Between No Longer and Not Yet: Words on Slow Growth and Moving to a New City

1,631 miles.

That’s how far I am from Cinco de Mayo West Nashville, an iconic Music City institution featuring $13.99 margarita pitchers on Sundays, Mondays, and Tuesdays. 

It’s been two weeks since I shared a final round of margaritas there with my people. Two weeks since I packed up a U-Haul and turned in the keys to the apartment I had called home for half a decade. Two weeks since I exchanged my Tennessee address for the desert and $3.69/gallon gas prices.

I live in Phoenix now, a Saguaro-studded city I’ve loved for a long, long time.

I feel like I’m on vacation. I wake up — sans alarm — to watch the sun rise all rosy pink over the scrubby mountains that frame my horizon, drinking coffee on a balcony I’ve strung with Edison bulbs. I’ve visited some of my favorite restaurants, explored new coffee shops, written with wine as the sun sets. My former roomie / best friend / fellow cat mom is here visiting her parents through the holidays, so we’ve already met up for wine nights and dinners and hikes and sleepovers.

It feels like vacation, but it does not feel like home. 

Home was a spacious, falling-apart apartment with carpet that probably predates my birth and a revolving cast of roommates and room-cats. Home was my church with its stained glass windows, vaulted ceilings, and Everest-hiking priest spitting his wisdom every Sunday. Home was a corner booth at Cinco de Mayo West Nashville, a pitcher split between friends that double as family. 

But Nashville is no longer home. And Phoenix is not yet home.

I’m in between no longer and not yet.

It is — to put it in literary terms — UNCOMFY.

My friend sent me a quote today: “Major life changes—moving to a new city, starting a new job, ending a relationship, getting married, having kids, etc.—will often make life harder for the first 100 days before improving. Not always true, but it’s a reminder that early struggle doesn’t always mean it was a bad choice.”

My response: “100 whole days?!”

You see, the thought of being uncomfy for 100 whole days makes me — to put it in literary terms — more uncomfy.

As I sit on my balcony writing this, I can glance across the street to a single Saguaro cactus. This cactus is young, just a spiny green trunk without arms. In fact, it takes 40 years (!!) for the stately Saguaro to reach the height of a 5th grader and up to 100 years (!!!) before it even begins to bud arms. 

Slow growth. Slow transformation. Nature is always pointing to this.

This, in my humble opinion, is a big bummer. Where’s the sign-up sheet for quick, easy, painless growth? Oh, you’re telling me that doesn’t exist?

I don’t get to control how long I remain tucked between no longer and not yet. According to the aforementioned quote, I’ve got 100 days of this in-between status — at least. 

If it were up to me, I would’ve felt that home-sweet-home feeling the moment I skidded into town two weeks ago. My grief over saying goodbye to a place and people I loved would’ve been adequately expressed and processed back in Nashville, and now I’d be exclusively experiencing the excitement of a new chapter in life.

But nooooo. As the Saguaro shows me, that’s not how it works. This life is all about slow growth, slow transformation. Trust me, I wish that weren’t the case.

An author I follow shares often about the idea of “yes / and” — an openness to the duality of life, of understanding that feelings are not mutually exclusive: “Yes, I am happy to see my friend finish grad school and I feel lost in my current career path.”

Yes, I am happy to be in Phoenix. Yes, I feel confident in my decision to move here, to shake myself out of the comfort and apathy I had fallen into, to hope that new things, better things will grow inside me. Yes, I wake up every morning giddy to watch the sunrise over the scraggly McDowell range. Yes, I smile to myself every time I pass a Saguaro.

And.

And I feel major loss that I’ll never return to apartment 7 at Chowning Square. And I miss watching Amazing Race after stopping for a cider at the beer and burger joint right up the road. And I miss Frothy Monkey mochas, the way the tree turned a stop-and-stare shade of gold outside my old bedroom window each fall, the Monday night Bachelor viewing parties with a charcuterie spread to write home about. And I miss plopping into a booth at the end of a hard day and splitting a $13.99 pitcher of margs with people who know me as deeply as a therapist would.

Yes. And. Both of these truths sit side-by-side within me. And my assignment is simply to allow them space to be, to let the Saguaro teach me the good in slow growth, to wait patiently for that welcome-home assurance — whether it takes 100 days or more. 

You know what I think might help? Finding my nearest neighborhood Mexican spot.

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