Moving emotions from Doral to Pembroke Pines
In the entirety of my life, I’ve only moved a few times but this one was a drastic change in my life. For the second time in my life, I was leaving for a whole different city than where I had lived for almost 18 years.
The first time I moved into a completely different life was 20 years ago when I left Colombia to come live in the United States. Even though this time it wasn’t like changing countries, it is a brand-new chapter in my life where I must get used to a whole different city and leave my past behind.
This move meant that I had to leave my job and get used to finding other ways to travel. I moved from Doral to Pembroke Pines which also means that it’s a whole different county. Now I know that Pembroke Pines is a little closer to my hometown Colombia because most people who live in the area are Colombians.
So, throughout the process of moving, I decided to track what I was feeling from the moment I left my job in Doral to the moment we were still getting settled in the new apartment, following the items I moved from one place to the other.
Using the days from when I started to track my emotions, I recorded what I did those days, such as picking up the keys for the new apartment and even the last day of my job using symbols to represent the events. I used different colors to represent the emotions those actions produced in me that day. I realized that in the beginning, I felt nostalgic for leaving the past behind but then I felt happiness and gratitude for the new chapter and for the beautiful memories I made.
In addition, I also tracked the movement from one apartment to the other. The items I had packed throughout the day and what I had moved from one place to the other. I recorded this in a notebook, jotting down what I had kept and what I had thrown away. I represented it through drawing boxes in the days that had gone by. I used a blue color to represent what I had packed and red to represent what I had thrown out as well as what I had moved, I used a purple color. Each box has a specific letter that determines the item.
