Cyrus’s Review of Moving

Never have I wanted to go minimalist and just not have any possessions as much as I do now.

Moving is basically the worst thing ever invented and even though I’ve done it a million times, it was always when I was basically a criminal vagabond who didn’t have any stuff that couldn’t be transported in at most two backpacks. Now that I’ve done it with someone who has way too much stuff, it’s safe to say that next time we move, I’m just burning down the house and collecting the insurance money.

Spoiler alert right here: If you feel like you have to move somewhere, don’t.

There’s actually no part of moving that isn’t awful, which really makes you wonder why anyone does it. The first part you have to do is find a new place, which is annoying because you have to deal with real estate agents who, to be fair, are only doing their jobs. It’s just that their jobs involve lying to you about what’s available and what you’ll get if you move into their property, and even as someone who’s pretty versed in being lied to all the time, it’s really frustrating. It gets a little easier if you’re moving with someone who has a set of really specific requirements, since most places aren’t going to be private enough, or soundproofed enough, or distant enough from neighbours, or close enough to a local park, or whatever.

Then you have to pack all your shit and I’m going to say this is probably the very worst part. When you have a lot of shit, which someone does, it takes a long time to pack and you just never have enough boxes and too much of your stuff needs to be packed in a really particular way and no two people have the same idea about how packing is supposed to work. And then you know, your boyfriend uses all your clothes to pack everything fragile because he doesn’t want to buy bubblewrap and you just don’t have clothes even to go outside for two weeks.

Next is the actual moving. Now, you either have to hire movers, which costs the fucking Earth, to manhandle all your stuff for you and continually ask you why you have so much stuff, or you have to do it yourself. Now I thought we’d have to carry all our own shit and drive our own truck since all of my boyfriend’s aforementioned too much shit is comprised of illegal audiovisual material and/or the equipment he uses to produce illegal audiovisual material. But of course I should have known that he’d know some movers who are fans of his work and are happy to be paid nontraditionally, and in installments. Max and Gino are still a week away from paying off the last of it.

Moving into the new place is terrible because there are always some unforeseen circumstances. Like, this is where those lies you heard before will come back to bite you, because it’ll turn out that you were lied to about your move-in date and you’ll have to spend an hour on the phone explaining why you’re moving in on the date you said you wanted to move in six different times to three different people and they’re not going to stop you doing that. This is also when you’ll try and fail to get in touch with the hydro company, and have to wait around for the internet company, and discover that nobody blocked off the street for parking so your moving truck can park like they were supposed to. It’s also when inevitably at least some of your furniture will get broken and you will discover that actually, you have zero sentimental attachment to any of your furniture, especially in hour six of your stuff being moved around.

And then, of course, you have to unpack all your shit and you can’t really enjoy your new place at all because it’s a huge mess. It takes you a full day just to put the furniture where you want it and then like two weeks after that to take everything out of the boxes and sort it out and then get all the garbage put where it belongs, and by the time you finally have that all done, you’re so removed from the fact of being in a new place that you don’t care anymore. By that point you’ve been in the new place to start to realize the things that are wrong with it and you already regret leaving the other place, where you’d learned to deal with the things that were wrong.

I’d love it if I could end here with some positive paragraph about “oh, but you learn to love your new place and it’s so much better than the old one and blah blah” but really it’s kind of not because you moved into a mob compound where everyone is planning to kill everyone else and it’s exhausting and stressful and you lose weeks of otherwise productive work time and it doesn’t really matter how excited your boyfriend gets about all the new kids he can molest in this neighbourhood, it all just feels pointless and stupid and you wish you lived in a tent in a field with three sets of clothes and a sleeping bag again.

Or maybe that last part is just me. But either way, moving sucks hard, it’s really expensive and tiring, and honestly it’s just not worth it. I guess if the place you’re living is genuinely terrible, but otherwise you should probably just realize that the small problems you have with it are going to just be replaced with other small problems that’ll annoy you just as much.

If you’re thinking of moving, don’t. If you like the cute boys in a new neighbourhood that much, just go kidnap them like a normal person.