The Cost of Putting Down Roots

I think I knew I wanted to stay in Seattle when I started walking the 2.3 miles to my favorite local bookstore, pulling a book off the shelf, and learning that the author lives in Seattle.

I am well aware that the odds of grabbing a local writer’s books are slightly higher at a local bookstore, and there might be some unconscious absolutely-not-The-Secret-thing-because-The-Secret-is-garbage draw towards Pacific Northwest writers’ stories, but I swear I’m just picking titles that look interesting:

Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses. I’ve been practicing yoga for years, this could be interesting. Who’s Claire Dederer?

A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table. I love cookbook memoirs! Molly Wizenberg… opened a restaurant that’s a mile-and-a-half from my apartment.

Love and Biology at the Center of the Universe. “Upon learning that her college sweetheart husband has been seeing another woman, Mira Serafino’s once perfect world is shattered and she wants no one, least of all her big Italian family, to know. She takes off — with no destination and little money — heading north until her car breaks down in Seattle.” WHAT IS GOING ON HERE.

The funny thing about Seattle is that it was the one city I never thought would be a permanent stop. I moved to Minneapolis, Washington DC, and Los Angeles with the idea that I might end up building a life and career in each of those places; I moved to Seattle because I needed to leave Los Angeles, but also because I was dating someone in Vancouver and Seattle was closer to the Canadian border than Portland.

Then I ended up in that microapartment on Capitol Hill, washing my dishes in a bucket and telling myself “I do not want to be here in five years.”

But now I’m thinking that maybe I will stay. More than that; I’m thinking that I want to stay. I want to get involved in the city itself, not just the part of it that I write about from my home office. I want to volunteer. I want to meet other Seattle writers. I want to be part of a community.

There are about three huge problems with this idea, and I’ll just list them all at once:

1. I work a lot of hours. My freelance workload is pretty manageable at this point (which is to say it’s a 50-hour workweek), but I’m also writing a novel on the evenings and weekends, and thanks to Patreon I’ve committed to two chapters a week until it’s drafted. (There’s a reason I was so interested in The Other Washington’s idea that it’s harder than ever to build a life outside of work; it’s something that I think about all the time, or at least in the two hours every day when I’m not working.)
2. I love my one-bedroom apartment, but I’m pretty isolated from the rest of the city. If I want to go to Phinney Books, I plan a 45-minute walk each way. If I want to go to Hugo House, I plan an hour bus ride each way. I can generally get two solid hours of non-work each day, as I mentioned above, but I have to do some serious planning to get the four/five hours I need to go to an event and come back from it.
3. I keep thinking about how much it costs to really live somewhere, instead of holing up in a small apartment waiting for something to happen. If I were going to start putting down roots, I’d start taking Ubers to events instead of the bus, so I could go to more of them. (This in itself causes its own problems vis-à-vis my wanting to support public transportation, but if public transportation doesn’t support my life I can’t do it.) I’d pay even more for event tickets, books at book signings, and cocktails than I already do. I might want to move to a neighborhood that’s closer to where I want to get involved, which might also cost more money—or I might want to think about buying a condo. I might even want to think about buying a car and re-learning how to drive. I think about all of this and then I think about doing it in one of the U.S.’s most expensive cities, and I think “shouldn’t I just pack everything up and move somewhere cheaper?”

But I want to stay. I’ve started to dream about staying, which is even more of a sign than pulling books off the shelf. I don’t know how much of this dream is about Seattle itself and how much of it is about the person I want to become: a woman who is involved in a community and knows the other people who are doing the same work that she does. A woman who has a home with well-stocked cupboards and bookshelves and a cat. A woman who has enough time to leave her office at the end of the day. (Maybe not every day, but often enough.)

And all of this will cost money, both in the “I need to pay money” sense and in the “I probably need to earn more money, at least so I can work fewer hours” sense.

So I’ll keep thinking about it. I couldn’t stop even if I wanted to. It’s in all the stories I’m choosing to read, which means I’m probably going to choose this story for myself if I can figure out a way to make it happen.

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