After 9/11, everything felt different.
The country changed almost overnight. Airports changed. Conversations changed. Even the atmosphere at work changed. The future suddenly felt less certain somehow.
But life kept moving anyway.
The company continued growing under larger corporate ownership. First Polaroid purchased us, then eventually another company entirely. Meetings started feeling more corporate. More discussions about expansion. More conversations about relocation.
Florida became the plan for many people.
The company offered relocation packages and opportunities to move south, and a lot of employees were excited about it.
But my wife refused almost immediately.
She would not move to Florida.
The only places she would even consider were Houston or San Antonio because she still had family in Texas.
At first I resisted the idea.
Michigan was home.
Lake Michigan was home.
The little towns, the cold winters, the gray skies, the lake effect snow, the back roads — all of it was part of me. Even when life there was difficult, it still felt familiar.
But deep down I already knew something important.
If I wanted a future in technology and support work, I probably needed to leave small-town Michigan eventually anyway.
The jobs simply weren’t there.
For the first time in my life, I realized the world was much larger than the places I had grown up around.
Texas sounded enormous to me back then.
Hot weather.
Huge highways.
Big cities.
Different culture.
Different people.
It almost felt like another country compared to southwestern Michigan.
But the company was changing. My career was changing. My life was changing.
And honestly, I think part of me wanted the adventure.
I had spent so much of my life feeling stuck.
Stuck emotionally.
Stuck financially.
Stuck geographically.
Now suddenly the future felt open.
Scary, but open.
I remember long conversations about what we were going to do. Whether we should follow the company. Whether Texas made sense. Whether we could really leave everything behind and start over somewhere completely different.
In the end, the decision slowly stopped feeling optional.
It felt inevitable.
The strange thing about major life changes is that they rarely feel dramatic while they are happening.
There’s no music playing.
No giant speech.
Usually it’s just paperwork, conversations, stress, and trying to convince yourself you’re making the right decision.
Somewhere during all of that, without fully realizing it, I had already started leaving home behind.