Mindset and Moving

It’s the middle of a pandemic, and I decided to move across the country. The main reason for my move was my school placement. I’m finishing my Master of Arts in Counselling Psychology and because of the pandemic, placements were short in my very large, but almost constantly stay-at-home-ordered city. I decided to expand my search and applied to a small city in the beautiful Canadian Rockies, nearby where my younger brother lives. I pulled off this whole move in just a few weeks and by January 4, 2021 I was in a new place, where I have only 2 friends plus my brother, but know no one else. Not to mention a placement in community mental health which is a complete career change from what I was doing before. Yet with all of this, I’m feeling comfortable. How is that possible?

I think that it all comes down to mindset. If we want to get really existential for a minute, we can say that a big part of life is finding meaning. My new career is one that is meaningful for me – I want to help others – while allowing me to continue to do the many other things I enjoy – such as writing. If anyone needs a good goal for 2021, I would say that it is to start to engage in things that are meaningful to you, if you’re not already. What do I want to do? Who do I want to be? These are questions I began to ask myself back in 2018 and 2019 before I made a career change and went back to school. What do I want my life to mean? And not mean to others but mean to myself, because that is the most important thing I could do. Another part of existential though that really has helped me with this whole move has been that of freedom and choice. I was free to make the decision to move. No one coerced me, nor did anyone try to stop me. This was a decision I made because not only was it good for my career, but a change of pace and scenery was good for me. I left a city where everything was shut down anyway, so what difference does it make if I’m starting somewhere new? The only difference it makes is that I did it for myself. This may sound selfish but it’s not, which brings me to existential point number three: isolation is normal. I’m not talking about the self-isolation of Covid-19. If anything, we’ve seen how bad that can be for the mental health of many people. Isolation in this sense means that we are always alone, because the only person we actually spend our whole lives with is ourselves. In that sense, I am okay with knowing very few people in my new city. This is because I like myself, and I am comfortable being by myself. Now, that doesn’t mean that I don’t talk to my parents, siblings, friends from my old city (which I should point out is also not where I was born and raised), or that I’m not meeting new people at work. I do still spend a significant amount of time socializing, just on Zoom, which is pretty much what everyone else is doing anyway. What this does mean is that I am going to be okay with being more isolated than normal. The last pillar of existentialism is nonbeing or death. This sounds a bit extreme, and definitely plays less into my whole move, but I want to mention it because we only get one life to live and I want to spend it doing the things that are important to me. That includes seeing the world. In that case, when the opportunity arises to spend eight to twelve months in a new places, why wouldn’t I leap at it?

The way I see it is that there are many, many situations in life that come down to how we look at things. This doesn’t mean there aren’t bad days, or that you have to be super positive all the day – that’s completely unrealistic. On the contrary, it acts as a nice contrast to the bad things and helps me remember that the majority of my life is in my hands. That’s the lesson for 2021 that I want to live by.