My grandfather told me once that most people will live within 50 miles of where they were born. I imagine he saw it on the World News, maybe, which he watches religiously every evening.But it checks out: four in 10 Americans won’t even leave the place where they were born.
I was 22 years old when I made the decision to start my life over someplace else. I didn’t want to be one of the four who had never left.
But it was more than that. Many reasons for leaving seemed to collide all at once: an SUV almost running over me in broad daylight because I’m gay, feeling out of place as a transgender person in a conservative Midwestern suburb, one too many Michigan winters and something about figuring myself out.
I’m a creature of habit and consistency. It has always been the same cafe and the same order, the same streets and the same route, the same store and the same grocery list every week. And eating the same foods and watching the same shows on an endless loop. I grew up with “white knuckle” parents whose way of coping with uncertainty and my early signs of mental illness were to create a reliable, if not unwavering, routine. But the inability to bend that made me realize that if I didn’t leave, I would break.
When I got an acceptance letter to a graduate program in the Bay Area, there was no question about what I would do. My partner and I had already agreed that if we didn’t leave at that moment, we might never find the courage to do so. After a particularly unforgiving Michigan winter without reliable heat — one made bearable only with booze and heavy blankets — California seemed to be calling to us.
It didn’t hit me until the plane touched down in the Bay. I had two suitcases, a flip phone, a couple of thousand dollars and a sublet for one month. The strangeness of everything around me — absent of routine and predictability, the things that had anchored me in my past life — left me standing motionless in the middle of the Oakland airport, turning to my partner and quietly saying, “Now what?”
I’ve often said that if I knew what I was really in for, I’d have never done it. While growing up, the world was presented to me as fundamentally unsafe. Unwittingly, I became the kind of adult who was afraid of everything. I took one step out of that airport and realized that nothing had prepared me for what it would feel like to start over. While I was excited for the chance, I wasn’t expecting to feel so unnerved.
Life in the Bay is different. There are no rules. There are no boundaries. For the first few weeks, I rarely went outside. Trying to use public transportation was like being asked to place my hand on a hot stove burner.
I didn’t know what agoraphobia was at that time. In my small Midwestern life, I had never ventured out far enough to know that I was actually trapped. My world had been tiny, the boundaries drawn out from the moment I was born, and I can’t remember a time when I ever went anywhere alone.
The cognitive dissonance of wanting and fearing everything was difficult.
Life in the Bay is different. There are no rules. There are no boundaries. For the first few weeks, I rarely went outside. Trying to use public transportation was like being asked to place my hand on a hot stove burner. At times, I couldn’t go anywhere without my partner, convinced that going out alone would be unsafe, the anxiety too unbearable.
Being a graduate student with undiagnosed agoraphobia became impossible. I had to practice my route to school with my partner until it felt safe “enough” to do it alone, and even then, there were days when I had to be accompanied. Sometimes I missed class entirely because I was too anxious to function. The cognitive dissonance of wanting and fearing everything at the same time was too difficult. I wanted to go to the beach. I wanted to go dancing. I wanted to go to the library. I wanted to meet new people. I wanted to know what it felt like to be part of something bigger than myself.
Or at the very least, I wanted to feel like I could move through the world freely, even without thinking.
Agoraphobia kept me in San Francisco but would not let me feel like a part of it—alive but not present. Everything moved forward without me as I watched San Francisco through a window.
The Bay Area was a beautiful promise left unfulfilled. It was the life I knew I could’ve had, the life I had spent the coldest Michigan winters dreaming up as I scraped ice off of my car windshield and muttered, “California, California, California,” to fend off the frostbite gnawing at my fingertips. But it was not the life I was now living. Not as breezy, but in some ways just as cold.
Agoraphobia kept me in San Francisco but would not let me feel like a part of it—alive but not present. Everything moved forward without me as I watched San Francisco through a window. I was looking at a postcard, not my home.
Things spiraled out of control. I dropped out of graduate school and started going without food or medication if my anxiety prevented me from getting to a store. I got a job that allowed me to work from home, and I rarely left my apartment. As my depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder escalated, my life became only a dysfunctional shell of what it could’ve been.
I realized with horror that I might look back at this era and remember only the view from my window. “It’s not supposed to be that way, is it?” I asked my partner. “I might think about the time when I lived here, when I uprooted my whole life, and have very little to show for it.” I was sitting on a tiny red sofa in our Berkeley apartment, looking at the same sunset on our noisy street and watching everyone else go by. I said, “I don’t want to waste this.”
Two years in the East Bay, and I could count on both hands the number of times I’d really seen San Francisco. Old friends called and asked if I’d seen Golden Gate Bridge. I said, “Only from the plane when I flew in.” (And only when I imagined myself jumping from it, though I knew I was too anxious to ever get there on my own.)
I thought my new beginning started at Oakland International Airport, but it really started two years later in an emergency room on Easter. I ate microwavable lasagna while a social worker explained to me that I had been 5150’d. Sign here; X here; sign here. Do you have any questions?
I realized with horror that I might look back at this era and remember only the view from my window. “It’s not supposed to be that way, is it?” I asked my partner. “I might think about the time when I lived here, when I uprooted my whole life, and have very little to show for it.”
I had a lot of questions. Some would be answered immediately — we’re sending you to Santa Clara; the ambulance is on its way; yes, you’ll need to remove the drawstrings from that sweatshirt — but some of the answers came later, a slow process of joining the world for the first time and learning what it meant to fully inhabit my life.
Some of the answers would come from a psychiatrist, the first to take the time to really get to know me, working some kind of magic that recalibrated my brain to make it tick the way I think it was meant to. Others happened as I finally stepped outside. I learned the joy of trying new foods. I came to know the thrill rather than the threat of new places, the feeling of the ground fully supporting my weight underneath it. And most importantly, I developed an unwavering trust in myself.
When I step outside of my apartment now, I remember the times when doing so felt impossible and how tiny my world really was. I spent two decades of my life in Michigan, though I can’t say with any certainty how much of it I actually saw. But I can honestly say that the Bay is the first place where I’ve really lived.
