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Moving Makes Me Sad
Why moving is one of life’s most stressful events.
The first time I moved, I was 16. I had been living with my family in a maisonette apartment in Braddell View — a large, government subsidized residential development in Singapore. That year, my dad had purchased house. It was just a 10-minute drive, but a whole different world from Braddell View. Leaving my childhood home was traumatic and I had a manic episode that kept me awake for three nights. I spent those nights flipping through my pile of Elle, Cosmopolitan, Self and Shape magazines — which I knew I would not bring with me to our new home — and cutting out the articles and pictures I liked and storing them in a Kjeldsen’s cookie tin.
My dad sold our maisonette and we moved into our new four-level bungalow in a more affluent neighborhood called Adelphi Park. The following year, I moved to Perth, Australia for college and lasted eight months in a drab apartment in a student village before getting stoned one night, accidentally setting my curtains on fire and getting my student visa revoked.
In my early twenties, I lived with a boyfriend in a rural village then a boat in South Sulawesi in Indonesia. When that relationship ended, I was in my mid-twenties. I cut my hair with a kitchen scissors then moved into a 90-square-foot bedsit — a windowless, sealed off kitchen that was transformed into a student…
