How to Build a Life

First step: decide to leave your old one.

Get a job. Maybe it’s not your ideal situation, but find something that will, at the very least, provide you with an income.

Look for an apartment, starting in the “cool” areas of the city, then decide that’s not what you want. Find a place that’s exactly what your 14-year-old self envisioned you living in when you were “all grown up.”

Feel absolutely confident and fantastic in your decision to move.

Move.

Regret your decision to move.

Get a car and slowly ease back into a life of driving everywhere, after relying solely on public transport for the past three years.

Fill your apartment. Sleep on an uneven twin bed for much too long before finally buying a bed. Spend too much money on the mattress.

Find characters to populate your new life. Be open to meeting everyone. Try them on for size. Go to happy hours, go to parties. Go to dinners and brunches. Go to work bleary-eyed one too many mornings as a result.

Reconnect with anyone you know in the city. Get drinks and dinner with them. Show them who you are, now. Allow them to do the same.

Overshare, but be true and real when doing so.

Shuffle around these new characters; try to figure out where they fit in your life, or if there’s room for them at all. Continue to meet new ones. Trust some of them too quickly.

Make regrettable choices. Spend time with regrettable people.

Curse your decision to move. Hold tightly to your previous life.

Unintentionally hurt people you love.

Feel like you’ve lost your old self, feel like you don’t know this new person. Wonder if this is a good or bad thing.

Realize you’ve stopped doing some of the things that used to make you feel like you.

Learn unpleasant information about some of the people you chose to spend your time with. Wonder why no one cared to tell you these things beforehand. Feel a little bit bitter and a lot foolish.

Have a strong desire to move from this new life and start a new new one.

Be terribly hard on yourself.

Try to remember to be gentle with yourself.

Consume way too many calories at restaurants in your new city, but become a veritable expert on the food scene while doing so.

Be forward and open, but move on when you are shut down. Reach out to those with whom you feel like your most authentic self. Spend the most time with them.

Feel absolutely confident in your decision to move.

Spend more time with those same regrettable people.

Question why you moved.

Find new things that make you feel like you and start doing them. Pick up some of the old things that made you feel whole.

Finally let those regrettable people go.

Be accepting when people reach out to you, but learn from your previous mistakes. Forgive others for theirs.

Have ridiculously good times with the characters in your life. Love and appreciate them and tell them that.

Slowly come to the realization that you made yourself a life, but don’t know when, exactly, it all came together. That you’re happy.