Twenty years ago today I made the most important and biggest change in my adult life: I moved to Washington, DC.
Walking away from my mom after kissing her goodbye at the airport, I was so sad, but I willed myself not to cry. It was in this moment that I really felt like I had become responsible for my own life.
I was flying TWA (which doesn’t exist anymore). Their gates at Albuquerque’s airport (which also don’t exist anymore) were added in this weird way where you had to go up this narrow escalator and wind your way through a turning hallway to get to them. I remember the scene so vividly: Mom took me to the airport and walked me almost all the way to the gate. We were definitely through security (you could do that back then when you weren’t a passenger), but I think I told her she didn’t need to stay until my flight left. Though I didn’t verbalize it, I wanted to be alone. I wanted to relish in my independence. I wanted to show her I was an adult. She reluctantly said “okay.” We hugged and kissed and said goodbye. I turned on my heel and, standing tall, walked toward my gate.
The thing is, that walk was much more important than just an amble to get on an airplane. That walk was my line in the sand: it was me leaving my childhood behind, it was me declaring my independence, it was me striking out to find my life and looking forward, and it was the first few steps in the adventure that would become my life.
The excitement of all that was met equally with fear and sadness. I was 22 years old. I was leaving behind the comfort of the familiar, the caring embrace of my mother and my family and I was making a move that could result in failure. And to this day, whenever I relive that memory, I feel the intensity of all those emotions as if I was standing in the airport terminal again right at that moment.
Making the Decision
The air was warm with a slight breeze blowing off the Pacific Ocean, across the Pacific Coast Highway and up the hill to Pepperdine University’s student union building. I stood in the late afternoon sun feeling the breeze against my face, tasting the slight salt in the air pondering my day.
My roommate had returned to her alma mater to spend Thanksgiving with her friends and I had flown out to join her. I later described my experience on that trip and at Pepperdine as being stuck in the collision of an Acura ad and a PowerBook ad. It was a world so unfamiliar to me and so incredibly enticing. Everyone I met was smart and driven and aware of the world beyond them. They all had this ambition to do great things and they all seemed to have wealth to underwrite it. Money, for them, never appeared to be a constraint to anything: survival, clothes, dinner that night, nothing.
It was intoxicating.
In that ponderous moment on the patio at Pepperdine, the voice in my head said to me, “Brett, the world is so much bigger than what you know. Go be a part of it. It’s time to make a bold change. It’s time to move.”
And right then is when I decided: on March 1, 1995, I was moving to Washington, DC.
Selling it All
My first day back at work the following week, I gave my notice. (In retrospect, giving three months notice at just about any job is overkill, but it’s especially so as an entry-level retail worker. They did not need three months to replace me.)
My dad lived outside Washington, DC at the time, so I asked him two things: could I stay with him until I get settled and would he buy me my plane ticket. I don’t remember when I told my mom. I do wish I remember the conversation, though. I’m sure she was supportive but probably outlined all the risks and definitely reminded me that I hadn’t finished college. Dad agreed to both things. Years later my mom told me that she told my dad to make sure the plane ticket was round trip “in case it didn’t work out.” To this day that makes me chuckle because even though I was afraid I might fail, I knew that I wouldn’t.
My worldly possessions at the time fit into a bedroom, a closet and a parking space. It wasn’t much, but I was determined to arrive in Washington with even less. My parents had bought me the car and had very generously told me I could keep the money I earned from selling it to help me start out in DC. Thinking that it could take weeks to sell it, I put an ad in the paper in mid-February for $100 more than what they paid for it.
The car sold that morning to the first person who called (and the only person who looked at it) for the price I asked.
I couldn’t believe it. The ease with which that happened made my decision seem like exactly the right thing to do. Except now I was without a car! With a wallet full of cash, I decided to rent a Nissan Pathfinder for the remaining two weeks I was in Albuquerque. I thought they were just incredibly cool, so I treated myself.
Over the next few weeks, I began packing, giving away things I didn’t want to move and throwing the things away that nobody wanted. The morning of March 1, my life was crammed into 17 small- and medium-sized moving boxes and a suitcase. I schlepped the boxes to the bookstore where I worked and they shipped them for me.
I did one final walk-through of my room in my apartment discovering a wooden cassette tape holder behind my bedroom door. I remember being really ticked off that I’d missed it, but there was nothing to do but leave it behind.
With that, I hopped in my rented Pathfinder and drove to the airport.
Marking the Twenty Years
I haven’t been able to figure out why the 20-year milestone is so important to me. Maybe it’s because that’s the span of time that measures a career? Or maybe it’s because over the years I’ve divided my adult life into three 20-year segments and this is the end of the first? Or maybe it’s because it is roughly half my life? I’m not sure.
But it is significant to me.
That decision I made standing on that patio overlooking the ocean 20 years ago was the absolute best thing I ever did for myself. And while the past two decades haven’t been without stress, strife or tragedy, they have been—without a doubt—the best years of my life.