Few decisions in life are ever simple when they impact lives of people you love.

Yet, however complicated my reasoning, my decision to move to Seattle was relatively simple.

As my spirit desires, so shall I.

I’ve always intended to document my initial thought process for moving to Seattle from Oakland but my mind was afflicted with procrastination aka I was cattin. A year later, I finally feel the ambition and clarity to write it.

To start off, the catalyst to my decision was for job relocation with more pay and responsibility. At the time of the job offer, I felt under-stimulated with my current role and didn’t foresee any real opportunity for growth. This job relocation opportunity marginally fulfilled those voids.

I’ve had an interest in Seattle (Pacific NorthWest) for the past few years prior to visiting the summer of 2014. After I moved back from Washington DC in December 2010, I didn’t have the desire to live anywhere else. Two years later being home in the Bay, the idea of Seattle suddenly became a blip on my radar. Not sure where this inclination came from but I know that the idea of living in an area with eternal rain with a city/scenic landscape seemed like my type of adventure. I never been before by this was my interpretation. It seemed like a place where I’d be able to live in nature and still be apart of the city. I also assumed that type of scene would be conducive to an aspiring writer.

As my Seattle interest developed, the popularization of Seattle’s socio-economic policies caught my attention. One of these policies was Washington state’s legalization of marijuana. Not much for me to comment on that lol.

Another was the raising of minimum wage to a living wage, $15/hr. A few years ago I did policy research and organizing, analyzing the minimum wage for each of the 7 Bay Area counties and its cities to support policies that reflected raising wages to living wages to keep up with the quickly rising cost of living in the Bay. So with Seattle being the first metropolitan city to introduce a $15/hr minimum wage, I was curious to what its true effects would be.

A third was the technology boom occurring. Seattle has been a technological hub ever since the inception of Microsoft complemented with Boeing headquarters. It has exponentially grown in the past 15 years with the rise of Amazon, which is also headquartered. These major corporation spawned a plethora of other businesses that helped establish a world class tech market comparable to Silicon Valley and Tokyo, but on the under. Seattle isn’t popular known for these industries to those who live outside of it.

In my recent years living in the Bay, I had hella fun. Like I was hella happy with my social life and everything else was cool. Life was hella comfortable. So comfortable that after awhile everything started feeling redundant and monotonous despite the variety of activities and travelling. Although I was making strides in my spiritual and professional development, I didn’t feel like I was developing at a rate to my liking. I felt stagnant. There were certain aspects of my life I wanted to change but I lacked the discipline to follow through on them because of my desire to remain constantly active within my environment.

So when my employer asked me to consider relocating to Seattle, I instantly knew it’s what I wanted to do.

The conflict in my decision was abandoning my family, my nephews and nieces during their coming of age, my friends, and the legacy I was creating. I was knowingly abandoning comfort. I was abandoning home. I was abandoning what I hella loved, to explore an area where I knew no one. And despite the fears of leaving what I knew and loved, I was more excited with the prospect of living in solitude to get to know and love myself more in depth.

This is my first experience living in an environment where I knew no one prior to moving there. Where I had no associations or affiliations. I’d be a legit nobody. It was an opportunity to be brand new and live in temporary discomfort and learn how to grow out of it. It is a welcoming challenge to apply my life experience solo bolo. I’d get to explore and meet people on my own reconnaissance without the conducive institutional social incubators like a school or military.

So as complex my reasoning, my decision to move to Seattle was easy and I’m still capable of being apart of my loved ones lives however satellite I am from them.

I’ll be back…