Dear Cary,
I'm hoping you can help with something that weighs on my mind a little heavier each day. I'm a 25-year-old professional woman, raised in Pennsylvania with four little brothers and sisters aged 18-23 whom I adore. A few years ago, I was working a post-college first job near my family home. I had a nice apartment in the city, saw my family often, and was making friends ... but I hated my job. I was completely miserable and mourned my college years, the days of fun, friends and having a reason to get up each day. I hated the humidity, the East Coast conservatism, the snow, the lack of people my age, the rat race ... everything.
When I became so unhappy that I thought I had nothing to lose, I risked my entire small savings account, quit my job, bought a van and moved to San Francisco, where I didn't know a soul and had no job lined up. Thanks to Craig's List, I found a home with roommates, found activities and clubs, even a dead-end administrative job that I didn't mind so much because it paid the bills and there was much, much more in life to distract me from it. I lived there for two years, visiting my family back East two or three times a year, while making more and more West Coast friends, having more and more fun and finally beginning to feel comfortable with myself. I was having fun on the weekends and weeknights, I was dating more often, and really discovering an artistic, liberal, outspoken, fun-loving, adventurous side of myself I hadn't known before, even during college.
Then one day I was referred to a dream job by a friend. Life got even better -- I had everything I wanted, including the job. I kept in touch with my siblings as often as possible then, although they themselves were busy with college. During this time, we were all doing our own thing in different locations, talking sporadically, but I don't think any of us really missed each other. We were all living too fast for that.
The dream job ended up transferring me to Seattle, where I've lived for almost a year now. Well, it turns out that life got even better. I love this town more than San Francisco. I have beautiful, wonderful friends here, all of them transports from around the country. I'm making great money. I'm involved in the community, I date a lot, have plans every night, and generally have what my parents have always referred to as "The Life."
Now my siblings are starting to graduate from college. I just returned from seeing everyone for a week. It always takes us a few days to get back into the groove, but when we do, it is amazing. I miss my little sisters so much it hurts. I miss laying with our arms around each other watching TV together. My brother is opening a store and the whole family is helping him get it up and running -- except me, of course, because I'm out here. On the day I left, my sister wrote me a letter asking me not to leave. I cried when I read it, laughed about it with her, and left anyway, came back home to Seattle.
Cary, I love it more here every day. I see myself living the rest of my life here. But my brothers and sisters are settling into a life near where we grew up. I've seen my mom's sister be the one in the family who lives far away, and I see her excluded from the special relationships that my mom and her other sisters share. I don't want that. I could still live a couple more years out here, while everyone gets really settled (they are still career-hopping and moving around, but I know they will all stay near home), but I know I must go at some point. I know deep in my heart that I must move back to Pennsylvania if I don't want to be "that sister." Should I give up everything I love, including my job here (which can't be replicated on the East Coast), to move back and start fostering a life in a place I hate everything about, save for my sisters, whom I love more than anything? I know it will stifle me to live back there again, right when I am flourishing in my identity and personality out here. Should I move now, or in a couple years, when I know I just shouldn't wait any longer? Please help me
"Torn" or Something
Dear "Torn,"
Yours is the dilemma of mobility and economic freedom. It is a dilemma disguised as a gift. It requires you to choose. I can't really tell you what to do.
I do not know what I would do, either, if I could do it over. I have conflicting feelings about having spent the last 30 years on the opposite coast from my family. But here are some ways to think about it, some vague trajectories and generalities that you might consider, in somewhat random order:
San Francisco and Seattle are great cities for the young. What they offer can be found few other places -- openness to experimentation, liberal social attitudes, concentration of youth with similar backgrounds, lots of highly educated people and the jobs to support them. In my opinion, while these areas offer incomparable experiences for the young, what they offer for middle-aged and older can be found elsewhere as well, and often at less expense -- schools, housing, parks, good restaurants, recreation opportunities. And their drawbacks can loom as more important the older you get -- the expense, the fast pace and loose social ties, the constant change. Likewise, or conversely, the tradition and stability of the East, which you find stifling now, may tend to become more attractive the older you get.
San Francisco and Seattle are great cities to visit, but expensive to live in. If you have to live in one place and visit another, it might be slightly better to be visiting the West Coast but living on the East Coast.
Dream jobs may be harder to find in Pennsylvania, but if you have experience and you are willing to spend a good bit of time looking, you may be able to find a job you like. You are in a perfect position to look now. You can take as long as you like. You are also gaining valuable experience -- perhaps at a level of responsibility that might be hard to duplicate on the East Coast at your age. (That's just a guess.)
You can always move back to the West Coast again, if you find the East Coast unworkable. Whereas, if you never come back to the East Coast to live, you may always be haunted by a thought that you abandoned your family, that you missed the best years of your sisters' lives, etc.
The West Coast is a great place to reinvent yourself. The East Coast is great once you know who you are. Perhaps it's during the process of inventing oneself that one is so fragile and thus so dependent on a nourishing environment. You need people supporting you while you're experimenting with who you are; once you know who you are, it becomes less important to have external support and approval. So perhaps the East Coast would stifle you now, in your experimental period, but after you've constructed an identity and lived in it for a while, worked out its kinks, smoothed it out, made it comfortable, then it can travel with you back to Pennsylvania.
So I suggest you do as much as you can on the West Coast while you can. Become who you are. Become who you aren't and everything in between. Try everything you want to try and some things that you don't. Then you can return to the East Coast with a glad heart, knowing you'll be with your sisters and your brother and all the people you love so dearly.
As to the West Coast, it'll be here for you. Drop in anytime.
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