I get moving panic attacks. Even though I’ve moved pretty frequently ever since I was a kid, the process causes me serious anxiety and I average one proper panic attack per move. Today, as the regularly scheduled shallow breathing settled in, I tried to analyze why this was happening. Moving sucks for everyone. I’ve never met someone who enjoys the acts of moving house. I also don’t know many people (anyone?) for whom a panic attack is routine part of the process. In thinking it through and fighting back tears (why? from where? for what?), I realized that this hadn’t happened on our last move. Our last move, from Kirkwood to Edgewood neighborhoods in Atlanta, spanning a distance of 1.1 miles, was very simple.
But it wasn’t the simplicity that kept my anxiety at bay, it was the known quantity of our destination. We watched our Edgewood home get built. We selected finishes. We knew the plans and the paints and the delays. It was the only home we knew before we moved into it. Every other major move in my adult life was an unknown. We moved from Alabama to Oregon for me to go to grad school and arrived at our apartment we’d rented sight-unseen. We moved from Oregon back to Atlanta so I could start my postdoc at Georgia Tech and saw our rental house in Lake Claire for the first time when we pulled up in the driveway.
Today, the movers and Steve managed to transport all of our (many) boxes and the (few) furniture pieces we’re keeping to our storage unit while I was in a brief series of morning meetings. I exited my office to find an echo-y, empty house; it was wildly disorienting despite knowing exactly what was happening.
It’s not the empty house that’s most unsettling. It’s the liminal space in which I feel completely untethered. Our items are stored or in bags and suitcases waiting to be bullied into our car. We don’t… have a home. We’re going to road trip down through Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, and the Mexican states of Coahuila, San Luis Potosi, Guanajuato, and Jalisco before landing at our short-term rental in Nayarit. I cannot even confidently pronounce the names of each of those Mexican states.
There is so much we don’t know about what awaits us in this endeavor, but we do know that we would have regretted not moving when the stars aligned to make it possible.