Honesty

Sometimes I catch myself staring at a Florida sunset, like it’s supposed to fix something in me. As if healing could come from a different skyline. As if putting hundreds of miles between me and my old life could make everything that hurts feel quieter.

It hasn’t.

Moving has taken a bigger toll on me than I ever expected. I keep trying to romanticize this chapter of my life—make it sound adventurous, exciting, like a fresh start or a chance to reinvent myself, but most days it just feels lonely. The kind of lonely that stays no matter where you are—around people, in motion, in noise. It follows you through the day like something just out of sight, easy to ignore until night falls. And when everything finally goes quiet, it’s still there, louder than ever, finally speaking.

I think one of the hardest things I’ve had to admit to myself is that you can change almost everything about your life and still be carrying the same pain. You can move to a different state, get a new apartment, a new job, new routines, and surround yourself with unfamiliar faces, but depression doesn’t care about your zip code. It doesn’t care that you’re standing in what’s supposed to look like paradise. Once it’s planted itself inside you, it remains.

Lately, I don’t recognize myself, and that’s the part that scares me most. I thought freedom would feel empowering. I thought starting over would expand who I already was. Instead, I’ve felt myself slipping out of reach of who I am.

The other day I wrote something in my journal I haven’t stopped thinking about:

“I left my hometown and accidentally left myself behind.”

That’s exactly what this feels like. Somewhere between packing boxes and unpacking them, I lost something—or maybe someone.

Me.

Now I’m trying to find my way back to a version of myself that feels familiar. And loneliness hasn’t helped. Nobody talks enough about what loneliness does to a person—how quietly it works, how it makes old temptations feel comforting again, how it wakes up urges and habits you thought you were done with.

Loneliness isn’t anything at first. Then it rewires your sense of what normal should feel like.

I gave myself too much credit before I moved. I thought I was stronger than this, thought I was healed enough, thought starting over would be easier. But the truth is that starting over isn’t just exciting—it’s grief. It’s grieving people you can’t just grab coffee with anymore, the streets you knew by heart, the places that knew you before you had to think about who you were.

It’s grieving yourself, too.

There are days where everything looks fine from the outside, but nothing inside of me feels like it belongs here yet. I try to convince myself I’m adjusting, that this is just part of the process, but the truth is I still feel unplaced. Like I haven’t landed anywhere emotionally, even though my life is already here.

I don’t know where this chapter ends. I don’t know if I’ll read this months from now and feel different about it. I hope I do. But today, this is where I am. Today I miss the feeling of home. Today I feel lost. Today I’m struggling. And maybe the strongest thing I can do right now isn’t pretending I’m thriving, it’s telling the truth.

The honest truth.