Moving Back Home

We are moving… again… for the third time in 3 years. But this time we are moving back to our home town. We made the decision to move because we desperately want to be closer to family. Our college years have been spent at minimum, 2 hours away! Which has meant rushed trips home for holidays and tons of missed family events. We are absolutely thrilled to be around for our nieces and nephews’ events, attend impromptu family dinners, and ultimately for our future kids to be around their family. However, the preparation for this move has come with some inner turmoil for Matt and I.

Growing up in a small town everyone says how much they hate it, there’s nothing to do, and once they get out they are never moving back. Pretty standard small-town stuff, right? Ours is no different. Kids graduate from high school, head off to college and plan on never looking back. I didn’t even mind where we grew up and that was my plan too!

The fact is, there’s a stigma around moving back to your home town. The fear that people will think that you couldn’t make it out in the “real world.” Or that you didn’t succeed and now you have to move back to the little town you were raised in. Or that you’re settling for the easy and comfortable. When you watch old movies about small-town kids, they only move back if they failed out in the real world. 

On top of that stigma comes this inner conflict from past you and current you. Matt and I both said we wouldn’t move back. We would graduate college and get grown up jobs somewhere else. That was the plan, even before there was an “us.”

We graduated college, are working towards those dream jobs, but we are actively choosing to move back home. We are doing the exact thing we said we wouldn’t. The imagined “plan” isn’t going the way we originally thought. It can be a hard pill to swallow. We both used to view moving back to our home town as a sign of failure. The stigma made us believe this little town would suck you back in if you got too close. 

The real truth is, the things we were scared of and nervous about stem from other people’s opinions and the negative connotation we associated with moving back. Like anything in life, it’s hard to readjust your way of thinking when life doesn’t go as planned –and thank goodness it doesn’t!

I wanted to share this with you because I know someone else has felt the way we did. We have been working through these feelings for the past couple months and now the big move is finally here. Overcoming them is still a work in progress but we have made great strides. Recognizing that our concerns stemmed from hypothetical judgement from other people has made the biggest difference for us. As a rule, I wouldn’t consider Matt and I to be people who care too much about other people’s opinions. That being said, we both put being successful high on our pride list. 

Moving forward…

We are letting go of those “concerns” that don’t serve us, focusing on all of the amazing aspects of living near family, and standing firm in what we know to be true. We have succeeded at goals we have set out for ourselves thus far, we are happy and looking forward to our future, and our opinions on our life are the only ones that matter! While I hope this is helpful to someone in the same position as we are/were, this advice is applicable to far more than just moving back to your home town. 

-The Relatable Red