What is it like…really?
“What is it like to move cities so much?” people often ask. It strikes me as an odd question. I want to reply, “What is it like to live in the same town all your life?” But then I realize it would sound rude and pretentious, and in any event, when I really sit back and think about it, maybe I am the odd one out.
I always have been, because every time I’m just about to get settled in one place, I’m uprooted in the name of adventure, or education, or career advancement.
So I do the numbers, and I realize I have lived in six different cities over my 21 years of being alive, each for at least 6 months, usually around 9. If you count 2 or 3 month stints for internships, it goes up. My next academic year will add another city (Buenos Aires) to the tally, and soon enough, it will approach double-digits.
In a lot of ways, it’s a dream come true, to move around the world and have such rich experiences under my belt. It’s cool to reflect on the fact that before I graduate college, I will have lived the better part of a year in more than half of the world’s continents. It’s a position of immense, rare, amazing privilege.
But it’s also lonely, and weird, and triggers a sense of unsettled angst that can only be resolved in one way: truly and genuinely getting to know who you are.
I don’t mean the kind of “knowing who you are” that is essentially resignation to the beliefs and attitudes you grew up with.
Nor do I mean the kind of “knowing who you are” that basically amounts to a constant excuse for bigotry, or bad behavior, or exclusion.
It’s not the “sense of self” some have that misappropriates self-awareness to staunch close-mindedness.
When I say “knowing who you are”, I mean an act of courage so terrifying that usually you have to be forced into it in order to be truly willing to partake in it at all.
England
As glamorous as it seemed to the outside world, I never wanted to leave Miami for England. Based on what I knew, it seemed like an insane thing to find excitement in: leaving a sunny metropolitan paradise for sheep, rain, and unseasoned British food.
But I had to do it, because I was a minor and I had no choice.
At the mercy of the whims of my familial higher-ups, I was forced to face the truth of who I was when the environment I had grown up in was stripped away.
How did I want to dress when I compared the flashy, sleek tastes of Miami against the tweed and cashmere old-money wardrobes of England?
What parts of myself did I want to leave behind? Which parts would I keep?
Tragically, upon leaving Miami, I learned that I actually loved the beach and its treasures (thus my love affair with all things water chemistry, marine biology, and crunchy-granola environmentalism).
I learned that I don’t like to sit in traffic.
Maybe I preferred the reserved, somewhat obstinate nature of British education over the chaotic American high school life my friends had back in the US.
Of course, I moved to England at the start of my adolescent years, and I don’t mean to underplay the inevitable self-discovery of those years regardless of whether you have moved across the ocean.
However, I also can’t say that I would’ve turned out as the same person if I had stayed in Miami until I was 18. If I hadn’t been uprooted to England and forced into an uncomfortable new place, maybe I never would’ve left.
And now that I’m years ahead of that tumultuous time of my life, I can safely say that I’m glad I left Miami, my home “town” (if you can call a place with 6 million residents a “town”), because it afforded me the inner strength to step into discomfort and uncertainty later on.
Choosing To Explore With Minerva
“Because in the end, you won't remember the time you spend working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain.” - Jack Kerouac
When I made the decision to attend a college structured around constant movement, I had adventure in mind, but now, halfway through, I have learned that there is even more to living abroad than the travel blogs would have you know.
Importantly, I say “living” abroad, because “travelling” abroad is not really the same thing. You get to leave. Once it’s “too much” and you feel homesick, you just get on a plane.
Travelling is more akin to escaping than living somewhere is, because living forces a confrontation with the features of a place that are truly foreign to you. And it forces that confrontation for such an expanded period of time that you must actually resolve your discomfort.
And not necessarily with the “exotic” touristy “top 5 things”Instagram told you to do when you visit a place.
Living abroad forces you to actually experience the frustrations of language, navigation, and differing belief systems.
It makes you get properly I-can’t-even-read-the-map-and-my-SIM-ran-out-of-data lost.
Sometimes it brings you to tears from the loneliness, and the crazy timezones. and the sharp pain of constant loss. Dating is pretty much impossible. Keeping up local friendships is also tough once you leave. Every goodbye is suffused with such unbearable gravity, that you will find every way to avoid saying it.
You will struggle to find the foods you’re used to, and once you do find them, they won’t be anything like they are back home. Or they will be five times as expensive.
There will be misunderstandings and faux pas. You will wonder why it is so hard to do even just a simple chore like buying groceries. Often, you will accidentally offend someone because you haven’t quite learned the norms of that place yet, and you will beat yourself up about it for weeks.
Sometimes you will want to call home and realize everyone you love is asleep.
Without even thinking, an entire month will pass and you will realize you can’t remember the last time someone smiled at you.
But when you move around with such frequency, and each time for such a long period, something else happens to you: you also learn to be utterly, utterly still.
The Evolution
In case you’re wondering about my credentials, I will tell you them exactly.
I was born in Fairfax Virginia, and when I was 6 months old, my parents moved to Miami. At 13 years old, I was off to England until I was 18, and technically an adult (but of course, not really).
I deferred my college entrance by a year, and spent my gap year living in North Carolina. Then I lived in San Francisco for nine months, then Tokyo for another nine months, and now I’m in Kentucky for the summer before moving to Argentina for (you guessed it) another nine months.
So, as you can imagine, ever since I was a sulking fourteen-year-old dumped in the dreary English countryside, I have lamented my inability to answer the question “Where is home for you?”
I struggled, feeling constantly like some degenerate heathen outsider who was at odds with the place I lived in.
Over time though, I realized something: as my sense of belonging and home got more and more muddied, my sense of who I was and who I wasn’t was fortified.
Every crack in my place-centered identity was filled with an identity I formed on my own terms.
As I struggled with differing belief systems, hygiene standards, styles of dress, food, and so on, I learned how to both try new things with greater ease and confidence, and also say “No, this isn’t for me” without the debilitating FOMO so many people experience.
Among the wider, more profound examples like my values and life philosophies, are the smaller aspects of myself that everywhere I go, I stand by even if they make me stick out awkwardly among locals. Everywhere I go, I am reassured that I want to continue eating a vegetarian diet. I am reassured that I love to be surrounded by lively colors, whether in my clothing, on my desk, or in other paraphernalia.
There is also the negotiation between what it means to blend into a culture, and what you will never need to compromise.
And most of all, I have finally realized that I can find happiness, and enjoyment, and adventure no matter where I settle one day, because I am 100% confident in my ability to find my weird, creative, fascinating fellow degenerate outsiders anywhere I land.
Because we are everywhere, if you keep an eye out.
The Privilege Of A Lifetime
There is a quote attributed to either Carl Jung or Joseph Campbell (depending on whose Pinterest board you’re looking at) that goes, “The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.”
It’s a quote that has always comforted me in those I-can’t-even-read-the-map-and-my-eSIM-ran-out-of-data moments.
I suppose it’s because it reminds me that when faced with such all-consuming uncertainty as living on the other side of the world, you get to build a sense of self that can’t be taken away by distance.
So what I once thought was a teenage travesty, I have now learned to see as a secret superpower.
Ultimately, we borrow our identity from our environment, and by dissolving my attachment to any single environment, I have gained an intimate knowledge of what is borrowed and what is really me.
The Ingredients
“Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” -Howard Thurman
I want to boil down this “self-discovery via being tossed into a foreign land” soup into its essential ingredients.
That way, you can take what I’ve experienced and test it out for yourself.
#1: The Cave Analogy.
Socrates’ cave has been used for centuries as an allegory for enlightenment, philosophical and scientific inquiry, self discovery, and more.
It is really about the “journey out of ignorance”, in all its forms.
This is how it goes: Socrates asks us to picture a group of prisoners held captive in a cave all their lives. It’s all they’ve ever known.
They can’t move their heads, and can only see the wall in front of them, where shadows dance. Unbeknownst to them, a fire is burning just behind the wall, where puppeteers cast the shadows.
As far as the prisoners know, reality is just shadows, caves, and mainly darkness.
That is, until one prisoner breaks free and is able to walk out of the cave and finally see the fire, the puppeteers, the outside of the cave, the sun…
It turns out, the world is made of more than shadows and darkness, but when the prisoner returns to break the unbelievable news, no other prisoners believe it. After all, it’s impossible, right?
They cannot imagine a world beyond the wall right in front of them, a world where a sun and fire exist, a world filled with trees and animals and such an expansive new idea of reality.
On top of that, now that the prisoner’s eyes have become accustomed to the sun, they can’t see the shadows like the others.
But once the prisoner’s eyes adjust, it’s clear that the shadows are mere projections of the other reality. They are produced by the sun, by the moving objects, by the outside world the other prisoners can never fathom.
The knowledge is isolating and liberating at the same time.
Socrates tells us that the “unexamined life is not worth living”, but does not warn us of the cost. Perhaps we already know that if we step outside the cave, there is no going back to a reality where there are only shadows.
But what is the cost of staying in the cave?
You never get to see the sun.
So the first ingredient is to leave the cave.
#2: Cognitive Dissonance, Cultural Echo Chambers & Confirmation Bias
“Loving life is easy when you are abroad. Where no one knows you and you hold life in your hands all alone, you are more master of yourself than at any other time.” - Hannah Arendt
The discomfort of knowing you are wrong is one of the most powerful forces that exist. It’s so powerful and uncomfortable that most people spend their entire lives avoiding it.
Unfortunately, acknowledging where you are mistaken is one of the steps that need to happen on the way to growth in a new and more aligned direction.
The thing is, when everyone in your circle mostly agrees with you, there is no confrontation with the potential of your wrongness, and thus your surroundings never generate any of that growth-inducing cognitive dissonance.
After all, echo chambers don’t just exist on InstaTok. They also exist in communities of people in real life who all think the same way and are never challenged on it.
True to the trope that you “see the world not as it is, but as you are”, you then process all new information already deciding what you’re going to think of it before even, well, thinking of it.
Because of such confirmation bias, and our inability to escape it as mere mortals, it’s important to always manufacture cognitive dissonance.
Without cognitive dissonance, growth just isn’t possible.
So the next ingredient is this: get uncomfortable. Lean into it.
#3: “Oh wait, that’s possible for me.”
Putting aside some of Nietzsche’s questionable stances and his infamous influence on Nazi eugenics, he had a fairly useful framework for answering the timeless question of “who am I really”.
Unlike some of his more ancient counterparts, Nietzsche turns away from the notion that there is a “true inner self” buried deep down somewhere, which you only need to dig deep enough to find.
To him, it isn’t “self-discovery” as much as “self-creation”.
And, as any creative knows, your creative output reflects the input you are allowing in.
If you allow yourself to live a variety of different ways and in different places, the self that you create is even more intentional.
So the final ingredient to this process is deliberation. Don’t wait to discover yourself. Work towards it actively.
“This is the most effective way: to let the youthful soul look back on life with the question, ‘What have you up to now truly loved, what has drawn your soul upward, mastered it and blessed it too?’ Set up these things that you have honored before yourself, and maybe, they will show you, in their being and their order, a law which is the fundamental law of your own self…for your true being lies not deeply hidden within you, but an infinite height above you, or at least above that which you commonly take to be yourself.” - Friedrich Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator essay of Untimely Meditations
What Stays When Everything Else Is In Motion?
Once you have left the cave (or your home town), made yourself uncomfortable (by getting on a foreign subway), and done the work to understand the self that you want to create (whether you like eating dinner at 5 or 8pm), what is left behind?
You have questioned, doubted, mourned the loss of who you once were, and journeyed agonizingly through the 7 stages of grief for all that you thought you wanted because it’s what the world told you to want.
What no one warns you about is that, at first, it’s tiring and lonely to live in a world no longer constructed of shadows.
Alas, there isn’t usually a pot of gold waiting for you once you take the leap.
But after that, once everything that you threw into question has settled into some sort of foundation upon which to build, you get to decide what/who/how you will be.
The process never ends, and that is part of its beauty.
Ask Yourself The Question
“Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you should set up a life you don't need to escape from.” - Seth Godin
It’s both a ginormous question and a microscopic one.
Creating yourself is the most creative act you will ever take part in, and whether consciously or not, you take part in it every day.
That means that actually, you don’t have to do what I did and live in a new city every 9 months (I certainly recommend it though).
In reality, all you need to do is make the space to ask the question: what parts of you have you taken for granted, borrowed from your surroundings, and do you really want to keep holding on?
Thoughts To Action
#1: Pause and Write Your “Failure Archive”: List three things you tried that didn’t go as planned this year. Don’t fix them. Instead, just name them and how they made you feel.
#2: Reframe Effort as Evidence: Track one kind of effort for two weeks (reading time, daily creative minutes, meaningful talks). Let the action be the metric, not just the outcome.
#3: Create a “Growth Pause”: Pick one thing you’ll do less of (doomscrolling, chores as avoidance). Put a boundary around it and note what space that creates for something nourishing.
#4: Rediscover Joy in the Small and Slow: Read one short piece of writing without pressure—no speed goals, no expectations.
#5: Set One “Next Try Intent”: Choose one thing from your failure archive and decide a small, doable step you’ll try next quarter — no perfection, just continuation.
Sources
https://cup.columbia.edu/book/philosophical-self-knowledge/9783838218809/
https://philosophybreak.com/articles/nietzsche-on-what-finding-yourself-actually-means/
https://1000wordphilosophy.com/2023/05/26/allegory-of-the-cave/
AI Statement
Where was AI used?
SEO keyword research & optimization: This is the boring bit that has to do with aligning what I write with what search engines will put at the top of their pages. I let AI do it so I can focus on being a better writer.
Where was AI not used?
Image generation: A human being took and selected every photo used in this post.
In any writing, at any point: A human being wrote this post with her heart and brain, not her LLM friends.
Selecting ‘Thought to Action’ items: These have been remixed from past posts with related themes.
