“If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere — but not because of something as banal as ‘job opportunities.’ It’s out of the sheer force of… will that brought you here when you could have had it easier somewhere else, where you would have driven a four-door sedan and shopped in suburban grocery stores with wide aisles and pristine parking lots and have had 2.5 children by the age of 28 and worked a 9-to-5 job in something [yawn] somewhere.” Source

The last time I wrote on this blog, I was saying goodbye to something exceptionally dear to me.  Since then, I have had to say goodbye to hundreds of other things: my friends, my family, the only life I have ever really known.  Soon, I will have been living in New Jersey for a month and working in New York for almost that amount of time and let me tell you– it still doesn’t seem real.  It still doesn’t seem like I’ve actually done what I set out to do all those years ago.  It still doesn’t seem like the reality that I’m living is just that- reality.

When making a decision like the one I had to make, you have to weigh a lot of options.  It’s not just about the things that you are going to gain, but it’s also about the things that you will lose.  When I took an Intro to Economics course during my last semester at Duquesne, we talked extensively about “opportunity cost.”  For those of you who don’t know, opportunity cost is essentially the value of everything that has been forgone because of a choice you have made.  The example Dr. Bernard used on that first day of class was something along the lines of:

If you make the choice to go to this economics course, the opportunity cost is the hour and a half of sleep you gave up, maybe breakfast at Towers with your friends or catching up on homework for another class.  It’s all of those things that could have been had you made a slightly different decision.

So in getting “everything that I’ve always wanted,” I’ve also lost an entirely different life.  If you subscribe to the multiverse theory, there is a Katie still living in Pittsburgh– maybe working, maybe still looking.  She is surrounded by the friends she’s always had and gets to see her family every day.  This is my opportunity cost.  This is everything that I have given up.

But what I have realized is that when a place no longer has anything to offer you, when it has taught you everything that it can, the opportunity cost may indeed be greater when you allow things to stay the same.  There is no growth in stagnancy.  There is no happiness in allowing a place or a person to hurt you so many times and expecting a different result.

One of my favorite John Green quotes is from Paper Towns.  When I read it the first time, it resonated with me deeply.  But I don’t think I quite understood it at the time.  I don’t think I understood it until now.

It’s so hard to leave until you leave.  And then it’s the easiest goddamn thing in the word.

You think about leaving all the time: Moving from places.  No longer talking to people.  But are you brave enough?  Can you will yourself to do it?  Is what you’re choosing better than what you’re leaving behind and if you never leave- how will you know?

So on an otherwise normal August morning with most of my worldly possessions packed into the only car my family owns, I left.  I set up my new life in a single bedroom apartment in New Jersey.  I started working the job I always dreamed I would have.  Some of it has been much easier than I expected; other parts have been much harder.  I have questioned and grappled and wondered.

Metaphors are important.  My favorite character on a tv show once said that– and she is the reason I wear the gold star around my neck every single day.  As a little girl I dreamed of fictional places and getting away from the small town that I feared would make my life small.  But getting on a train during the first days of September and living out something that had been a fantasy for so long, seeing the Manhattan skyline rise out of the fog like a beacon of hope that I had been pursuing since I learned how to dream– it made me realize that sometimes the opportunity cost isn’t important.  Sometimes the only thing that’s really important is following your gut and being brave enough to be the person you always hoped you would be.

There is a 16-year-old girl from my past who is very proud of the 22-year-old who took a leap of faith.  Who was braver than she ever imagined she could be.

And maybe, just maybe, that’s enough.