When I was young, I always wanted to go to Australia. Like from about the time I was 9 or 10 I had a big map of it on my bedroom wall, and was just in love with the idea. But I didn't just want to visit there, I wanted to move there. I've wanted to move to a different country for some time.
Then I fell in love with the idea of going to Alaska. This is one of the few places outside the contiguous U.S. that I did actually get to go to. I spent some time there, enough to get a real feel for what living in Alaska would be like, but at the time I didn't have the resources to really stay there. So I had to come home. I was only 19 at the time.
After that, my thoughts turned to leaving the U.S. again. And by that time I had started spending a lot of time with friends up in Canada, and the idea of potentially moving to Canada had been bouncing around in my head for at least a couple years. But moving from one country to another is not only hard, but it also comes with a significant dollar value attached to it most of the time. Not just for moving physically there, but because most countries have a requirement that you must have a set amount of money available as liquid assets just to qualify to move there. Back then, the requirement to move to Canada was around $10,000 U.S.. I was still just a young dude and had no way of getting that kind of money together. There were some other ways to move up, like getting a job and getting your employer to sponsor you, or going to college up there. But trying to get a job in another country is very, VERY, hard if you don’t have some special skill that they need, and going to college in another country can be very expensive as well. So neither of those ways were going to work out for me. I was stuck, so I just let it go.
Over the years since then, I’ve entertained the idea of moving a few more times. Mostly to places that are either in the E.U., or again to Canada or Australia. But things haven’t gotten any easier when it comes to doing that, and i still don’t have any way of getting it done. I’ve kind of had to come to the realization that I may want to, I’m probably never going to be able to move out of the United States. And the older I get, the more whatever hope I still have to do this fades. I haven’t totally given up on it, but barring something miraculous happening I see no way of moving forward with it.
If I do move again, it’s probably going to be a case of moving to wherever in the U.S. I can find that works best for me. Maybe somewhere out west or up north, but in the end I don’t know how much of a difference it’ll make. Many of my main reasons for moving out of the U.S. aren’t really addressed by just moving somewhere else in it.
While I have some real issues with living in Florida, I’ve also been here for over 20 years. It’s at this point the single place that I’ve spent the most time in, and while it may never really feel like “home”, it’s probably as close as I can get to it right now. I may just have to learn to accept that. That for better or worse, Florida is just where I’m going to be.