'I Moved Back Home and Now I'm Single and Depressed!'

Sadness attunes you to your values and desires.

Les Jeux Nouveaux (1940), Yves Tanguy

Dear Polly,

I made a huge life decision that I’m panicking about.

I’m a 26-year-old woman from a small Midwestern town and have lived in big East Coast cities since 2018. In those years I attended fancy schools and met all kinds of people and my world got massively bigger. I became way more confident, made amazing friends, fell in love, learned how to do a kind of political organizing I really cared about, and overcame some very intense self-hatred. But in all that time I never stopped longing to move home. My relationship to my big fucked up family and my shitty little hometown stabilized over those years, to the point where I found myself spending progressively more time visiting each year of my early twenties. Splitting time between two places like that was making me feel a little crazy, like I was only half in anywhere. So last summer I decided enough was enough, and that at the end of the next school year I would finally move home. I wanted to be with my family, watch my little cousins grow up, and find a way to be a political agent in the place I care about the most. I knew it was going to be really hard, but I also knew I’d never stop thinking about it if I didn’t try. This coincided with breaking up with a long-term partner who was never going to move back here with me. When I made this decision it felt like I was finally being true to myself. I had a great last year of graduate school and really made the most of it, but the whole time I knew I was headed home.

Over Thanksgiving break I met a guy from the bigger town in my home area and had a whirlwind romance. We saw each other three times that week and then texted every day until I came back for Christmas. He seemed perfect — shared my politics, really funny, really sexy, understood my connection to my hometown. Until he got fucking weird. TLDR he said he didn’t want to keep hooking up over Christmas since I was just gonna leave, but he did a bad job communicating about it. Then he wanted to text me all the time in January under the auspices of friendship. About a month into that arrangement I told him I didn’t wanna talk for a while. And then he texted me on my birthday in March and we picked up where we left off, talking every day. I wasn’t sure what was gonna happen when I got home and was still being quite cautious. But then he sent me an apology letter in the mail! It was beautiful and more than I could have cooked up in my wildest fantasies. He told me he was sorry that he got scared in the winter, and that he wanted me in his life in every way when I got home. We started talking on the phone a bunch for my last month or so of school, and I was consumed by excitement. I thought I was falling in love and I couldn’t wait to get back here.

Things fell apart as soon as I arrived. He immediately got flaky and weird. We hung out a handful of times and I put up with about two weeks of wishy washiness and terrible communication and then told him to leave me alone. Tragically, he has.

I really like this guy and I am really jealous of the life he has here. He’s from the coolest town in the area, the college town where I always imagined I’d spend a lot of time when I moved home. He has a ton of fun friends and a band and seems to know everybody. I love my friends from home but by comparison they seem very settled down and traditional. I’m so crushed that all his promises to show me around and introduce me to people were bullshit. I am in a full panic that I’ll never meet someone I like as much as him, and especially not here. Right now I feel like falling in love is the only thing that matters and I’m wasting my time if I’m not putting myself under better circumstances to find it.

I know that the freshness of the heartbreak is making everything feel more dire, and that I have to be patient and let it get smaller. But I feel like this is gonna kill me! And I feel insane and silly for moving back to this place where I never quite fit in, where all my friends are in long term relationships, where it’s really hard to meet new people. And I can’t believe I now have the added challenge of avoiding this guy as I try to put myself out there in the small town where he is from. Did I really leave my walkable neighborhood and great friends and leftist community to come here and be celibate and talk about mortgages and golden retrievers?

I’ve been in a really dark funk all summer and I’ve started feeling like everything good in my life must be behind me already. I’m full of regret. I went from being the stablest and most confident I’ve ever been back at grad school to extremely low and self-doubting in the span of two months. When I made this decision I was so excited and full of romance. I felt so brave. Now I know that I was living in a fantasy. How do I make peace with the reality? How do I give small-town life a real, thorough try under these circumstances?

I’m good at being depressed. I’ve done it many times. I haven’t made my life small. I have an intense job starting soon and I’ve been reading and running and seeing people and looking for community. I love my roommates and my new house and being near family. But I’m having a hard time enjoying any of it, or imagining how it might add up to a good life.

Sincerely,

Small Town Spinster

Dear STS,

I understand how jarring this moment must be for you. I’ve made a series of big leaps without looking over the past few decades, and the bewilderment of being propelled by bluster and fantasy and then landing in reality can’t be understated.

Making confident, decisive moves is a tricky thing. It works incredibly well at times, and other times, whew, you wake up and realize that you were living inside your head, constructing a dreamworld from imagination alone. No matter what forces were in play, though, the important thing is to move out of your head and into the real world.

The real world is populated by real people with real limitations. The real world is imperfect and tiring at times, and includes smudged windows and bad pizza and alerts from your phone that show up on both your watch and your laptop because you secretly want to be interrupted constantly like a character in a dystopian Kurt Vonnegut short story.

Your watch and your laptop and your phone would be interrupting you constantly in the big city, too. The windows there are also smudged, and when you’re there, you miss the crazy weather back home, you miss your weird family, you miss your boring normie friends. But the pizza is just so bad here in the sticks, I mean, my god, except for the one hipster place that’s only open from Thursday to Saturday. College town hipster chefs know better than to work too hard! They can afford a cute little house in the country here, but they have to spend Sunday through Wednesday weeding their big gardens, which they imagined would have the exact same volume of weeds as their tiny community garden plots back in the big city!

You can’t live two places at once. There aren’t enough sexy single men with big ideas in their brains anywhere, but there are even less of them in smaller places. But in bigger places, those hot men are treated like rare treasures everywhere they go, so they’re always sniffing around for upgrades. They’re texting with you while being interrupted by texts from other women, texts that pop up on their watches and laptops and phones all at once, dirty texts, funny texts, coy texts. How does anyone tolerate this reality? Who could survive without a steady flow of fantasies to keep them going? Aren’t all of these interruptions manifestations of escapism? Don’t we need dirty imaginations to make it through these trying times?

I’m leaping without looking now because I want to demonstrate what happens when we privilege our IMAGINARY IDEAS OF THE WORLD over our lived experiences. And I just want to say that, as easy as it may be to imagine the city as a paradise of countless options and possibilities, walkable joys and leftist comforts, personally, my lived experience in the big city was very small, and my lived experience in a small town feels vast and untamed. It’s hard to put the emotional and sensual benefits of small town life into words, or to describe the satisfactions of friendships in places where the goal isn’t to do the coolest or best thing at all times, but to simply see the people you love.

I’m saying that this experiment is going to take some time. And in order to be patient, you need to make sure that you’re not measuring your despair when you’re, say, in your car on the dumb big road through town, driving by the Home Depot and the Jersey Mike’s. You need to go to beautiful and soothing places and feel your sadness there. You need to see this for the romantic and special moment that it is.

Because even if you change your mind, you deserve some congratulations for doing something courageous and bold and new. You’ve made a very big choice that is challenging, interesting, and informative. Instead of wondering, instead of flip-flopping, instead of avoiding, you’re diving in and LEARNING MORE.

Imagine if you didn’t make this move but you got into a long-term, long-distance relationship with Mr. Cool instead. If you stayed on the East Coast, you could’ve spent years living inside a fantasy of moving home while hemming and hawing and hedging your bets, thereby avoiding the nerve-wracking process of finding out more — about him, about yourself, about life in your hometown. And by keeping up a long-distance relationship, Mr. Cool could’ve live inside a fantasy that YOU WERE THE ONE FOR HIM without having to find out what real, in-person, day-to-day intimacy might look like with you. You could’ve occupied the same fantasy together, from a distance.

Choosing long distance love is sometimes unavoidable. But other times, it’s like choosing to get texts and notifications on your phone, watch, and laptop at once. You are always somewhere else.

Moving to a new location and getting an intense job there is different from that. You are diving in boldly! There are gigantic adventures ahead! Don’t make those good times into the subplot of a story of heartbreak starring an impulsive, lovestruck jackass! You could’ve wasted years on this dude. Instead, you showed up and FOUND OUT. You found out that this is not really your guy. You found out that you love bold moves — they make you feel confident! — but you are also very afraid of big changes, afraid of your own depression (even when you’re managing it well), and afraid of ending up alone among people who talk about mortgages and golden retrievers.

When I first moved to my hometown, all talk of pickleball sent a chill down my spine! We are all afraid of the same things out here! If you doubt me, go read Halle Butler’s “Banal Nightmare.” It’s about a woman your age from the big city who moves back to her small town in the Midwest and feels very out of place among her high school friends. GODDAMN I LOVE THAT BOOK. I won’t spoil it for you, but at some point I might have to try to interview Halle Butler. (If anyone knows her, send her my email: askpolly@protonmail.com.)

If you buy and read that book right now, it will make you feel better. It’s VERY harsh. You will love it. It will remind you that this loneliness and fear you feel are so real, so fucking real for allllllll of us, no matter how old, how married, how settled, how boring. We are all savage animals longing for a teensy bit more than what we have. We all have to manage ourselves and practice gratitude for small things, because the granular delights of existence, the tiny snippets of ordinary magic, are what make life worth living.

Those granular delights aren’t fueled by fantasy and escape. They are only accessible to us when we feel our sadness, face our fears, and admit that we’re vulnerable and fallible. We make mistakes. Times of bluster are followed by fallow periods, misgivings, regrets.

Don’t worry about falling in love right now. You can’t be focused on that goal at this moment. Cultivate your friendships. Don’t avoid Mr. Cool. Resolve to see him as a benevolent semi-stranger or almost-friend as much as you can. Don’t start telling a story about how you’re doomed. Instead, think like a fiction writer and consider the many, many, many unpredictable and exciting ways your story might improve.

You have to be patient. You have to stick your neck out. You have to learn more about your town. Sometimes, you have to feel fragile and heartbroken and worried while you do these things. Feel what’s here.

You might have to feel regretful, too. You might miss your big city and your walkable neighborhood. You might want to escape into your job, or escape into a new relationship, or escape into more running, more reading, more of everything.

My advice to you:

Don’t escape. Don’t strenuously avoid feeling heartbroken. Don’t idealize the big city. Don’t stigmatize your hometown. Don’t call Mr. Cool “Mr. Cool.” (lol.) He is just a person. Don’t call the mortgage-and-dog people dull. Don’t pretend that making art or traveling or living somewhere big makes you a million times more interesting.

Regret is part of being alive. So is heartbreak. Confident, decisive people treat big moves as romantic until they make a huge move that feels incredibly UNROMANTIC. Then they second-guess themselves. Don’t do that.

THIS CALAMITY IS ROMANTIC.

Write those words on your wall. We all want to get everything right. We all want to be perfect and in love and hot forever. We all want everything all the time and we don’t want to miss out on any one thing. But making sure you don’t miss out means being interrupted constantly. That’s not joy.

Reality includes limits: We can’t be two places at once. We can’t be irresistible to everyone alive. We can’t keep up a lifelong winning streak. Not every good decision is a BOLD decision. Sometimes a “no” is more romantic than a “yes.” Sometimes LEAVE ME ALONE is bolder than TORMENT ME WITH YOUR WISHY-WASHINESS UNTIL I AM A SHADOW OF MY FORMER SELF.

Sometimes when a person says “I am good at being depressed” what they really mean is “I am bad at being sad.” I know that you’re saying “I can stay busy and active and engaged instead of moping around” but maybe you also mean “I fear sadness more than anything else” and “I have been depressed many times before so I know how terrible it can feel” and “I can’t imagine being happy unless I’m fulfilling my fantasy of what my life should look like.”

Maybe what you mean is also “I’m disappointed in myself whenever I can’t rise above an emotion” and “I like to pretend that I’m in control and whenever that story proves inaccurate, I feel completely fucked.”

Sometimes you can’t move swiftly to the next thing. You have to feel sad. You have to miss the big city. You have to NOT fit in. You have to crave love but there is no one to fall in love with. This is when you learn more about who you are.

It doesn’t feel magical at first, to realize that you have to be patient through a long, slow, sad, regretful, confusing time.

That’s just how life is. And when you fight that? When you say “I’ll find another sexy man!” and “I’ll throw myself into my job!” and “I’ll prove to myself that this was THE RIGHT DECISION FOR SURE, NO DOUBTS, NO REGRETS!”? You actually prolong your confusion. Because you’re not letting yourself have some time to adjust and feel where you are. Your body still wants to be sad about what was lost. Your heart wants to long for what you thought was going to happen. Your mind needs space to accommodate someone who occasionally stumbles and second-guesses herself. You can’t skip this step. You have to stay calm and BE HERE.

So you have to avoid verdicts. There’s nothing big to decide right now. The big picture isn’t important right now. Loosen your grip and be here. Tell zero stories about here. Just be.

I was confident and decisive for a solid decade. It was great. Now I am indecisive. I change my mind a lot. I second-guess myself. I am commitment-phobic. I think I’m MORE wishy-washy than I would be otherwise in many ways because for a while there I kept expecting to take the hero’s journey again. I was like “HERE I AM, HEEDING THE CALL, MAKING THE RIGHT CHOICE! WHERE IS MY VICTORY?!!!”

I did bold things that didn’t work. I committed and then backed out. I barked up the wrong trees. I made a splash that just got me wet and cold.

I was impatient. I wanted to feel like the hero. I wanted to be blameless. I wanted my old sources of escape. I wanted to believe that everything I ever did would be magical. I wanted to feel important and pretty and special again.

I needed to feel sad instead. I needed to look around and say, “Oh god, I feel unsure.” I needed to notice hard things. I needed to tell the truth about all of this.

Remember that sadness is just the experience of facing the disappointments and limits of a normal life. Depression is an extended fight against sadness that leaves you numb and anxious and afraid. When you’re sad, you know where the sadness is coming from. When you’re depressed, you’re asking yourself to rise above disappointment, conquer sadness, and when you fail (which you inevitably do, because the sadness is still there), you feel ashamed and stuck. You hate yourself for being SO BAD AT SADNESS. You feel hopeless. You are telling the story that YOU GOT EVERYTHING WRONG.

Shame is your enemy when you’re sad. REMEMBER: Feeling sad without shame isn’t that terrible. You cry and the world is bleak and it hurts but it’s actually romantic. There is hope. Pain itself isn’t horrific because you know that this is what life is made of. We can’t escape pain. We can’t glide over hurt and pretend that it’s not there. All humans feel heartbroken and lonely and uncertain sometimes.

When you hate yourself for being sad, when you tell yourself that you need to CHARGE FORWARD or ERASE THIS FEELING WITH LOVE or SUCCESS or DISTRACTIONS, that’s a path to anxiety and depression.

Don’t turn your life into a series of distractions. Live the life you have fully. Don’t avoid where you are. Stay busy but keep your eyes open and feel what you feel. Be honest. Don’t avoid your ex, his neighborhood, his friends. You just got there and you need to dare to explore and let everything in. Keep moving and running and reading and sign up for new activities, try out new things.

But be gentle with yourself, too Some days you will feel bad. Don’t tell extreme stories about how you fucked up. Just exist where you are and let yourself be very vulnerable and tell the truth and notice things and learn.

That’s what I’m doing. I had to make a tough decision today that I hated making. I had to say no to something that made me feel like I was not brave, not a hero. I feel like this is a theme for me right now: Resisting the call. Refusing to do what I’ve always done to get by. Staying where I am instead. Noticing where I am.

IT IS NOT ROMANTIC to say no. It does not feel magical, at least at first. Likewise “Leave me alone” feels depressing, even when it’s what’s best for you. You told someone he was hurting you and you said no thanks to that. But somehow that doesn’t feel bold. It doesn’t feel confident to say “I can’t do this.”

But sometimes “I CAN’T DO THIS” is the most confident thing of all. You can’t be two places at once, so you chose to be HERE. You said “I won’t half-ass things at this moment in my life.” Think about that. You said, “If I show up for something, I want to be 100% IN IT.”

Now take that energy and live it. You made a hard choice. Be proud of that choice, not ashamed. Feel this jittery sadness but don’t THINK YOUR WAY away from it. Be here and feel this pain and breathe it in. Go running but feel where you are. Cry when you need to. Feel alone when you need to. Write it all down. Talk about it.

Falling in love offers us a victorious story about who we are and where we are. But what matters the most in this life is building real, deep, ROMANTIC connection with ourselves and others that won’t dry up and blow away easily. This isn’t a moment to build another glorious myth about your new life. This is a moment to truly engage with this imperfect place with your whole heart.

Show yourself and be real. BE HERE.

You don’t know how it will go yet. Don’t speed through this.

You don’t know what it all means yet. Don’t skip to the end.

You don’t know who you’ll meet around here or how it will feel. Don’t tell quick stories with simple morals.

Your best years are NOT behind you! My god, of course not! That’s never true — it’s just a story that people tell when they’re living inside a fantasy of the past. You have so many years ahead, to learn more about small places and bigger places and the difference between them. You have years to experiment with this place and see how that feels. You don’t have to rush to form hasty or panicked conclusions.

Forgive yourself and everyone else around you. Welcome what’s here with all of your heart. Stop looking to form verdicts and be in the open air instead. Write down what you see. Be honest about what you dislike. Be awake and alive and feel everything.

Don’t let your shame harden into bitterness. Don’t let your fears harden into dread. Vulnerability and honesty will keep you away from those sharp edges.

STAY VULNERABLE.

The word “spinster” suggests someone who has nothing to do but weave fabric. She has not been chosen. She is forever alone. Her position is shameful, particularly in a smaller place. A spinster in the big city is just a hipster. But in a hometown, a spinster is a sad ghost. That’s what the idiots think, anyway.

Have you ever molded your behavior around what idiots think?

Of course not. So don’t start now. Don’t abandon yourself every time trouble or sadness arrives. Remember who you are. Get your own back. You are exactly where you’re supposed to be. Stay here and relish everything, even the sadness.

It can be so tempting to try to FIX this feeling. I know that too well. But this green, lush, rainy day is telling me that I need to feel vulnerable right now. I need to breathe and welcome whatever arises from this grief. I can’t blame myself for fucking up. I’m doing my best. And the world around me is saying:

STOP AND FEEL THIS.

Don’t skip over it.

“I’ve felt sad all summer!” you’re thinking. But sadness takes its sweet time with you. And if some part of you is resisting or shaming away your grief, sadness wants to stick around longer, until you really feel it. If you can surrender to it instead of fighting it, this sadness will light the way to what you care about, what you value, where you want to invest your energy. This is a very fertile time for you! Even these tears are full of promise and light. Feel this with everything you’ve got!

Of course, whenever you feel strong emotions, you’ll be tempted to retreat into your head, where shameful stories are told. Don’t do that. You haven’t permanently screwed everything up. Far from it. You’re expanding in every direction. Your heart is growing bigger. Your mind is becoming more flexible, more open, more agile. You’re growing, taking a more resilient shape. Be proud of the decisions that brought you here. Be proud of the strong person you’re becoming.

Polly

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Thanks for reading Ask Polly! Sadness is no joke, and it wants you on your knees. Honor it and the curse becomes a blessing. I have no idea why! Try it and you’ll see! Escapists stay delusional, addicted, and depressed, while emotional realists thrive and grow. The hardest parts are the best parts. Lean the fuck in and savor where you are. Send this column to a friend who could use it, and find a copy of “Banal Nightmare” and read it immediately. Ask Polly Book Club!

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