I Left In Order To Find Myself
And It Actually Worked.
Last October I moved from Chicago to Mobile, Alabama. If I didn’t tell you Mobile was in Alabama… you probably wouldn’t have known.
At least I didn’t know Mobile existed, and I also thought it was pronounced like ‘mobile phone’. It’s actually pronounced like ‘Batman’s bat mobile’.
I was extremely excited to get out of Chicago and move to the South for many reasons, but mostly because of nature and a chance to slow down.
Back in the city I felt like my life was half mine and half random things dumped into my existence.
The thing is, I didn’t believe it was actually random, but I was fed up with allowing my life to be dragged in directions that wasn’t going to help me.
I’ll over simplify and attribute it to being scared. I was scared to be myself in the face of a life I created where… I wasn’t fully doing that.
So I took a step back and examined my life, and then called myself out.
I started saying no to things I did not want to do, I got rid of people in my life that were blatantly bad for me, and I took back my power.
We all have a story, and I use mine to explain some environmental conditioning that I had to undo. Like caring what other people think, and the worst part… not really admitting it to myself.
We all say things like, “I don’t care what they think of me”, but if no action is taken to change that core belief, then it’s nothing but an absurd lie to hide your insecurities.
That’s basically how I lived my life — half unknowingly and half just too scared to do anything about it.
Ever get to a point in your life when you stopped dreaming of the life you wanted and actually started living that dream? That’s when my life truly started, no more half & half crap — fully me.
I projected out an idea of how I wanted my life to look, yearning for it, but taking no real action. A lot of excuses were made.
Then, I started to create the life of my dreams moment to moment, with the man I love, and more intentionally every day. Until I forgot I was even doing it.
Yeah, that’s all it took for me to fall in love with my life.
Did I mention how beautiful it is down here on the Gulf Coast?
Transitions are always tough, but also very fun (at least they are mysterious). Moving down here was interesting, there were a lot of, “what the hell just happened”, moments to say the least.
You can only imagine what it’s like to move from a bustling metropolitan city like Chicago to Mobile, Alabama. Everybody knows everybody downtown— it‘s a very small downtown.
…and I did have to question a few times if time stopped in the 90’s and never resumed… it’s not every day that you see people in full tie-dye outfits and sweat bands.
Amazingly so, my boyfriend and I have a family of turtles living in our back yard and we have an orchestra of birds to wake us up in the morning.
When I am worried or stressed it’s nice to walk outside and watch the natural world take care of itself.
All worries melt away.
