As of the present moment, I’m 41 years old and I’ve already moved my life ten times. While a few of those household moves were justified, many were not. In those cases, they were more about running away from the things that felt too out of control in my life and hoping the next place would be a whole lot better. In approximately two months though, I’ll be making my eleventh move and it’s something I’ve been sitting on the fence with for quite awhile. That’s solely for the reason because I wanted to be sure I wasn’t attempting to make yet another geographical cure in my life.
In the recovery world, a geographical cure is a nickname fondly given to the action where a person moves their entire life somewhere completely new and far away from their old life where many problems usually existed for them. Unfortunately, it took me a long time and many household moves to figure out that this never works. While there are many valid reasons why a person might choose to move from one place to another, running away from their problems isn’t one of them although I often convinced myself it was.
I lived a very problematic life for several decades creating a lot of drama in all my affairs. And ironically, the word “affairs” is just one of the many things I got myself involved in that created that drama. On top of that, I frequently made enemies and upset friends everywhere I went because of the way I was living my life. This generally led me to have the tendency to believe that moving myself to a completely new place would allow me to start over. I basically was always looking for a clean slate, but given the fact that I never worked on most of my character defects, that clean slate became pretty dirty in a very short amount of time wherever I lived. Until I became willing to change and work through all of them, it didn’t matter where I moved or travelled to, as I just created the same mess everywhere. This is why I’ve been waiting patiently on making my decision to do yet another move, with this one being from Massachusetts to Ohio where my partner currently resides.
Many people who get into intimate relationships, especially long distance ones like mine, think their lives will be all the better if they move in together sooner than later. In my former days, I allowed myself to believe this and would often be living with someone I had been dating for less than six months. In some cases, this might have actually worked for two healthy people. But in the case of someone like I once was, who was toxic and troubled, moving in with a person I had been dating for such a short period of time just made our lives together toxic and troubled. That is the precise reason why each of those relationships failed and sadly, I just ran away each time they did to somewhere new thinking I could start over fresh.
With my connection to my Higher Power, I am grateful to see now how this pattern of running away to somewhere new was never healthy for me. This is why I’ve stayed in Massachusetts for the past six years, as here I’ve been forcing myself to work through the majority of my character defects that would always rear their ugly heads no matter where I lived. While I know life can’t be perfect and everyday problems will always arise, I haven’t made the move yet to my partner’s home because I wanted to make sure I was healthy enough to do that. Truthfully, the invitation for me to move in with my partner has been out there since June of 2012, but up until just a few days ago, I knew I wasn’t ready for that. Thankfully, that’s all changed now. My Higher Power has shown me I’ve worked through enough of my own character defects to make this move in good conscience and not for a geographical cure.
The point I’ve been trying to make in all of this is that geographical cures never work. If your life is seriously troubled and you are thinking about moving somewhere else far away because of it, I encourage you to take a moment, breathe, and think again about making that decision. There’s a strong chance that you will just re-create your seriously troubled life all over again no matter where you go. While it may hide it’s horrible face for a period of time in that new location you choose to go to, it’s quite inevitable that your problems will only resurface again some time later there. So save yourself the hassle and expenses involved in moving and instead seek your Higher Power to work through your problems where you are now. I can promise you in doing so that your Higher Power will let you know when the time is right to actually make a healthy geographical move, just like my Higher Power did for me.
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson