how to make it out of your hometown

i'm moving to san francisco! on the struggle, grief, and freedom that comes hidden in moving boxes

Leave your hometown in your twenties. Get an apartment with two to three strangers. Go alone to social events, eat solo dinners at new restaurants. Read out-of-genre books. Force yourself into new situations. Allow change to change you. Comfort is a habit, sometimes a bad habit. Comfort deceives you into staying in a situation longer than you want, just because the cost of disrupting that seems too heavy upfront. But you’re leaving so much on the table by staying in place.

Reader, I have a confession. This isn’t a guide to getting out of your hometown. No, it’s not, because if you really wanted to get out, you would. You’d apply for the job, get the lease, and book the flight. You’d be obsessed with it, you’d make it work. You wouldn’t need a guide because the map is etched within your soul. No substack article can tell you your destiny. But you are here anyways.

There are many different circumstances that one cannot leave their hometown, all of which I understand. This is not directed towards those that desire to leave, but cannot. Your struggle is another journey on its own, and I’m not fit to comment on it. I’m talking to the people on the fence, people with no reason to stay other than the illusion of comfort. What are you leaving on the table? Who are you not allowing yourself to become?

So stay with me here. What does it mean to leave your hometown?

It means marrying risk, not comfort. Yes, your childhood friends will move on. They won’t sit at your doorstep waiting for you to come back. Your parents will find hobbies. Secretly, they’ll love the empty nest. Your hometown will not wait for you, but the world won’t either. You’ll never be more young and more dumb and more malleable than right now. The older you get, the more your bones settle. Change will only feel more excruciating. You can always return home, but you can’t gain back the opportunities you let crisp up on the burner.

But Riya, I’m saving so much money. My mom will do my laundry and make my food. I can focus on my passions and work and blah blah blah. You can focus on all of that alone, just like your parents did when they were raising you. You’ll have to grow up one day. You’ll have to move out one day. If the only thing keeping you home is because it’s easy, you’re doing yourself a disservice.

My parents not only left their home town, but home country in search of a better life. Their life showed me the truth about moving. The struggle is immense. It’s lonely. It’s a hard couple of years. But the reward is beyond what you can imagine if you’re just patient and resilient.

It’s much easier to spend your adult days on your parents’ couch. Cheaper too. But I’m Catholic, so I think struggle is good. Struggle is the forging fire that turns functionless steel into a sharp blade. Unlike many parents, mine never demanded that my brother and I stay close to home. They know our edges need to be sharpened by rougher surfaces, but always offer their counter as a place to rest.

Leaving your hometown doesn’t mean you have to despise your family, or hate your friends. It doesn’t mean that you won’t miss your childhood bed. It just means you’ve recognized that staying stuck in the fantasy of childhood only delays adulthood, not erase it.

I wait eagerly at the precipice of change — thankful for the past, but excited for the future. It’s not because I don’t miss what I have, but fear staying stuck in it far longer than I’m due. There are so many lives to live, cities to explore, lessons to be learned. As big as it is, there is so much more than Texas. I owe it to my twenties to spend these years trying it out. But once you finally make the decision and guarantee the move, your eagerness fades into worry, anxiety, and even guilt.

No one talks about the silent guilt that washes over you when you eagerly say you’re leaving. Your mom smiles but her eyes water with tears. She wonders what she could have done to keep you here. The real answer is nothing. You were always destined to leave. Maybe you’ll return. My heart is already yearning for home and I haven’t even left. Still, I know the pain of missing something is the price to pay to gain my own identity.

Another part of you wishes your hometown was all they made it out to be. Too much of this place has wounded you and the only hospital is another city far away. It fascinating, all the ways that hurt people in a hurt city continue to hurt each other until they find another city to pass that hurt onto. The “what if” lingers in your throat. What if the high school friend group was in-tact. What if visits back home meant more than sedentary days in your house. What if there was something other than family and your best friend that made it so hard to leave?

I’ve left my hometown twice — once for college, now for work. The transition sucks. I’ve spent so much time scouring for deals on facebook marketplace that my vision is blurring. It would be so much easier to stay in my furnished home. But I’m sedentary here. I’m literally doing nothing, regressing into my high school self. That’s how I know that home will always be home, but cannot be my place of growth any longer. It has reached capacity for how many versions of me it can hold in its walls. It’s time for another place to hold the weight.

So how do you make it out of your hometown? You resolve that you want to. The actual steps are quite easy, but it’s the decision to leave in the first place that weighs down the most. Once you’ve decided that, the world is truly your oyster.

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