Welp, I won’t bury the lead.
I am moving to London!
If you haven’t heard of it, that’s in England.
It’s a bit surreal that I haven’t been to the UK yet in my travels. I suppose it never seemed like it would be all that foreign, so every time I was planning a bit of travel, I opted for something that felt more AdV3nTuR0Us. I always used to say “I’m sure I’ll end up there eventually.”
Well… that turned out to be truer than I could have predicted.
The reason I am moving to London is to go to graduate school at Imperial College London. It’s a great school (honestly, I’m a bit humbled to have been accepted) and it’s located in what is—apparently—the most expensive neighborhood in the whole of the United Kingdom: a place called South Kensington.
Where I will live when I arrive in London remains an open question. I think we can pretty much rule out South Kensington for price reasons, but I will need to be there most days, so I will be looking for an apartment—er, sorry, “flat”—within striking distance.
So, there will be lots of articles about London coming up!
I think I’m going to skip the usual chronicling of the quest to obtain my entry visa because—in this case—it’s a student visa, and therefore highly specific to my own situation. Also I don’t want to hold myself out as being an expert on these things because the process was as bewildering and stressful for me as anybody else.
But I do have the visa now! I think these things are always cool to see in passports, so here it is. Maybe not the most flattering picture of me, but I’ve seen worse. 😂
This is a huge life change for me, but I think it is the correct move for me at this point in my story. In the past few articles, I have done a bit of unpacking around my departure from the Nashville music world. For me, this departure is… complicated. There’s some deep water there. I am not going to swim through all of it on this website, but I think the fundamental reason that I have decided to turn the page was captured pretty succinctly by a close friend of mine in Nashville during one of our farewell hangs.
“If you’re not loving the journey… you’re on the wrong journey. The destination isn’t going to make up for it.”
That made me laugh. So concise, yet so wise.
Anyway…
There is no shortage of blogs on the internet written by Americans who moved to London for one reason or another. But the more I hear people talk about the experience of moving abroad, the more emotionally sterile these accounts begin to feel. It all feels like something off of a motivational poster; a cheugy blend of over-the-counter colloquialisms and platitudes designed to inspire, but in the shallowest of ways, with only the most vague and implicit reference to what makes the experience so profoundly challenging.
Personally, I have always found this absence discouraging. It makes me wonder if being scared is normal. If I don’t see this part of the emotional spectrum represented anywhere, it must not be normal, right? The natural next steps in this chain of logic are for me to feel alone, all the more fearful, and like I might not be cut-out for these kinds of adventures at all.
These feelings were often compounded when, in the run up to this move, I got questions out in the real-world like, “So, are you getting excited yet??” These questions were clearly well-intentioned fodder for small talk, but I was really beginning to struggle with them. Because, I was not feeling excited. I was mostly feeling sad and scared. Sad for this chapter of my life to end, scared to leave this chapter behind, and—again—scared for what is to come. Did that mean I was doing the wrong thing?
Here’s the thing: if anybody is set up to have a good experience with this move, it’s me.
Not only have I felt overwhelming support from my friends and family leading up to this move, but I’ve also done this before. TWICE! Both to places a whole lot more foreign than London. So I am very lucky, and should be a pro at this by now. And even though I am a big strong manly man, I am still scared. And I’m still sad.
So, I suppose my hope for this article is to help normalize talking about these kinds of feelings. My first instinct would have been to hold off on publishing this until I am actually in the UK (you know, just in case something goes wrong), but by the time that happens, I am (probably/hopefully) going to be in a much better headspace. No—instead, I wanted to put this out into the world NOW, when I am still in the thick of these emotions.
Maybe some people would be completely unfazed by the prospect of moving to another country. I hope to be one of them someday…
I’ve always struggled with anxiety and one area of growth for me right now is the ability to discern when my anxieties should be dismissed and their compulsions resisted, vs. when they should be accepted and normalized. The subjectivity of this has always been tricky for me; I often find myself comparing my emotional responses to what I believe others are feeling in an attempt to gage what is “normal.”
This—I think—is a situation that is genuinely scary. And all those people who are too-cool-for-school and aren’t scared to do this stuff… if that is true, that might make them cool but it doesn’t make them brave.
I keep reminding myself: you don’t get the opportunity to be brave unless you’re scared first.
So I’m half-way there already!
And if I must to choose, I’d rather be brave than cool.
I’ll end with a Track of the Day that is special to me. This song has taken on new meaning to me over the past few years as I have exited one chapter of my life and been forced to envision something new for myself. To pull a quote from this song, I have come to know “the pain of losing who you are” very well recently (re: my departure from music / Nashville). It’s a death-of-self, existential experience that can send you spiraling to all sorts of dark, scary places. I know it did for me, and after traversing that swamp, I feel like I have come out the other side not only with some hard-earned knowledge, but also a renewed sense of purpose. Now it’s time to translate those ideas into a reality and make the big, self-actualizing leap… and paradoxically, I find myself looking backwards more than forwards; focusing on what I am leaving behind with sorrow and fear.
Well, if there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that no matter WHAT I might be feeling at the time, in a few days I am getting on the fucking plane and making this move a reality.
I already published this article, so now I have to do it! 😂
So, in the midst of all this upheaval, this song has been a really empowering reminder:
“This is not the end of me. This is the beginning.”
