Somewhere That Wasn't the Last Place

I closed the door behind me, looked around the empty apartment, and slowly sank to the floor.

I'd gone to the new apartment a few days early, just to check the keys worked before moving day. Nobody was watching. There was no reason to hold anything together. So I didn't. I sat there in an empty unit I'd signed a year-long lease on and said, out loud, to no one, "This place is shit." Not angry, just sad, in a way that had almost nothing to do with the room I was sitting in.

Because it wasn't about the apartment. Not really.

The place I was leaving was the first one I'd lived in alone after a long relationship ended. Sixth floor, quiet corner of a new building, high ceilings, lots of natural light, a balcony that ran the full length of it. I'd got it below market rate after being persistent with the agent, at a point in my life when almost nothing else was going well, and it had truly felt like home in a way that few places ever had before. I loved that apartment. I still think about the walk along the water I did most days from there.

Two years in, I got hit with a 20% rent increase. Around the same time, I'd started feeling like I needed out of that suburb specifically, too much history, baggage, and memories, like a suffocating psychic weight hanging around my neck. So when the rent went up, I took it as a sign that it was time to go.

I started looking across the bridge, somewhere I'd vaguely considered years earlier. The red flags showed up fast. No train line, a commute that would triple in length, friends and family gently asking why on earth I'd picked that suburb given how far it was from everything, and that I'd never given any indication that it was an area I liked. I remember answering with reasons that didn't feel genuine even as I said them. There are some great parks there, a few good walking trails by the water, a jiu-jitsu school just up the road (which I only ended up visiting once anyway because it was a bad fit for me). When people pointed out the commute, I brushed past it. When a colleague asked why I wouldn't just pay the increase and stay where I was, I told him the rent rise was a sign I needed to move on, which was true, but also an incomplete answer to his question.

Looking back, I can see what I was actually doing. I wasn't choosing a suburb, I was running away from one, and grabbing at whatever justification let me stop being asked about it.

I secured the place after a packed inspection day and I felt proud of that at the time. Only a couple of days later, I started having second thoughts that quickly morphed into something approaching certainty that I'd made a mistake. I spent the weeks before moving day looking at the floor plan, arguing hard with myself about the numerous problems I now felt there were with it, trying to talk myself into a positive feeling that wasn't there. Then came the empty unit, the closed door, and the sentence I said out loud to nobody.

Moving day itself was almost comically simple. I'm enough of a minimalist that my brother and I did the whole thing ourselves with a trailer, no removalists, done and dusted in half a day. A couple of trips back and forth, hard work, over before lunch. It should have felt like a clean, easy start. It didn't.

It didn't get better once I'd moved in. My girlfriend at the time, now my wife, could see I was struggling and eventually walked the apartment with me pointing out, plainly, why it wasn't working: low ceilings, a colour scheme that shrank every room, an old, awkward layout, no air conditioning in the middle of summer. And it was tiny and my meagre furniture crammed inside made it feel tinier still. All of this was true and beside the point. She also said something else, gently, that stuck harder than the rest, that the apartment probably felt to me like a step backward in life, rather than forward.

It started taking a toll on my body. A racing heart some mornings, persistent headaches, persistent low-grade anxiety, a feeling of being depleted that descended faster and stayed longer every day. When I told people it hadn't turned out the way I'd hoped, more than one responded with a kind of pity I found harder to sit with than the apartment itself. I wasn't my best self during that stretch, and though I knew this while it was happening, I held my obligation to stay as a sign of integrity which I later realised it wasn't.

I gave it a red hot go for a couple of months and still felt like I was tolerating it, not enjoying it, definitely not feeling like it was home or anything that even vaguely resembled home. I was quickly counting down the days till the end of my lease. Eventually, and for the first time in 23 years of renting, I decided to give my notice and break the lease, paid the substantial early exit fees, and left on good terms with a landlord who was understanding about the whole thing. And the next place I moved into was almost exponentially better in too many ways to list here.

What I only realised later was that leaving the suburb wasn't the mistake. That part was right, and waiting for the perfect apartment in the perfect suburb might have meant never leaving at all. The mistake was how little consideration I gave to where I was going, because I was so focused on what I was running away from.

It was years before I caught the same pattern trying to resurface, years after I'd have sworn I'd fully learned the lesson. This time it showed up in a different, much bigger decision, but underneath it was something uncomfortably familiar. I was again much clearer on why I wanted to leave than I was on why I wanted to go where I was going. I'm proud of catching it when I did, albeit later than I'd have liked, and I'm grateful I changed my mind and went in a different direction.

Running away from something and running toward something can look identical from the outside. Same box, same trailer, same brave face at the goodbye drinks. The difference only shows up later, in whether you land somewhere you actually chose, or somewhere that was simply not the last place.

If you're weighing a change right now, job, city, relationship, it's worth asking honestly which one you're doing. Leaving may be completely justified. The harder question is whether you could describe, in specific words, what you're moving toward, and why.

If this is landing, there are two ways to work through it. RECKON for Men is built for doing this alongside other men in the same position, rather than working it out alone. 1:1 coaching with me is built for going deep on your specific situation with direct, dedicated attention.

If you'd rather start with a conversation first, see what needs to change and we'll work out what's actually going on and what to do about it.

Whichever way you're leaning, joshboxx.com is where to start.