I am moving. After 24 years in Central Texas, I am moving to the Seattle area. Of course, people move all the time, but the prospect of moving seems to be especially daunting for HSPs. Perhaps there are multiple reasons for this, extending beyond the mere stress of the process, itself, to include such factors as a resistance to change, a fear of going to an unknown place, and others. This article-- or "journal entry," as it really is-- grew out of a "conversation" in an online HSP mailing list group. Specifically, the topic became about "life changing" events, cross-country moves, and how HSPs go about the process.
I started writing this when my friend Phil asked: "What made you decide to make the move? Why Seattle? Don't know about now but when I went Seattle was rated as the best city in the US. From an HSP point of view, what pulled you to Seattle?"
Phil-- and everyone else who reads this-- I stand at a bit of a crossroads, as far as answering your questions goes. There is a "short version" which really doesn't explain things well, and then there's the "novelette version" which does, and which perhaps also explains the long process leading to where I find myself today.
I've decided to "publish" the long version, perhaps in the hope that the telling might trigger someone else out there out of a sense of "stuckness" they might find themselves in, at this moment. I should also warn readers that if you're not into things spiritual/metaphysical, this might come across as the ramblings of a delusional quack. ;-)
What made me decide to move? Why Seattle?
Well, "Places Rated" rankings never had anything to do with it. Well, maybe a little-- to the extent that if everyone on the planet thought Seattle to be the smelly armpit of the western world, I might I have thought twice about moving there. What may surprise you is that it has taken me almost 20 years to move.
I think the majority of the world-- HSP and otherwise-- operates under a fairly broad-based assumption that "we create our own happiness wherever we are." I certainly believed in this for many years, and it is a viewpoint widely supported by "experts," motivational speakers, life coaches and other "gurus" around the world. "Bloom where you're planted," they say.
Although I didn't give it much thought at the time, this whole idea began about 18 years ago. I had a "strange" experience when I first visited the Puget Sound area for a vacation in 1987. I can best describe it as "feeling environmentally home," almost from the moment I got off the plane at Sea-Tac airport and started driving around. The place had an emotional impact that was so strong it was almost a physical response; my wife (at the time) thought I was being weird. My ex was marginally "tolerant" of my "weirdness;" back then I didn't have a handy "HSP label" to explain it. Anyway, there were even a couple of places we went where I spontaneously burst into tears... for absolutely NO reason, other than a "feeling" that came over me.
I basically wrote it off as "nonsense," at the time. I'd taken enough psychology classes in college to understand that it's part of human nature to assign unrealistically positive attributions to places where we go on vacation. After all, we're "free," don't have to work and have no demands made on us, so we tend to feel positive about the place. Why wouldn't we? I never stopped to examine the fact that I hadn't ever felt that way about the Virgin Islands, Florida, Mexico, the South of Spain or other far more exotic vacation spots I had visited.
A couple of years went by, and my college friend Linda (who was born and raised in Lubbock, TX) got married and moved to Madison, WI. As a bit of backstory, Linda was probably the first person I knew whom I can look back at and say she was "spiritually awake;" in retrospect, I feel pretty certain she's an HSP. Alas, we lost contact a while back. Anyway, Linda moved to Madison-- after spending her first 29 years in Texas-- and we ended up talking on the phone, a few weeks after the move. And she said something that has stuck with me ever since, she said: "I feel more at home here after a week, than I did after 29 years of living in Texas." She tried to describe it to me, offering what seemed like "strange" reasons like "the light is the right color" and "the trees smell right." She wasn't really doing anything radically different than what she did in Texas, yet her experience was very different.
I also didn't pay this a great deal of mind-- although some part of me recognized that Linda's descriptions of Madison matched my experience of the Seattle area. I did feel a slight envy at her positive experience, however, as I also had never "felt quite at home" in Texas. Not on a "bothersome" level, but.... hard to describe.... on a level I might describe as "never feeling more than 80% relaxed."
Then, around 1992, a couple of things happened.
The first involved a sort of "awakening" of my intuition. Those of you who are also on the "HSP-Spirituality" list, may have been following the recent dialogue on intuition-- I covered some of my experiences on that topic there. Anyway, I started noticing strange synchronicities. Although I was in no way looking to move out-of-state, "Seattle" kept cropping up in reading, conversation, the news I happened to be tuned into. I would be presented with some totally random thing/event/idea that I felt really positive about.... and weeks, or months, later I'd discover it was made in Seattle, or the inventor lived there, or something similar. Why wasn't "Kansas City" or "New York" or "Topeka" appearing with the same frequency?
The other thing that happened was that my ex graduated from the MBA program in Austin, and ended up having two job interviews in Seattle. And we spent about 10 days there, and I experienced the whole "feeling" thing again. This time, a little more "consciously." Now the fact that my wife was looking at jobs there, while we were firmly rooted in Texas (we had a business, employees, obligations, real estate investments, a mortgage) was mostly a reflection of the "flimsy" state of the marriage-- but that's a whole other story. The point is that my interest in Seattle went from some kind of "random coincidence" curiosity to "active interest."
As it turned out, my ex took a job in Portland, OR-- and a somewhat "odd" lifestyle started up, one in which I would spend a few weeks in Texas minding the business here, then a few weeks in Portland
"tele-commuting," then a few weeks back in Texas, and so forth. I ended up spending a lot of time alone and "in introspection" as well as a lot of time in marriage counseling as the relationship started to wind down. A lot of time to think, and "to figure thigs out."
Portland became "important" on some level, however, because it had an "almost" feeling to it. It wasn't about "doing" anything specific while I was there, it was about the way I felt while "just being" there. Even though I was basically in a miserable marriage, I would experience a certain feeling of well-being (almost euphoria) when I'd get closer to the Northwest (usually somewhere over the Cascades), along with an odd sense of "dread" when the flat plains of West Texas became visible out of the airplane window. As someone who has lived with mild Dysthymia (a very low-grade but pervasive depression) for most of my life, it was strange to feel the gray backdrop lift, almost as soon as I'd arrive in Oregon.
I realize this probably makes me sound like a hysterical nutball; so be it.
Sometime that same year, I came across a relatively unknown book entitled "The Power of Place: How our Surroundings Shape our Thoughts, Emotions and Actions."
It basically shot huge holes in the notion that we create happiness "wherever we are." There are definite limitations on this. (note: some years later these ideas became part of the Environmental Psychology field). You can't really take an Inuit villager from Barrow, Alaska and set him down in San Diego and expect him to "fit in" and be happy, with "a little effort." Likewise, if you dumped a West Texas cowboy in New York city. Beyond such surface layers as "lifestyle preference," different people "resonate" with different geophysical locations.
As I spent more time alone, I also spent more time "connecting" with a woman named Jinger. Jinger was my "sister spirit," in some ways my "anam cara," if you will. She's also a Shaman-Priestess-Mystic, and an accomplished astrologer (and HSP). Oh, and even though we've known each other for a dozen years, we've only met once. She was the first person I ever "met" online, and we remain "connected."
Jinger had done my astrological natal chart and we'd chatted about that at some length-- one day I told her about the "Power of Place" book, and about my "dread/euphoria" feelings going back and forth between Portland and Austin. She started talking about "locational astrology" and said she'd like to overlay my birth data on th latitude/longtiude for Austin, Portland and Seattle and give me a reading. At that time I still had a bit of a "yeah, well, whatever" attitude, but agreed. What came back was very interesting. We're not talking the "generic" factlets-that-fit-everyone musings of newspaper columns, but something far more specific.
Jinger told me that the great positive aspect of this part of Texas, as a location for me, was that it was more or less ideal for becoming involved in spiritual and transcendental self-development activities. And that, indeed, was-- and has been-- very true about my time here. The positives I have experienced here has been all about a growing self-awareness, self-growth, intuition and spirituality. She also suggested that the "shadow" side to this was a danger of slipping into excess idealism, losing sight of reality, and retreating into isolation. These things also have been true. That was the good part.
The remainder of what this place "offered" was not so bright. Deceptive individuals around me. People tending to project their own issues onto me. Repressed emotions. Being subject to false promises, people keeping secrets from me, shallow friends, disappointing relationships, troubled partnerships. Likely to be taken advantage of. Financially, a very bad place, potentially leading to ruin. Not a good things for acquiring material things. Not a good place for making investments. A bad place for speculating financially. A place where I might be subject to "negative judgments."
The hair stood up on the back of my head, when she told me this. Largely unbeknownst to her, just about all of the preceding had/have been true. Bankruptcy, financial losses, failed businesses, failed partnerships, failed relationships, deceptive friends, ruinous investments, real estate loss, lawsuits. Everything other than my spiritual awareness has been "turning to dust" for 20 years. And I am generally a very perseverant and determined hard worker.
