Friends. Family. Strangers from the internet. I am abruptly packing up my life and moving across the country in 27 days. I will be road tripping with two of my dearest friends through the southern states to sunny San Francisco, where I will continue to work on Google's Cloud Platform marketing team. 

The decision to move to California has been brewing in my mind ever since Stackdriver was acquired by Google and I found out my new team is all based on the west coast. I non-committally started telling people, "Yeah, I think I'll move to SF in January!" It felt far off enough to be safe, yet it wasn't quite close enough to feel real.

Enter: Caitlin and Kerri. Caitlin is going to Stanford for grad school this fall and the two had been planning an East Coast --> West Coast road trip. I knew about the road trip but didn't think it was feasible for me to up and leave by the end of August. But I realized the only real thing holding me back from just up and leaving was myself: my nerves, my fears, my apprehension to exit my comfort zone. I rarely do anything spontaneous. So I thought: why not? Better to rip off the bandaid now before my over-analyzing brain changes its mind. 

So it has been decided. I am moving across the country. The toughest part is leaving Boston-- my home-- and everyone I love. My identity is so closely tied to where I grew up and where I've lived the last 6 years, which is why this change is equally as exciting as it is terrifying. Exciting because it's the perfect opportunity to expand that identity, to see what I truly am capable of being and knowing and doing. Terrifying because everything I've ever known and loved exists within this 30 mile radius. Leaving home will force me to grow up in ways I haven't yet. It'll test my patience and my ability to keep those relationships as strong as ever. It'll put some hair on my chest, but hopefully just in the figurative way because otherwise gross. 

I love Boston for so so many reasons: its community, its unique changing beauty with each season, its accessibility, its history, its fans, its aggression. But a city is nothing without its people. And my favorite people in the whole world are in and around this tough, small city. It's absolutely not goodbye to Boston, it's see ya later. 

In my scramble to pack up and move my life cross-country, I am currently accepting:

• Plans to hang out in Boston before I leave
  
• Roomate(s) and a place to live in SF
• Recommendations for things to add to my Boston bucket list
  
• Recommendations for things to do & places to go in SF
• Intros to friends of friends (of friends of friends) who want to be my friend in SF
  
  

I truly look forward to my time in San Francisco. I think of SF and I think: adventure. There is an endless number of things to do and people to meet and food to eat and experiences to experience. And I want ALL of them. 


 

While the title here may indeed sound like an Onion article, I assure this is an actual first-world problem I'm experiencing and attempting to put into coherent words. 

tldr; I (nor anyone for that matter) is actually too busy to do the things they love doing outside of work and I need to shut the F up and just do them.

But I digress:

Are you ever full of inspiration to work on fun creative side projects but have no effing clue where to begin? Or how to act on all of these personal goals that are chaotically mulling about your brain like a school of blind fish?