Almost A Month Is Gone
I knew everyone in Atlanta. Or, at the very least, it felt like I did. For the twenty-nine years I’ve resided on this planet, all twenty-nine have consisted of me, a human from Stone Mountain, living somewhere around this city.
This is no longer the case. I made the drastic step of moving exactly one state north for graduate school at the University of Tennessee a few weeks ago. My driver’s license may still say that I’m a Georgia resident, but the amount of Tennessee orange that surrounds me on a day-to-day basis reminds me that I’m very much not in my home state anymore. I live somewhere else. More importantly, I live somewhere where I truly don’t know a soul.
Nobody.
And it is the greatest thing. One of the drawbacks to comfortability is that you mistake that comfort with contentment. You don’t jump out that window into something new because your reflex is to resist and stick with what you know. I know Atlanta and Atlanta knows me. We’ve been together a long time. Almost thirty years in fact. Somewhere, I knew long ago that I would eventually need to leave home. Not thirty minutes away from my parents, no, really leave home.
A feeling that has stayed with me from the moment I was settled in my new home reminds me of an experience I had in New York on a journalism trip my senior year of college at the University of North Georgia. To this day, I have never been happier than I was at 2:30 A.M. in the freezing cold where I sat on the beach in Coney Island, lit up a cigarette, and just relaxed. I was alone and on my own in a city where nobody knew me. I walked everywhere. I almost got stabbed on the subway. I went to a plethora of museums. While most of my classmates on the trip stayed within the group, I ventured out and got away. I had never felt better than I did in that moment and I had never felt worse than I did when my mother picked me up from the airport. I remember the guilt I felt riding in the car with my mother because she could sense how down I was returning from my trip. I love my mother, to be clear, and it wouldn’t have mattered who picked me up that day -- I was going to be a fucking wreck.
When I was a senior in high school, I remember spending an inordinate amount of time, not only posting on internet message boards about sports and pro wrestling and not dating girls, scanning Craigslist for apartments in Queens and Brooklyn. I was obsessed with going to New York. I loved where I grew up, but somewhere, somewhere deep, I knew I just needed to go. To be happy I had to be alone. Really be alone, like I am now where I don’t know a soul. It’s like walking around with an Invisibility Cloak at all times. I’m more at peace than I’ve ever been and it’s because I am a human that is happiest alone.
This is not to say I don’t need friends or family, either. I need them both and love them both. But I need my space more. I need isolation more, where I can walk around my college campus as just another face in the student body. This was not possible in Atlanta anymore. I knew everyone and everyone knew me. There is a line from Mr. Feeny in “Boy Meets World” that I always strived for back home but often fell short: “If you let people's perception of you dictate your behavior, you will never grow as a person.” I failed.
It’s important for a person, especially at twenty-nine, to have an idea as to what their strengths and weaknesses are. Life is hard enough, the least you can do to make it more manageable is to have a firm grasp as to what you really suck at and, more importantly, are unlikely to improve at so you avoid or limit that thing, if possible. In Atlanta, I was always surrounded by people who knew who I was for years and years. Some remember me at twelve. Some remember me at sixteen. Some remember me at twenty-three. I felt trapped. I’d love to sit here and say that I’m a strong enough person to disregard those predispositions in favor of being the person I am. Who I am twenty-nine is an entirely different person than who I was at nineteen. But the latter always had a place in Atlanta, which was a problem.
So I’ve been thinking. Often. What took me so long? I don’t think this necessarily matters, as human progress is not linear. I’m thankful for the time I had in Atlanta and it always will be home, but it can’t be a coincidence that I feel as good as I do alone in Knoxville as I did when I was alone in New York, no? I know you, the reader, will roll your eyes at this lame expression, but that whole thing about having to jump and fall to develop your wings is true. Especially for me. In Knoxville, I’m jumping out of a metaphorical building daily when I walk into new surroundings, drive down a road I have never heard of, meet a new person at work, meet a new person at school, but I am doing so as the person I am at twenty-nine, not the pulled-in-all-directions person I was in Atlanta. And for that, I am grateful.
Chase Thomas is an independent sportswriter based out of Atlanta, Georgia where he has been published in ESPN’s TrueHoop Network, Sports Illustrated’s The Cauldron, AJC, VICE Sports, SB Nation and more. Email him at chasethomaspodcast@gmail.