From the archive

You're finally free. Why does it feel like this?

I distrust the promise that the person waiting on the other side of a big decision will be a completely different person. Who packed that person? Which suitcase are they in? You brought your habits. Your need to impress people. Your reluctance to spend an evening without something playing in the background. Perhaps you also brought a tendency to turn uncertainty into another urgent project. A new address can give you room to change those things. It can't change them on your behalf. That doesn't make the move pointless. It means the move was a move, with specific benefits and limits, rather than an exorcism. The old conditions may genuinely have been unbearable. You don't have to revise that conclusion just because the new conditions aren't paradise.