This is a speech about the anxieties of change - particularly those involving moving.

Big
changes often create smaller effects than your fears informed you that you should expect.

There comes time in every persons life in which big change occurs that scares them. Situations
such as death, illness and forced emigration can occur and anytime. Its a scary thought, but on
a lighter note sometimes the smaller of those big changes - changes you expected would ruin
your life, take everything away from you and leave you out in cold - don’t really leave much of
an effect on the way you live. Changes scare us because our minds get so used to routine and
our anxieties tell us that change will upset the stride we have set for ourselves we need to see
that those same fears have an issue with overselling how much a change like moving will really
break your rhythm. No matter how much change there is to life there will always be constants.

“We have to move” - this phrase is one of the most nerve racking things a child will hear is it
not? Regardless of how you may personally answer this question, it was in my case. The idea of
everything you’ve grown accustomed to in your short life being pulled from you, it’s a scary
thing. When your brain registers that statement, spoken factually and with finality, it tends to
start running at 1000 miles per hour. It thinks about the down falls moving may cause and it tries
to run from them, from the ineffability of the situation, from the change. All the mental chaos
prevents one from simply stepping back and thinking to themselves for a moment - “how much
change will this really cause the way i live?”



Last year I experienced that very situation first hand, not it t’was not the first time i had had to
hear that phrase, I had already moved overseas an back again once before. This time it had a
more grave effect than the last. Since moving back after the two year stay I had found myself a
sanctuary where I felt safe and all seemed well, which was an experience I had not had before
in my life, for the first time I felt as if I was truly living and that life was not a tiresome and
worthless chore. The idea of moving again threatened that peace, but I couldn’t avoid it - in that
moment I felt a little more empathy towards the refugees seeking shelter in my homeland for
they too were forced to leave their homes and the life they’d known by the decisions made by
their government their case being albeit way more extreme than my own personal turmoil. I felt
as if the dry ground had opened and stolen my shaky breaths along with my ability to think
rational thoughts.

It scared me to imagine living in a new culture - one just similar enough too mine to fall in the
uncanny valley yet miles away from what I am used to - or so I thought anyways. I failed to
realize at that time an important fact about life, that no matter how much life changes for a
person there will always be constants to that life that follow them. After the move I found myself
into a routine, one that was similar yet alien to me. It’s feeling one does expect after emigrating
to an entirely new continent. It was an odd sensation and quite frankly, it worried me quite bit -
was all the anxiety for nought? Everything felt so different yet, it t’was the same as if this routine
was muscle memory, as if my daily motions in this new place were no different to those I went
through in the past.

You may ask yourself if things will ever get past the point of seeming vaguely routine? Will you
ever find that sanctuary again? After all you’ve fallen in stride but the new surroundings you find
yourself in are still alien to you when it comes down to it. The answer to both those questions is
yes, yes you will. Change took away normalcy and sanitary from your life but both will return.
The longer you follow routine there normal and well, routine it will feel. You may find that you
have found a new sanctuary in this new land or you may find it again right where you left it. It
won't disappear and you will be able to return to it someday but for now it seems like a good
plan to simply live where you are, your anxieties about emigration were never the be all end all.



Sure my heart still longs for my sanctuary. Sure I am still homesick for my homeland, my
country and those I left behind in it but my point is not about that - it is about how the anxiety of
moving corrupts our sense of how much our lives will actually be shifted. It is an anxiety not
founded on the truths of the world, if you were in the situation of moving such a feeling is almost
unavoidable. Yet you must remember when you can the rule of this world. That no matter how
much your surroundings change there will always be constants to keep you steady, to help you
adjust.

Thank you for listening.