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[t_s_o_p]

I'm in the first year of a wonderful t-t job. I love the job, and the location I ended up in is really not bad.

I would have thought that having a great job, finally having a regular paycheck, and being in a relatively OK place would make the transition to a new location mostly painless. Despite all that, I really am feeling grief and stress about having left my old life behind. I loved my old place, which was a large cosmopolitan city, and I am finding that life outside of urban centers, while easier in some ways, is hard to get used to. I've moved many times in my life and if anywhere is home to me, it was the city I left.

[pink_]

Give yourself time to adjust.
It's hard during the first year of a new of because you don't really have time to acquaint yourself with your new surroundings, and even if you are lucky to have moved with a partner or family, it can still be lonely and uncomfortable to be outside your comfort zone 24/7.

Try to focus on the positives (we are really lucky to have jobs at all right now!), but don't beat yourself up for feeling homesick.  Most people can't adjust to a move immediately.  That's not a fault or a shortcoming; it's human.

[kedves]

I have the misfortune to eventually fall in love with every place I live; I know it can hurt to leave.  It's hard to keep up with friends when you rarely see them.  I channel my love for what was once "my" city into examples of daily life to tell my small-town students, and into rooting for what's still my team.  Only recently have I come to peace with the knowledge that I might never live there again.  Now my problem is liking my little town and having to leave here in a year.  Love is unreasonable.  You can't make it stop cold.  Despite how hard it is, I wouldn't want to trade that feeling for an easy transition.  Well, maybe I would, but I can't.  I am the way I am.

Echoing what Pink says--it takes time.  As spring buds and chirps its way into being this year, explore your new place and find some things to love about it, too.  Make your home a nice place to be. 

[svenc]

T_s_o_p, I can empathize.  I too have moved around a lot in life, including this past year for a lateral job move.  Like you, this was the first time that I really had a hard time with the transition.  Seven months in, I'm still struggling with it.

A big part of it is that both my work and home life are busier than in all my past moving, so I don't have the time to throw myself into exploring my new surroundings and meeting new people that I used to do very overtly in the past.  Perhaps part of it is that transitioning to new situations is a skill that doesn't necessarily improve with age.

And when the moves accompany likely career commitments, the transition also becomes about possibly "locking in" to a location for a significant portion of our lives.  It's a sobering enough thought to make the whole process a bit less "fun" than past moves.

Just my own experience, of course.  I love my new location, but this has been the toughest move of my life by far.

[biomancer]

Kedves and Pink speak wisdom.

Having moved around a bit myself, I've found out that a lot of the stress goes away when "summer" comes and I have time to explore the region, start my garden, and do other things to make it feel more like home.  I'm moving in 27 days (!) and I have a list of things to do to help Mr.B and me adjust.  These include:

- find the good places to shop for food - farmers' markets, ethnic groceries (some towns have one but not the other; SLACville where I live now has the former but not the latter while Branchville where I'm headed has both!)

- try a different restaurant as often as you can afford to eat out (for us it's about once every 3 weeks)

- find the movie theatre, local playshop, museums, and other cultural offerings

- find the good places to commune with nature -  hiking trails, streams/lakes for fishing/boating/swimming, etc.

Hopefully you get the idea... what this does for me is allow me to replace "if I were in SLACville I could be doing *this*" with "Hey, I'm in Branchville, I can go do *that!*"

I hope this helps the transition.

[aandsdean]

One of the best things a colleague has ever said to me--

At my last school, in a location I truly didn't like, in a house I didn't like, I was having a lot of trouble.  I happened to run into this colleague the first spring we were there as I was walking out of the local nursery with a cardboard tray full of hosta to plant.

She said to me, "Oh, look!  You're going to grow where you're planted."

Normally, I meet this kind of comment with cynicism or even disdain, but at that particular moment, it actually made a tremendous difference to me to hear that remark.  I tried very hard and with at least a little success to follow that philosophy, and though it would be fair to say I was never truly happy in that location or position, thinking about "growing where I was planted" helped me a lot, and more than once.

I like my current job, and the place, a lot better, but I was able to get the new job and move to the new place because I made it a point to grow at the last place and take from it the lessons and the best experiences as added wisdom and experience.

[dellaroux]

I also get "rooted" in a place, and a new place (like the one I moved to 2 years ago) can still feel "wrong" at times, although it's now only once a month or so, rather than the daily feeling I had when I first moved.

I'm happier in some ways, less content still in others, but overall the ups have outweighed the downs so that I'm feeling better about settling in.

But it still does take awhile.

In Kubler-Ross' work on death and dying, I think she states at the end that grief for all kinds of things, in addition to that for a human life, can take up to 3-5 years to be resolved, at least so that the pain is not a near-the-surface, constantly presenting thing.

I'm rounding the 2+ year mark and it does make a kind of sense, although I don't know if that helps much while you're in the pain, except to know that it has its own timeline/life cycle, and will recede after awhile.

[t_s_o_p]

It's nice to hear that others have had similar experiences. I knew that but it's still nice to hear it.

I'm not married. The problem with breaks and summer is that it's quite lonely here when things are quiet. When school is in session I'm too busy with school to notice.

I have a pleasant apartment now, but I'm thinking of moving to a small, super cheap studio when the lease is up. The idea is that I'll think of it as a crash pad/home base but will have more money for travel to other places. I'm also trying to line up some professional opportunities (like residencies) elsewhere for the summer so I'm not stuck here, alone. That would be good for my c.v. and it would be a chance to socialize with a community of like-minded people outside of my regular work environment.

I hang out socially on occasion with some colleagues from my department. Otherwise I don't know many people here so I really don't go out much. Here's a question: have you made friends with faculty from other departments? I invited someone close to me in age to a local event, and although we didn't end up going, I think we might do something social eventually. I was a little hesitant to even ask her along though because I wasn't sure if it might be professionally awkward to try to befriend a colleague from a neighboring department (and who works in the same building).

[menotti]

Treating your current location as a crash pad or home base could make things worse, rather than better.  It's hard to feel settled in a situation like that.

Friends from other departments are one of the best groups, IMHO.  They understand the academic craziness, but aren't so close to your work that it's diplomatically awkward.

[entwife]

In Kubler-Ross' work on death and dying, I think she states at the end that grief for all kinds of things, in addition to that for a human life, can take up to 3-5 years to be resolved, at least so that the pain is not a near-the-surface, constantly presenting thing.

I'm rounding the 2+ year mark and it does make a kind of sense, although I don't know if that helps much while you're in the pain, except to know that it has its own timeline/life cycle, and will recede after awhile.

I'm rounding 3+, and I still woke up crying today because I miss the old place terribly (it was a truly beautiful place, and just the right size, right temperature, right humidity for me). Buy at least I do not cry every day,  like in my fist semester here.
It is definitely a good idea to make friends in other departments. And while age is nor irrelevant, people of other age groups or other than faculty status can also become your friends. Also, if you have hobbies, you could make friends through that.
Because you love the job and do not really hate the place it would make sense to try to establish some roots and not treat this place as a pad.  You might come to like it.

[ck_dexter]

This may seem counterintuitive, but try, at the start, treating your new location as a place you're very briefly visiting.  Just as if you're planning a vacation somewhere, do lots of research to find out everything the place has to offer (even the worst places have something unique or surprising if you look hard enough).  Then, be a tourist and see and do everything.  (Note: for smaller or more isolated places, you need to widen the area of research -- non-city sites of interests, nearby towns and cities, natural areas of interest, etc.)

In my own relocations, I find this immediately changes my perspective on the place -- by doing everything at once, I start to see the new location as much more interesting than I originally thought, and I discover things I wouldn't have, which makes it possible to start getting attached.

After that, you need to take the good things you've found and really immerse yourself in them, so you take your mind off of, and ideally forget, your paradise lost.

If that fails, bury yourself in your work, and consider this a research leave to earn your next, better location.

[secretweapon]

Friends from other departments are one of the best groups, IMHO.  They understand the academic craziness, but aren't so close to your work that it's diplomatically awkward.

Agreed.  My best friends in Old City were colleagues in other departments.  After 7 months in New City I still don't feel settled, but it helped me to remember that it took that long in Old City, too.  I just blanked the first year there out of my memory.

All the advice here is good, T_S_O_P.  All I can add is that it helps to have a social hobby, take a class or volunteer.

[neutralname]

I think for most adults it takes at least a year to adjust to a new location and settle in.  It can be quicker if there is a ready-made social network waiting to greet you, but if you have to build it yourself, it takes a lot of work.  It can be especially hard if you have left behind people close to you. 

[boggy]

I recently left a tenured position that I loved but was in a town that I didn't for an overseas post.  I had many great friends in the last place, almost all faculty, and leaving was tough.  Of course we left with promises of staying in touch and having friends visiting our new desirable vacation location.  Has it happened?  Of course not.  Am I sad about that...sure.  BUt hey, there's new friends out there to make and a new great place (country!) to discover.

[rowan1]

A key thing that has made the transition from old place to new place more enjoyable has been getting out and active in a community outside of the University.

We joined the local UU because we were leaving behind a very connected social/spiritual group that had an enormous impact on our lives.  SO and I joke about how odd it sounds to say things like "going to church" and yet that community has helped make the transition so much smoother.  We found people who share our outlook on life and are funny and supportive and kind and just generally good to be around.  SO, who is one of the least social people in the world has a solid connection of friends and it is nice for me to have a group who doesn't talk shop all the time.  Plus there are several people who are at the U and that has helped me to make connections outside of my department.