# The Honest Truth About Moving *By [Ansh Chokshi](https://anshchokshi.com) · Apr 13, 2026 · 7 min read* Canonical: https://anshchokshi.com/write/the-honest-truth-about-moving --- I have moved through five cities and three countries in the past eight years. For a long time, I thought moving was about starting over. New place. New people. New version of you. Now I think it is more about learning how to grieve. I left home when I was 17. I still get texts from my mom saying she let me go too early. There is something about that line that stays with me. It sounds light when she says it now, but it carries the weight of everything we gave up when I left. I thought I was just choosing independence. I did not know I was also choosing distance. That has been the honest truth behind moving for me. Every move gave me something. A new city. A new routine. A new set of people. A new life that, for some time, felt like the only life that mattered. But every move took something too. Not in one dramatic way. In quieter ways. --- ## The People The hardest part of moving has always been the people. Every city in my life has had its own inner circle. Its own cast. The people I spent all my time with. The people who knew what phase I was in without me having to explain it. They knew the jokes. The habits. The routines. They knew which version of me they were getting. And every time I moved, I did the same thing. I got immersed in the new life. I got close to the new people. And slowly, without ever meaning to, I let the old ones drift. I am not proud of that. I am a very in-person person. I am good at presence and bad at maintenance. Good at intensity. Bad at distance. If you are reading this, I am sorry. I will do better. Still, moving taught me something honest about relationships. ***Not everyone you love comes with you.*** And when you see those people again, something strange happens. The gap disappears for a moment. The inside jokes come back. You laugh in a way that reminds you who you were then. Maybe that is the gift. You do lose people over time. But if the bond was real, it never fully leaves your body. --- ## The Memories People say you make new memories, and you do. But that has never made the old ones feel smaller to me. I hold memory very close. I have over 100,000 photos in my camera roll, which probably says enough. Sometimes when I am homesick, or lonely, or just not fully myself, I go back. I scroll back to an older phase of my life and sit inside it for a while. That is the thing about memory. People talk about the past like it is over. It is not over. It is dormant. It waits. Then one photo, one song, one smell, or one street name brings it all back at once. I do not think memory exists to trap us in the past. ***Sometimes it helps us survive the distance between who we were and who we are now.*** --- ## The City Then there is the city itself. Your city. Your spots. Your route. Your places. The place where your life happened for a while. Late-night walks at college park. Sunsets at Torrey Pines. Favorite penne alla vodka at Ricarda's. Mocha at Jimmy's. Slice at Fresca. Small places that would mean nothing to someone else and everything to you. What moving really takes is familiarity. You leave behind the version of the city that only exists because you were living inside it. I used to think leaving meant losing those places. But I do not think that anymore. If anything, distance makes them more precious. When I go back, I feel it immediately. A kind of rush I still do not know how to explain properly. Something between nostalgia and electricity. My body remembers before my mind does. I do not just remember the place. I remember who I was there. ***A place can stop being your home and still stay sacred.*** Maybe that is what a good city does. ***It outlives your time in it.*** --- ## The Things Then there are the things. This is probably the easiest lesson to say and the hardest one to practice. Do not get too attached. When I lived in Toronto, I was a hardcore sneaker head. At one point I had more than 30 pairs. Then I moved, and my whole life had to fit into two 32 kg bags. That is when moving becomes very honest. You sell some. Leave some. Give some away. Pretend it is practical. Pretend it does not mean anything. But of course it does. And you realize you were never just attached to the object. You were attached to the version of yourself that came with it. I do not regret letting them go. It was a real phase. A meaningful one. But still a phase. Sometimes letting go of things is really just admitting that a version of you has ended. --- ## Mono No Aware The older I get, the more I think moving has been showing me the same thing. Something deeper than ambition, independence, or change. ***Impermanence.*** On my flight to San Diego, I opened a huge card my family and friends in Toronto had filled with messages. Every person close to my heart had written something in it. Somewhere over the clouds, I sat there sobbing, reading memory after memory from a life I had just left behind. There is a Japanese term for that feeling: mono no aware. The ache of something beautiful ending. The feeling of already missing it while it is still warm. ***Things are not beautiful despite being temporary.*** ***They are beautiful because they are temporary.*** --- More essays by Ansh Chokshi: https://anshchokshi.com/llms.txt