Leaving Lubbock: Part 1

In December, I accepted a position as the Director of Student Conduct at the University of New England in Biddeford, Maine! I’m ecstatic to be getting back to the East Coast, living within a short drive to extended family and a half day’s drive home. UNE is on the ocean—I know, I know with water never warm enough to swim in—but ocean nonetheless. I have a stellar apartment in downtown Portland. All exciting stuff!

I’ve moved an inordinate number of times since I was 18. Each school year, it was on and off campus in August and May. In 2012, we graduated undergrad all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, heading out across the country. In 2014, we were all a degree hotter and ready to take on higher education. While 2016 wasn’t another graduation, my closest coworkers had left, and I was presented the opportunity to go back to Texas to do Student Conduct: my higher ed dream! Given that the only other feasible other option in my mind was to Stone Cold Stunner my supervisor at that time if I stayed in Baltimore any longer, back to Lubbock I went!

I knew a few people in Lubbock when I here, and as time passed and I’ve laid roots, I have established a cohesive web of friendships. I would normally tell you I’m not someone with lots of “friends,” but I really have established life-long relationships at every juncture thus far. Why, then, does leaving now feel so right but so much more difficult?

It dawned on me that all the aforementioned moves happened at natural breaking points in those relationships. You’re supposed to leave campus each year and spread your wings after undergrad and grad school. When you’re at a place of doing WWE moves on your boss AND you’ve been asked to apply for a dream job, you take it! While I firmly believe that this is my time to be making the move I am and taking the job I’m taking, I realized that this time around, no one else is leaving with me. Life in Lubbock is going to go on as I’ve known it, just without me.

Needless to say, this epiphanous moment occurred while driving directly into the sun on my morning commute the other day (IYKYK), so I damn near yeeted my car off the flyover. Moving on has always been rife with excitement because everyone else was on to new things too. It might have been scary, but we were all navigating it simultaneously, even if not physically together. There’s something terrifying about being the one to walk away from lives you’ve worked to intertwine.

I try to be relatively humble, but part of this feels if not selfish, at least self-centered. That said, I don’t need or really like abject praise. Welp, when you decide to leave somewhere, people truly articulate how much you mean to them. Having very intentionally woven my circles of friends together around me—a good ol’ safe space, if you will—I have been bombarded by love from a multitude of people in the past few weeks. I have always enjoyed bringing people together, which I suppose is why I am now so overwhelmed at the thought of walking away, especially as I continue to hear how much I matter.

I’ll end here: Having budded into quite the nihilist as I dive deeper into meaning-making and the bigger picture of this world, it’s easy to fall back on the idea that none of us matter in the grand scheme of the world. Weighing that knowledge with the personal journey of finding and making meaning in the spaces that matter to me, wrapping your head around how to move on is a LOT. I keep telling people, “It’s not goodbye, it’s see you later.” What a Hallmarky line of bullshit. When I roll out of Texas in a few weeks, the days and weeks will go on here just like mine will all be new. I know the relationships that are meant to last will do so, but man, y’all, it’s a lot of feelings for someone who externalizes almost nothing but frustration 97.42% of the time.