me.

on moving and moving on