For this week's blog post, I'm just gonna talk about moving and why it's crazy and fun but overall a good thing.
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| (picture from @drawings_for_my_grandchildren in insta) |
What's different about your new town from your old one?
Do you like Ann Arbor or Madison better?
How does your new school compare to your old one?
Moving is strange because you are simply stopping your life in one place that you have become familiar with, and beginning it in another. You have to start over with friends, school, street names, landmarks.. even the culture of the new place. For example: I had never heard of cheese curds before moving to Madison. They sound absolutely revolting, but are actually really delicious fried curdled milk. If you have a party in Wisco and didn't have cheese curds, was it really a party?.
There are also some lingering internal questions up in the air, about moving, like, "Who will I ACTUALLY keep in touch with when I move," and, "Is the new city that I'm moving to as great as the place I'm in now?". Moving is just as frightening as it is exciting, because you're going on an adventure outside of your comfort zone(in my opinion, the best stories come from these adventures).
Once you get to your new home, it just takes time to become familiar with it. All your furniture in your old house is in the new one and it seems awkward at first until you make memories in your house like celebrating Christmas, and Halloween. It also takes time to get to know the streets and you celebrate each new place that you can get to without using your GPS. You go to school and realize that there are so many people in the hallways that you see that you will never meet, because you'll only be at this school for a year before college. Navigating the new school can be difficult at first, because you were just in a school that you had known and could have navigated with your eyes closed and now are in a whole new school building where everything is foreign and you don't know how it flows.
Moving can be lonely at times because it is one thing to move away for college as a freshman when everyone else is moving with you, but it is another thing when you are the only one doing it. Even if you have you whole family by your side moving with you, YOU are the only one who can feel YOUR experiences.
It's exciting when you meet new people who resemble other friends you had in your old town, or completely new people who you are grateful for the opportunity to have met them. The biggest benefit of moving are the people. You will have a more diverse knowledge of human beings from different places and backgrounds, and then make some best lifelong friends who you wouldn't have ever met had you not moved. Your familiarity levels just drop a whole lot when you move and can't recognize people everywhere you go, though. Sometimes, it's surprising when you randomly think of people from your old town who you weren't even close friends with, and you wonder how they are doing and what ever happened to so-and-so.
Now that I've moved twice, and visited Ann Arbor after being in Madison for nine months, I can genuinely say that moving to Ann Arbor was a great thing. It was extremely hard at first, but during that trip back, I spent some time thinking about how much I'd learned and how many people I'd met while moving. The friendships that I made in only four years there have changed my life, and they help me to I realize that moving is a literal blessing and that it is a huge chunk of my story that I am proud of. I definitely believe that it will be the same here in Madison, especially as I transition into college here over the next several months!
Being able to go back to Ann Arbor last month was amazing, and here are some pictures from when I hung out with my friends:
Maybe this blog post was long overdue, but I'm just glad that I could put this into words!
Thanks for reading!
Joy :)
