All of the States I’ve Loved Before

Probably not shocking, but I love Taylor Swift.

I feel like I’m able to find little bits and pieces of myself in her songs. The good, the bad, and the ugly. This title came to me due to a phone call with one of my besties, an instagram post, and listening to “All of the Girls You Loved Before”. Hold tight for this revelation.

“Yeah, but you’re traveling the country right now”

As soon as my best friend said it, it hit me in the gut. It wasn’t a rude or sassy remark. It was a statement. I am literally traveling around the country right now so I obviously missed the hang out he had with our other mutual friend (Mutual friend is going to be named SB). The petty part of me still wished for an invite, but we’re all working on something still, right? We finished our conversation and said our goodbyes. We left on a happy note of eventually planning a future trip together. I continued with the rest of my Sunday and went on a beautiful trail run (thank you Taylor for getting me through those miles). But I just had a weird feeling in my stomach with the way our conversation went.

A little more about me: I’ve lived in 5 states before the age of 30. It honestly isn’t that many to me. When I tell people who have never moved out of the state they grew up in, I sound like a crazy person. “Why do you move so much?”. I lived in New York until my dad got a new job and we moved to North Carolina when I was 10. I still have a lot of good friends in both of these places and love visiting. After I graduated from Western Carolina University, I moved to Massachusetts and lived there for about 2 years. Massachusetts was probably one of my favorite places to live. I moved to Delaware to go to graduate school. Not much to say about Delaware, but I hated it and would never go back. After graduate school, I settled my heart on Maryland. My sister was there with her husband and first baby. I loved the Maryland culture and always had so much fun there. I had a list of how to tell a place was “perfect” for me. I promised myself wherever I moved to, I would spend at least 3-5 years there before making another big move. I was so excited to be the cool, fun aunt and I felt that Maryland could be my forever home. I was so sure it could be the new college environment for me that I wanted. When I say college environment, I don’t mean keg parties, staying up until 2 am every night, and hooking up with someone new every weekend. I wanted to simply be 5 minutes from my closest friends so we could hang out for Taco Tuesday and go on day trips on the weekend. Stay over at someone’s apartment Thursday night because I had one too many drinks and it’s just easier if I crashed on their couch. Calling my best friend and hearing her say “I’ll be right there” so we can grab ice cream in a fresh waffle cone and tell her about my latest heartbreak. I wanted that again.

I was scrolling Instagram Sunday evening and came across a post from my adventure coach, Bethany. She was talking about returning back to the place she grew up- had family and friends, went to school, and met her now husband.

“You can have the duality of loving what a city or place gave to you + taught you, but you can also know it’s no longer for you. I don’t really know where “home” is anymore and there are no roots set anywhere, but I think that’s okay.”

That’s when the weird feeling in my stomach from my phone call earlier made sense.

Maryland was my failure home.

I moved to Baltimore in 2019 with my now ex-boyfriend. I started working in a hospital north of Baltimore. I don’t think I need to go into more details about what happened not even 7 months after I moved there. It was the hardest time of my life of trying to build a community while being told to stay 6 feet away from each other and isolate. I was still able to make friends, see my nephew, and safely explore Maryland. End of 2021, my boyfriend and I went through a bad breakup. Two months later, my job announced they would be closing the unit I worked on. All but one of my friends quit.

To recap, from 2019-2021, I went through moving to a new state, living with my boyfriend for the first time (and then breaking up), COVID, trying to make friends, and a huge change to my job that caused me to lose all of the people I hung out with. Damn. I didn’t want to give up on Maryland yet. I got a job outside of D.C. and immediately dreaded the work week. My day started at 5 am and didn’t end until 8:00 pm at the earliest. However, I found one place that held me together for that year and a half. It was a CrossFit gym down the road. I met a great group of people at the gym, including my now best friend mentioned in the beginning. My post-college community dream was coming together. We worked out, went out for drinks, traveled together, and were each other’s biggest supporters. Most of them have seen me cry at least thrice, which is a lot. (To be fair, one time I fell while attempting a box jump and it was the final straw for me that week).

I got closer to one of the friends (SB) at the gym and we briefly tried the friends to dating pipeline. Possibly a story for another day, but, it didn’t work out. Then came the brief falling out. I was moving across the country the following week, but it wasn’t the way I wanted to end things with him or in Maryland.

“Yeah, but you’re traveling the country right now”

I promise. I’m tying it all together now. It would have been easy to dismiss the feelings as envy or sadness, which are not completely untrue. The relationship that could have been, but wasn’t. I’m glad I sat with the feelings a little longer. I realized I felt a wave of grief that I couldn’t name in the moment. Grief for the life that I so desperately wanted to have in Maryland, but slipped out of my grasp multiple times. The falling out with SB was the last of the hurt I could take. I felt that I had tried so hard to set my roots in Maryland, but an EF4 tornado would come and rip them all out once I felt settled. I finally acknowledged the hurt and sadness I felt when my best friend told me about the fun he had the previous night with SB and his new girlfriend. It fucking hurt. My inner child was kicking and screaming “it’s not fair! That was supposed to be my life!”. But it was fair. No one was out to get me. Things happened they way they happened. I am the one responsible of giving myself closure.

Grief can hit you in so many different ways and for different reasons. I was still grieving the life I thought I wanted for myself. The one that would “fix” everything. The one where “once all these things happen, then I’ll be happy.” I also had to acknowledge some of the not so invisible expectation I put on myself. Sure, having friends in a 5 mile radius would have been great, but what about a house? What about marriage? Don’t forget about those 2 kids and a golden retriever.

Did I actually want any of these things? Maybe a corgi, but otherwise, not really. My brain decided that I was definitely failing at life. I texted my best friend later that night and said “it’s been 4 years of heartbreak for me”.

As Bethany reminded me, I loved Maryland. I couldn’t deny that. I loved the friendships, the lessons I learned, being able to see my nephew and now my niece grow up, fat Baltimore and Bethesda rats, drunk nights trying not to twist my anke on cobblestone, the delicious brunches, the miles I ran on the roads, and the PRs in the gym. But, I can see now it is no longer for me.

These 6 months of travel have changed me. As cliche as it is, I truly have felt more at home with myself than I ever have. I listen to my gut 9 times out of 10. I became the person that can strike up a conversation with someone at the bar and talk for hours. I feel confident going to a concert or camping alone. I listened to the little whisper in my gut that told me to “just go”. My home right now is on the road and I’m the happiest I’ve ever been.