Today I cried on the phone to my mom as it rained around me.

Whenever I cry while it rains, all I can think about is my middle school english teacher explaining pathetic fallacy. I can’t quite remember if that’s supposed to mean the weather mimics my mood or my mood is mimicking the weather but I do know that either way it makes me feel infinitely more dramatic.

Anyways, it was raining, and I was in my work truck watching the laborers make rebar cages as I told my mom how alone I felt. It’s not unusual for us to have this talk given that I haven’t lived near my closest friends and family for almost four years now . This past year in particular has been the most intense. I haven’t been anywhere more than a few months. I was home last summer, Michigan for fall semester, Dublin for the spring, Illinois for the summer, and I’m heading to Houston for the fall in a couple weeks. It almost makes sense that I feel alone because I keep going to places where I know no one and then leave as soon as I get comfortable and build a community.

What’s confusing for me is that this is also the time in my life where I’m closest with my family and have the most stable, fulfilling friendships. I talk to my mom and best friends daily. Probably more than I do when I actually reside in the same zip code as them. And that right there is why I piss myself off.

I think it’s stressful to maintain a community when I’m in the midst of it. I find being a reliable community member suffocating, hence the draw of moving around to a place where no one knows me; but once the initial high of being somewhere new fades, I get hit with the most intense yearning for the familiarity of my hometown restaurants, the comfort of southern California grocery chains, and running into people I’ve known since elementary school in said grocery stores; for the drive to my best friend’s grandparents house, and riding the bus into the city centre of Dublin, for writing beli reviews after dinner and creating joint playlists when we can’t rehash a situation any further.

Moments like this are why I can finally understand people choosing to stay in their hometowns forever. For most of my life I’ve considered staying somewhere you were born and raised to be one of the most insane concepts ever. Both of my parents have lived all over the world much less all over the country. Neither ended up even remotely near their families and so we built our own, thus the concept of community and found family is dear to me. I truly feel like if I had stayed in one place, I would never have felt lonely.

Am I allowed to feel this way? I wonder this daily. It’s all of my conscious decisions that put me in these scenarios. It’s my commitment to experiencing new places, meeting new types of people, and learning to start over again and again after 18 years of stability that brought me here. I find it hard to empathize with my loneliness when I know it was an active decision and it could be over the moment I decide I’m done exploring.

I know I am allowed to feel how I feel. I know that choosing things does not make them less hard. I know.

But seriously, am I allowed to feel this way?