When I first moved out to Seattle, I never set out to stay for more than a year, in fact, I never set out to move to Seattle at all. I moved out west with a job offer in Vancouver BC, a city with a great vibe and mountains hovering as a backdrop to the downtown skyline. Somewhere in the process of moving, the offer fell through and since I wasn’t about to move back to Minnesota, I defaulted to Seattle, a place I’d lived before and still had some friends from that time I lived there.
I signed a one-year lease practically under duress as I could hardly stomach the idea of staying in Seattle for that long, much less any longer.
And here I am, nearly eight years later to the day.
In my dark Seattle years, my blogging became sporadic and then dropped off. As the saying goes, if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all. And most of the time, I couldn’t. And when I could, it was likely during my travels, and that just felt like something like showing off. Gross. So I stopped.
Elizabeth Gilbert in Eat, Pray, Love, learns from her Italian tutor that every city has a single word that defines it, that identifies most people who live there. If you could read people’s thoughts as they were passing you on the streets of any given place, you would discover that most of them are thinking the same thought. Whatever that majority thought might be—that is the word of the city. And if your personal word does not match the word of the city, then you don’t really belong there.”
Whatever Seattle’s word, mine is likely the antonym, because the type of person that most belongs here is a waterproof, hardcore outdoor person, who drives a Subaru Outback hatchback. And I’m a melt-in-the-rain, sun-worshipping, fair-weather outdoor person, who drives a MINI with a sun roof. So Seattle and I never really got along, instead it sucked the very life out of me and make me feel like I was daily hitting my head against a brick wall. This city throws a thousand pound weight on my shoulders that only lifts when I leave and I guess I’ve gotten used to the extra effort it takes to breathe in and out, and never really feeling free to be myself.
Looking back, I’m sure I was truly depressed for many of those years, and those years feel like I’m looking back at a black hole. As the years went on, the clouds began to lift as surely we’d be leaving soon. Perhaps this feeling was also strengthened by the fact that these last three years in particular have literally been some of the warmest and sunniest on record for Seattle.
But it was still the city that made me fall in love with cities fifteen years ago – it’s really just a small town passing itself off as a city so it was good training grounds. Nonetheless, I’ve had some great times here, not the smallest of which is meeting my husband here only five months after landing here, and together we’ve explored the city and used it as a base to explore some fantastic places around the world (Seatac airport is one of the best airports in the country).
Seattle really can be a great place – it’s gorgeous and green and surrounded by mountains, and is heartbreakingly beautiful on the rare moments the sun shines. Jake and I discovered a REAL love of coffee here (it may be the birthplace of Starbucks, but it didn’t take me long after moving here to discover Charbucks doesn’t quite qualify), and became foodies at the hands of the many many amazing chefs in this city. We had our winter restaurant list, and our summer restaurant list, separated by whether or not there was outdoor space because I wasn’t about to waste a moment of sunshine indoors. Zoë joined us here and has filled my days with love and laughter, and we’ve spent many a day at Marymoor Off-leash Park, one of the best in the country. Our journey to plant-based eating started here, and we joined a CSA and discovered the incomparable taste of freshly harvested farm produce and herbs. Plus, Seattle is only a five-hour flight from Hawaii, which we’ve taken advantage of far too many times, the best of which was to get married!
On our first date, I asked Jake where he saw himself living in five years, he said London. Ding ding ding! We’ve got a winner! My deal breaker while dating was where a guy saw himself living in the future, as one of my top things I wanted out of life was to live abroad for most of it. Finally, here was a man I could live life with! Who knows what I would’ve done had I known at the time I’d spend eight – EIGHT! – years of my life here with him first. It’s a good thing I didn’t know because now our dreams are about to come true.
We’ve had our sights on moving to Europe all of these years, our 2013/2014 trip to Europe was all about discovering which city we’d most like to live in. But we also had the dream of experiencing living in NYC for a few years at some point. Sometime in the last year, we started kicking around the idea of moving first to NYC and then on to Europe, rather than Europe-NYC-back to Europe as we had been thinking. And so things morphed…
When I headed out to move to Vancouver eight years ago, NYC was my other choice. Jake’s job has kept us here in Seattle all these years, but now it’s the job that’s moving us to NYC. Everything has come full circle.
We’ll be moving out there later this month (!) for the closing of our Brooklyn condo. I always knew I’d leave Seattle, ‘though at times it seemed such a distant hope, but the time has FINALLY come! It has hardly sunk in, but it had better soon because THIS IS HAPPENING PEOPLE!!!
I can hardly stand it.
