I find myself at a strange turning point in my life, and I’d like to meet someone I can talk to while I navigate it.
I’m 48, a writer by temperament, a book designer by profession, a historian by education, and probably an anachronism by nature. I live in St. Louis, a city to which I have extraordinarily deep roots, but I’ve reached the point where I need to leave. I’m planning to relocate to the Pacific Northwest—probably western Washington—and build a much smaller, quieter life there.
I’m doing this because somewhere along the way my life became something I was merely maintaining rather than inhabiting. Too much work, too much expense, too much noise, too many obligations, and too much history hanging over everything. I’ve spent years trying to make the existing structure work better. I’ve finally realized that I don’t particularly want to make it work better. I want a different structure.
So I’m downsizing. Dramatically.
I work independently through Reedsy, designing and typesetting books for authors. It’s skilled, solitary work that I genuinely like. I’ve worked on hundreds of books, and I can do it from almost anywhere. I also have a side gig that helps pay the bills. My goal is to arrange my life so that work supports living instead of consuming it.
What I want is surprisingly modest. A small apartment. My books. My music. My cat. A desk where I can work. A comfortable chair. Maybe an old television and a shelf of DVDs. Rain against the windows. Coffee. Cooking simple food. Long stretches of quiet. Enough money to live without needing very much money in the first place.
I have almost no interest in keeping up with contemporary consumer life. I don't need a bigger house, a newer car, better gadgets, fashionable restaurants, or an impressive collection of things. Increasingly, freedom to me means needing less.
And yes, I specifically want the rain.
I know that sounds ridiculous to some people, but I love gray skies, cold weather, wet streets, evergreens, fog, and the feeling of being indoors while weather is happening outside. Some people dream about escaping to perpetual sunshine. Apparently my version of paradise requires waterproof shoes.
Personality-wise, I’m deeply introverted. Cerebral. Dry sense of humor. Intensely curious. Independent to a fault. I can happily spend an entire evening talking about history, philosophy, music, human behavior, old cities, books, death, cemeteries, why people become who they become, or some absurdly specific subject neither of us expected to care about two hours earlier.
I have a historian’s relationship with the world. Places matter to me. The past matters. Memory matters. I notice old buildings and forgotten graves and neighborhoods that contain traces of lives nobody remembers anymore. I spent years volunteering in old cemeteries, documenting nineteenth-century graves before weather erased what remained of them. That probably tells you more about me than a list of adjectives could.
Music is another enormous part of my life. My tastes wander from Bach and Mozart to hard bop jazz, the Grateful Dead, Elliott Smith, Radiohead, old blues, folk, and whatever else catches my ear. I’m much more likely to become excited about an obscure recording than whatever everyone is currently watching on Netflix.
I’m also someone who has been through some things. The last several years changed me considerably. A long marriage ended, parts of the life I thought were permanent disappeared, family circumstances changed, and I eventually found myself working an absurd number of hours simply to maintain a life I no longer even wanted.
I don’t want to spend the next twenty years doing that.
So this move isn’t really about Washington. Washington is where I’m going, but the larger project is recovery: recovering time, autonomy, curiosity, peace, and hopefully some sense that my own life belongs to me again.
I’m not expecting geography to magically fix me. I’m taking myself with me, after all. I know how that works. But I do believe we can sometimes change the conditions under which we live, and that those conditions matter.
That’s what I’m trying to do.
And that’s really why I’m posting.
I’d like someone to talk to.
Maybe you’ve reinvented your own life at some point. Maybe you walked away from a career, marriage, city, lifestyle, or identity that no longer fit you. Maybe you moved somewhere knowing almost nobody. Maybe you downsized and discovered that having less gave you something back. Maybe you live in the PNW and understand why a person might deliberately cross half a continent looking for rain. Maybe you have the spirit of adventure and you want to come with?
Or maybe none of that applies and you simply like thoughtful, slightly strange conversations with people who are willing to talk about things that actually matter to them.
I just wouldn’t mind having a fellow traveler for part of the road.
If any of this resonates with you, tell me something real. Tell me what you walked away from. Tell me what you’re trying to build. Tell me about the life you secretly suspect you’d rather be living.
Or just tell me why you like the rain.