Is the Grass Really Greener?

“Move across the country and hope sadness won’t find you.”

I read this quote for the first time three years ago in a book of short stories. This book is one of my favourites because of the way it uses simple language to capture complex human experiences. But enough about my writer’s envy; the eery simplicity of this quote unifies the intensely human emotion of internal restlessness. The soul’s longing for change; the mind craving a new space; the imagination yearning for a new surrounding. It’s the body’s way of telling you “It’s about time for a new you.”

We’ve all been there.

As I read this quote today, I think about the restlessness that led me to pull out my calendar, choose a date, and subsequently book a flight. “I’m leaving for London on the 17th,” I told myself. Shortly after declaring this to myself, I began to tell others. Amid that euphoric haze which clouded all reason, rationale, and judgement, I stuffed my stuff into a bag (or four) and kneeled on the floor to wrestle each zipper closed. It’s as though the immovable zipper was trying to tell me something—though if it could, I wouldn’t have listened.

I imagine myself as a teenager, painfully unhappy with my high school. I believed that by switching to a new school, I’d settle all my internal qualms. “It’s the place,” I assured myself. “It’s the people,” I believed. Regardless of whether it was the place or the people, I was sure of one thing: I was not the problem—they were the problem. And perhaps they were part of the problem—the mean girls and the groupies; the ignorant teachers acting as bystanders at best, and enablers at worst; the myth of cordial interactions between high schoolers and the idealistic mission of a boutique private school in the heart of a vibrant city. Perhaps they were all part of the problem.

But so was I.

This reflection led me to think about those “move across the country” moments that are less about moving in a physical sense. I imagine a person who doesn’t move their bags and belongings from one city to another, but moves their emotional baggage into the arms of someone else—somewhere else. As their internal restlessness tosses and turns, the idea of reconfiguring their life around something new sounds desirable. “It’s not me, it’s you,” they'd say, as they kick their old life to the curb and walk out of what used to be home—a person, a place, or the person they used to be. Yet after this person moves their belongings out of the house in the quiet of night, the dust will settle and when it does this person may sense that something’s not quite right. Could it be the new house? The new job? The new commute from the new house to the new job? No—couldn’t be.

What could it be then?

It could be that after cutting away all the signs and shapes of the ‘old you’, there’s a painfully clear realization that the ‘new you’ is not so different after all. When you look in the mirror, you long to see your image replaced by a new person—a new version of yourself—though you appear unchanged to your old friends and those ghosts from your old life. To say that they don’t understand is merely a cop-out.

It could be that you said “It’s not me, it’s you” when you should have said “It’s not you, it’s me.” But to do so requires reconciling with the fact that you’ve changed after all this time; you’re not as perfect as you once thought you were.

Alternatively, it could be that you hoped this transition would bring a new energy into your life. You moved and hoped that sadness wouldn’t find you. In running away from your old life you ran right back into the arms of the thing which you sought to run from: the lonely blue shadow which hid behind the curtains of your old house, under the arms of your old person, and inside the safe confines of your old life.

xVL