Canvas, it took me forever to quit missing Anchorage. It’s so unique, the vistas, places accessable, people, the variance of the light over the seasons, the food, etc.
Do you feel at home yet?
Yes.
**How long have you been at your new home? **
Six months.
Male or female?
Male.
family or single?
Married, empty nest.
Where’d you move to and from?
To St. Mary’s County, Maryland, from NE North Carolina. About 220 miles.
Anything else you think it worthwhile.
I’ve always been the type that wherever I toss my hat is home. I began to think of MD as home about the time I quit missing North Carolina, which was roughly June, about 3 months after moving.
The culture shock from moving from the Land O’ Rednecks back to civilization was much less than when we went from Indiana to Tidewater Virginia in '03.
I’m also certain that I’ll buy a damned RV and live in it before I buy another house.
I moved from Austin, where I had family, friends and I loved the town, to Tucson where I had none of these things. I spent the first 5 years kicking and screaming to get the hell out of Tucson! It’s not and weird and dry and weird and hot.
But after those 5 years I found myself thinking that I didn’t want to leave quite so much. I had made friends, found good schools for the kids, loved my neighbors, lived near some great restaurants, etc. Now I’ve been here 10 years and it feels like home.
It’s still hot and weird though.
I’ve moved all over the place many times over the years. Usually 3-5 years in one location. I’m “at home” within a couple weeks. As soon as I’m not tripping over the couch in the dark & can find the gas station & gorcery on autopilot, I’m home.
Do you feel at home yet?
Not quite, but old home doesn’t feel like home anymore, so I’m sort of floating.
My current house feels like home, but Maryland doesn’t.
Do you think you will?
I sure hope so.
**
How long have you been at your new home**
I’ve been in Maryland for 4.5 years now.
Male or female?
family or single?
Female, married, no kids yet.
**
Where’d you move to and from?**
From Montreal to the Baltimore/DC area.
**
Anything else you think it worthwhile**
I can’t say I want to move back, because it’s not really home anymore. I have family left there, and I miss hearing French, but apart from that there’s not a whole lot I need there. People are telling me that once I have kids here and this is their home, I’ll start feeling more like it’s mine, too. We’ll see. My house has its homey touches and it’s feeling like home to me, but the area isn’t familiar enough to me yet. I know how to get around, I have favorite shopping spots and restaurants, but it’s so different compared to what I’m used to. You need a car to get everywhere! I’m used to hopping on a bus and being downtown in 20 minutes, sitting at a cafe and watching people walk by. Here, I have to drive 15 minutes to get to Panera Bread and their outdoor terrace looks out on a parking lot. I can’t just wander around and let the day take shape - I need to plan it all out.
Yes
I already do, but I think you will.
Eight years. That probably doesn’t count as “new”, but I’ve moved a lot so I thought I might have something to offer this thread.
Female
Single
:: blush :: Well, this last move, I quite literally moved across the street, where I’d been renting a house.
I’ve moved cross country by myself three times. Twice I knew nobody in the new city and had only followed a job and had to totally rebuild my social life from the ground up. It takes some time and my advice for that is: join a club, take a class, volunteer, whatever, just do something to involve yourself in your community and start making new friends. Adults do not have the common ground of meeting people in school, so we actually have to make some effort toward friend making. People with families tend to be focused on the family raising so sometimes singles find themselves at a loss for building a new social network.
Interesting anecdote about that last rental house I lived in. It was previously rented by a friend of mine, who decided to move in with her boyfriend mid-lease and asked me to take it over, so as not to stiff the landlady. Because it was a friend, I put up with her flakiness when she asked if I minded if she left “a few things” at the house for “a few days”. She promised she’d come to get them the very next weekend. At the moment I agreed to that, I had no idea how that would affect me psychologically.
Fast forward to moving day. I get all my stuff and my critters moved into the house and set about the task of waiting for the cable man and unpacking and putting stuff away. Every time I opened a cabinet or closet door, I would find some of my friend’s things in there. I’ve moved more than 20 times in my adult life and never once have I ever burst into tears while trying to unpack.
I felt like there was no room for my stuff in my house.
I felt like there was no room for me in my own home.
I had no idea how important it would be to make sure the previous tenant had gotten every last scrap of detritus out of the place. It didn’t feel like home until I got all her shit out. I ended up packing everything that wasn’t mine into the boxes I had just unpacked, just so I could put my things away. Six months later, not kidding, I called her and told her I was putting her stuff at the curb and if she wanted it, she better come by and pick it up before trash day. So yeah, I felt like a guest in my own place for about six months. It was weird, living with someone else’s shit. I would never agree to that again.
When I moved across the street, I felt at home as soon as I’d unpacked the kitchen, bedroom and bathrooms, scrubbed the bathrooms and taken a shower. Oh, I had to sleep there one full night. I scheduled the closing & moving so that I’d wake up on the morning of my birthday in my new house. I sang Happy Birthday to myself in my new house and had my first (of many) cup of coffee on my back porch, which became a daily ritual. That porch coffee = feeling right at home.
Perhaps you need to come up with a new ritual for yourself to ground you in your new surroundings?
THAT helps. I thought it was just that I’d been there so long. That place DOES have something special doesn’t it?
Do you feel at home yet?
Yes and no. I met my wife and had my children here, but it doesn’t feel like home.
Do you think you will?
At this point I’d say it’s unlikely.
How long have you been at your new home
New? 30 years
Male or female?
Male
family or single?
See above
Where’d you move to and from?
From small town in NE Ohio, to Houston
Anything else you think it worthwhile
Now, of course, home doesn’t really feel like home either. The climate feels right, the country and the air is right, the towns look right. But nearly everyone of my parents’ generation is dead, and the once-booming economy has been in the toilet for decades. But I’m going up for a week in a few weeks, and the place will (if past experiences are anything to go by) improve my general emotional state.
Do you feel at home yet?
At home in my new (to us) home of two years, yes. At home in Calgary where I have lived the last 21 years, no.
Do you think you will? I really don’t know. If I was going to, I think I would have already.
Male or female? Female.
family or single? Married, no kids, two cats.
Where’d you move to and from? To Calgary from Saskatchewan, by way of Manitoba.
Same as kelly5078, the funny thing about not feeling completely at home in Calgary is that I definitely don’t feel at home in Saskatchewan any longer, either. My husband is at home in Calgary; he was born here and I don’t think it would be easy to get him to move. I can’t really ask him to move when I don’t know where I’d rather be, anyway. I’ve never gone to a place and said, “Yeah, this is it. THIS is home!” Maybe some of us are just destined to be wanderers.
This is a timely thread for me. I was just bemoaning to a friend that I’ve been feeling like I’ve lost my sense of having a place. Last summer, I moved from the D.C. area (MD side), where I’d lived my entire life, to NorCal (Central Valley, not SF area). At the end of last fall, I moved back home temporarily and was really feeling back in place when I moved back out to CA a little over a month ago.
There are many things I love about where I live - virtually no commute to school, wonderful natural areas right outside of town, being in a friendly, laid-back college town, relentlessly sunny and dry weather much of the year, proximity to the ocean and the mountains, a great community and network of people associated with school - but I still feel like an outsider. I didn’t realize until I moved how much I had come to identify with the D.C. area and how just being familiar with lots of places, even if you never go to them, makes you feel like you’re at home. I got used to the commuting, the aggressive drivers, the traffic, the humid-in-summer and dank-in-winter weather, the sprawl, the focus on politics, etc., and yet all those things that I loved to bitch about were part of what made it home. And then there are all the actual positives that I miss - where I am now, I can’t hop on the Metro and have a last-minute dinner with a friend at a top-notch restaurant; hell, you can’t even get good Italian food in town. You can’t actually swim at the beach, and everything that isn’t farmland or river bottom is dry, dry, dry. Besides the fact that NorCal feels foreign to me, I feel like I am foreign to it, like I am some sort of stranger or interloper.
Enough of the pity party. I think I will come to think of this as more of a home, but I will almost certainly move in 4 years at the end of school for career reasons. For now, I still see MD/DC as being home home, though.
I am single, female, and in my 20’s.
You’ve hit it on the nose. Yes, I still feel like an alien who got dropped off on a strange planet.
It hasn’t been quite a year and other dopers are right, I need to put some effort into joining a club or finding some activities or something. But it’s not just that, the AREA and things there are to do, just feel odd to me.
I’m thinking (hoping) that a lot of it is that 40 years in one place (and practically knowing it like the back of one’s hand), that it’s kind of a real “duh” moment that I’m homesick. And what others have said has given me hope, but maybe Seattle is really more of a " jumping off" point and I’d really be happier in a different state. There sure are some that I’ve absolutely LOVED (like Nevada) while on Vacation, but…how does one ever really know? 