In Search Of
City to city. State to state. Apartment to house. What am I looking for? And why do so many people have a problem with me trying to find it?
Over the past 9 years, I’ve lived in four states. Five cities. Some unknown number of shoddy apartments and slightly-less-shoddy duplexes, townhomes, and single family houses.
I’ve been completely alone for the vast majority, then 8 years ago added a little gray cat to the equation, but no other humans. In short, I’ve “moved around a lot”. I also hear: “you just can’t stay in one place”, “you keep moving!”, “didn’t you just move?”, and more recently, “she’s flighty”.
Maybe some of that is true—maybe I have an aversion to roots in a place I’m unsure of, maybe I can’t sit still because there’s so much world and so much life to live, maybe I feel a sort of cleansing every few years where I pack up all my belongings, purge what’s not needed anymore, and seek out a blank canvas on which to reflect the new person I turn into from era to era.
Maybe that’s true. My question is—why is that such a problem for you?
The popularity of a life of travel, especially as a digital nomad, has surged since COVID-19 made offices optional.
Millennials and Gen Z alike decided to buck convention and see the world—creating a culture where consistent travel is glamorous. Adventurous. Liberating. A marker of success.
But consistent relocation? Unstable. Suspicious. Unsuccessful.
Pop culture reinforces this—that guy that “moved around a lot” on the primetime cop show? Probably the culprit, or at the very least, troubled because of his lack of roots. A woman who moves to a new city for a fresh start? Why does she even need one?
What happened to her?
Where is her family?
Doesn’t she want a husband?
How will she ever find one if she keeps moving around?
Especially for women, our agency is stripped by the notion that we need to plant ourselves in one place so a man has a chance to mosey by us and decide to make us wives—our true purpose and meaning in life, of course.
But if she lives for herself—or lives just to live—and wants something different than her schoolmates, her sister, her mother, her colleagues (who are remote and travel every other month but that’s a luxury, not a deficiency), there’s something not quite right about her.
It makes us nervous. It makes us uncomfortable. We couldn’t imagine doing that. So she shouldn’t either.
Stability is intoxicating.
It’s what we’re raised to procure for ourselves—a stable income, a reliable car, a house we’ll pay off (or spend our lives paying the mortgage on), a good and steady partner. Underlying all of these is the place it’s happening. Can anyone have these markers of stability if they blow up the foundation over and over? And if you don’t have these markers of stability, are you even a functional person?
The truth is, you will be knocked unstable at some point in your life, no matter the strength of the foundation. You can live in one place for decades and then one day find your partner is having an affair. You can never leave your hometown and watch as it grows beyond containment and suddenly you’ve been laid off because of AI, or replaced by a younger, sharper wunderkind, or priced out of the neighborhood you grew up in.
Stability isn’t safety. It’s the mirage of it.
Those who criticize someone that moves from place to place are often oblivious—purposely or otherwise—to their own stability’s fragility. That things will never change is a short-sighted illusion. My parents recently had to scramble to find somewhere to live after the house they rented for 20 years was put up for sale. Their landlord—much older than he was when we signed the lease—died. His children took over. They promptly put it on the market.
My parents’ home represented stability to me, too—despite my own wanderings, I could always visit the home where I ate at the same table I used to do my homework. Peek into my dad’s office, which used to be the bedroom where I was told my grandmother died. The hallway where we rode out a Category 3 hurricane during my junior year of high school. The living room where we watched the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade for double-digit years, curled up on the sagging couch (about as old as I was).
And then it was gone. Firmly planting themselves on that street in East Orlando didn’t keep them from being uprooted and forced to start fresh.
Pretending the roots they planted would never be torn from the ground didn’t stop it from happening.
When it comes to casual travel versus permanent(ish) relocating, sometimes it feels like a numbers game.
Living in one to two cities your whole life? Congratulations, you’ve won the Respectable Stability Game.
Lived in upwards of eight to ten? Wow, a nomadic lifestyle! People write books about this. You’re a global citizen. You have friends all over the world. Congratulations, you’ve won the Worldly Globetrotter game!
You’ve lived in three to five cities? A couple years in each? You just… move on when you feel like it’s time? That’s weird. You’re certainly not stable, but you’re also not seeing so many places in such rapid succession that you’ve created a lifestyle that allows you real freedom. So, what’s wrong with you? Sorry, you’ve lost the Functional Human We Trust Game.
People are uncomfortable with the messy middle. You’ve diverged from the stability they recognize, but haven’t quite crested something else they can define, so you’re sitting squarely in '“this makes me feel weird and makes me question my own choices” territory and we don’t like that. We will make sure you know we don’t like that.
I want to normalize the idea of roots spreading wide before they run deep.
Immersing yourself in new places for a few years at a time as an intentional lifestyle, not a reaction to dysfunction. We’re told to grow, to expand, to never stop learning, to be curious about the world and how others live, but offered the very narrow avenue of travel as a socially-appropriate way to do that.
I need more than a weekend in Paris to understand what it’s like to be Parisian. I need more than a tourist spin through the Loop in Chicago to learn how to survive a true Midwestern winter and witness the concept of ‘dibs’.
Yet, I also love the idea of finding a place that feels so much like coming home, I want to buy property, invest time and care into planting a literal garden, and envision children (or at the very least a few pets) running free in a backyard. But I’m not rushing that permanence.
I’m not running from anything—I’m running toward the future where roots feel like an anchor and not a chain.
At its heart, this is based in my inability to settle for less when I know I could have more. If I have the resources, the agency, and the drive to move toward something better—a house with the built-ins I’ve always dreamed of, a relationship where I feel like an equal and not a trophy, a job that lets me create, the kind of quality of life that gives me something to write gratitude lists about—why would I rob myself of that? Ignorant perceptions from others will never outweigh how I feel in my own experience.
People talk about “putting down roots” like it’s the only way to grow.
But maybe some of us are vines—climbing, reaching, striving, twirling, connecting, always moving toward the light. That’s their nature. Maybe it’s mine, too.
And if that makes people uncomfortable, they can stay right where they are.
“Some of us are vines” so real. I often think about why our choices bother others so much. It’s not your life! I’m so glad you’re living your truth and letting your vines go where it feels right.