The Best Thing I Ever Did Was Leave Home

On outgrowing certainty, starting over, and discovering that home doesn't get smaller when your world gets bigger.

“It's surprisingly easy to mistake your own upbringing for objective truth when you've never lived anywhere else.”

I don't think we're born narrow-minded. I do think we're born small.

I think we all inherit a version of the world from the place that raises us. We absorb its rhythms, its assumptions, its unspoken rules about what success looks like, where people belong, and what kind of life is worth building. If you're lucky, those roots give you a deep sense of home. If you're luckier still, you leave long enough to realize they were never the whole story.

For me, that place was Massachusetts.

I grew up outside Boston in a community where people tended to stay. They went to college nearby, came home afterward, married people they'd known since they were young, and eventually raised families a few towns over from where they had grown up. It wasn't a conscious philosophy. It was simply the water we all swam in. I followed the same path without ever questioning it. I went to school in New England, graduated into a job in Boston, lived close to my family, and assumed I'd spend the rest of my life somewhere between Boston and New York. I wasn't choosing that future. It had simply always been the future.

Then, during the COVID pandemic, something shifted.

For the first time in my life, all of the routines that had dutifully held me together disappeared. The career I had worked so hard to build suddenly felt too small. My social life shrank overnight. Every day looked exactly like the one before it. I remember feeling deeply unsettled, but I couldn't explain why. On paper, I had everything I thought I wanted.

Then it hit me: what I didn't have was anything unfamiliar. I had spent twenty-five years building a beautiful life without ever stepping outside the world I already knew. My life wasn't wrong; it had just stopped expanding.

At some point, my fear changed.

For most of my twenties, leaving home felt like the scary option. Leaving meant ending a relationship I thought would turn into marriage. It meant walking away from the city where my family lived, where my closest friends were, and where every version of my life had unfolded. It meant giving up certainty for a place I'd never seen and never felt.

Then, almost without warning, staying became the scarier choice.

So I applied to business school on an impulse and a two-month timeline that bordered on reckless. A few months later, I packed everything I owned into my Volvo and drove to North Carolina, alone and without knowing a single person. A year after that, I accepted a summer internship in Dallas, another city I'd never set foot in, and eventually I moved there full time.

None of those decisions were strategic in the slightest, which is the most surprising part, because I've spent most of my life making strategic decisions.

I've always loved strategy. I started my career in finance because understanding businesses through their numbers and economics came naturally to me. I could build the spreadsheet. I could understand the valuation. But somewhere along the way, I realized what fascinated me wasn't the model; it was the people behind it. I cared about why people gravitated toward certain products, why cultures formed around brands, why some ideas spread while others disappeared. I wasn't losing interest in business; I was becoming obsessed with a different side of it.

Looking back, I think that's true of my life, too.

I was never running away from Boston. I was running toward a larger world beyond it.

My friends and family at home often ask what I gained from moving. I think they expect me to talk about career opportunities, new cities, and professional growth, and those things matter. They matter a lot, and I'm grateful for all of them. But they aren't the first things that come to mind.

Instead, the greatest gift that leaving home gave me was perspective.

Before I left New England, I had remarkably confident opinions about places I'd barely experienced. Southern culture felt foreign to me. I dismissed things I didn't understand because I'd never had a reason to understand them, pulled pork and Republicans alike. It wasn't arrogance so much as inexperience. It's surprisingly easy to mistake your own upbringing for objective truth when you've never lived anywhere else.

Living in different parts of the country slowly dismantled this illusion for me. I've learned that people make sense once you know enough of their story. I've learned that what looks strange and off-putting from a distance often feels perfectly logical up close. I've learned that entire communities can value things differently than I do without being wrong. The biggest change wasn't that my opinions shifted. It was that I became far less interested in having opinions before I had experience.

This lesson has shaped far more than where I live. It's changed how I work, how I build friendships, how I navigate disagreement, and even how I define success. Curiosity has become far more useful to me than certainty.

Boston will always be home. My family is there. Some of the people I love most are there. Every time I fly back, I still know the winding, nonsensical streets of that city without looking at a map. 

But something has changed: New England no longer feels like the center of the world. It now feels like one beloved corner of it. For a while, I thought that would feel like a loss. Instead, it's become one of the greatest gifts of my life.

I want to be clear that I don't write this with judgment. The people I grew up with who never left have built beautiful lives. This is not an argument that everyone should move across the country; some people build extraordinary lives and do extraordinary things exactly where they started.

But what I will always argue, now that I've experienced this for myself, is that there's something uniquely valuable about becoming the stranger in the room at least once in your life. About having to introduce yourself and build a life from scratch. About realizing that the way you grew up is simply one way, not the way.

Leaving home didn't teach me where I belonged. It taught me that belonging is something you can build more than once. And once you know that, your world never becomes small again.