{"id":4371,"date":"2026-08-03T15:21:06","date_gmt":"2026-08-03T15:21:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/futureknowledge.in\/?p=4371"},"modified":"2026-08-03T15:21:06","modified_gmt":"2026-08-03T15:21:06","slug":"ive-never-lived-anywhere-longer-than-5-years-being-the-perpetual-new-girl-has-its-pros-and-cons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/futureknowledge.in\/?p=4371","title":{"rendered":"I&#8217;ve never lived anywhere longer than 5 years. Being the perpetual new girl has its pros and cons."},"content":{"rendered":"<figure><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.insider.com\/6a70891487737bff3ebda908?format=jpeg\" height=\"1000\" width=\"1333\" alt=\"The author sitting on a blanket in some grass with her dog.\"><figcaption>The author has never lived anywhere longer than five years.<\/p>\n<p class=\"copyright\">Courtesy of Chloe Gordon Cordover<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<ul class=\"summary-list\">\n<li>I&#8217;m 30, and I&#8217;ve never lived anywhere longer than five years.<\/li>\n<li>We moved a lot because of my dad&#8217;s job, and I continued moving frequently on my own after college.<\/li>\n<li>I feel as though I have wide, rather than deep, roots.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>At 30, the longest I&#8217;ve ever lived somewhere is five years.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s one year longer than the time I spent <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/www.businessinsider.com\/best-college-in-every-us-state-2026\">in college<\/a>, which for most people is probably the shortest time they&#8217;ve lived in one place. I&#8217;ve lived in 10 cities, seven states, and more houses than I feel like counting, and when people ask where I&#8217;m from, unlike when they ask me about the weather, there is depth to the question.<\/p>\n<p>So much so that my answer varies depending on the person who&#8217;s asking.<\/p>\n<h2 id=\"fa459e46-5906-4252-bc91-71f247e58e0c\" data-toc-id=\"fa459e46-5906-4252-bc91-71f247e58e0c\">I&#8217;ve moved all over, first for my dad&#8217;s job, then of my own accord<\/h2>\n<p>If I know I&#8217;ll never see you again, you get &#8220;<a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/www.businessinsider.com\/real-estate-investor-birmingham-alabama-market-buying-home-rental-property-2022-10\">Birmingham, Alabama<\/a>,&#8221; my birthplace, quick and easy. If the conversation is casual, you get &#8220;all over the South,&#8221; which is technically true and also conversationally merciful.<\/p>\n<p>But sometimes I&#8217;ll say, &#8220;It&#8217;s a long list, but I&#8217;m happy to share.&#8221; And if you say yes, I tell you to sit down before I walk through it all: Birmingham, then Nashville, then Dothan, then the Florida panhandle, then Louisville, then Denver, then Boulder for college, then Birmingham again, then New Orleans, and now Savannah, Georgia, where I&#8217;m three years into what is only a five-year stint, due to <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/www.businessinsider.com\/married-surgeon-work-redefined-support-relationships-2025-8\">my husband&#8217;s career<\/a>. After this, we&#8217;ll move somewhere else for one to three years, and then after that, maybe, we&#8217;ll settle down.<\/p>\n<p>That answer is always followed by the next question: &#8220;Why did you move so often?&#8221; Like most kids, I knew my dad&#8217;s job only in the vaguest terms: real estate lawyer. What he actually does all day is still a mystery to me. I understood, in the general sense, that his career was built on helping businesses grow or closing them, Blockbuster among them. But when people asked, I&#8217;d just reply with, &#8220;My dad&#8217;s job, and, no, not military.&#8221; Quick and easy.<\/p>\n<p>The first time I moved was when I was 3, and then again at 6. Our next move was when I was in fifth grade, and then twice in high school. I kept the pattern going myself when I moved to college, and then <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/www.businessinsider.com\/graduated-college-no-job-lived-with-grandfather-2025-3\">moved in with my grandfather<\/a> after I graduated. I then followed my now husband to New Orleans, Louisiana, for his medical school training, and then to Savannah, Georgia, to begin his medical career.<\/p>\n<figure><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.insider.com\/6a708c8797a2276a3423c703?format=jpeg\" height=\"798\" width=\"1200\" alt=\"The author wearing a green jacket and black hat with a backdrop of trees\"><figcaption>The author moved throughout her childhood because of her dad&#039;s career and, in adulthood, has continued to move frequently.<\/p>\n<p class=\"copyright\">Courtesy of Chloe Gordon Cordover<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<h2 id=\"093efe9b-2e99-4b25-a6ea-9efebb1904eb\" data-toc-id=\"093efe9b-2e99-4b25-a6ea-9efebb1904eb\">Having wide roots has its pros and cons<\/h2>\n<p>I don&#8217;t have deep roots. I have wide ones. They spread laterally, under state lines and across regions, through rivers and streams, and over mountains, which is why it&#8217;s rare for me to meet someone without finding a thread between us. Being the perpetual new girl taught me to walk into any room feeling unafraid, but also to be slow to interrupt the existing flow.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, wide roots can&#8217;t do everything deep ones can. I am nobody&#8217;s oldest friend. There is no one outside my family who has known me since before I knew myself, no neighbor who watched me learn to ride a bike and can hold that version of me up against the current one. Every friendship I have started in the middle of my story. When you move every few years, you get very good at beginnings and ends and very little practice at the middle.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve often wondered which are more meaningful, wide roots or deep ones. But I think it&#8217;s hard to compare.<\/p>\n<p>People ask if I&#8217;ve liked moving, and the honest answer is that I don&#8217;t know anything else. My <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/www.businessinsider.com\/jesus-christmas-birthdays-2022-12\">birthday is on Christmas Day<\/a>, and I get the same curiosity about whether I like that. But I&#8217;ve never had a birthday that wasn&#8217;t wrapped in the joy of a holiday, and I&#8217;ve never had a hometown that wasn&#8217;t temporary, whether I knew it at the time or not.<\/p>\n<p>But I do know that the life I&#8217;ve lived has given me an education in the small, stubborn differences between places outsiders assume are identical. One Southern city says &#8220;y&#8217;all&#8221; while another, improbably, says &#8220;you guys.&#8221; Boiled peanuts are a religion in one town and a soggy nut in the next. Tiny things, sure, but it&#8217;s where a hometown keeps its personality, and learning to notice them and the bigger nuances has made me both more interested and, I hope, more interesting.<\/p>\n<p>Sometimes I try to imagine what it would be like to have lived in just one city, in just one house, with the <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/www.businessinsider.com\/childhood-best-friend-lost-touch-reconnect-college-2024-2\">same friends from kindergarten<\/a> through graduation. But I fear that version of me might be boring and close-minded, unexposed to different cultures, people, and places. I&#8217;d trade every deep root I don&#8217;t have before I&#8217;d trade the width of the ones I do.<\/p>\n<p>So, have I liked moving? Yes, because it&#8217;s made me who I am.<\/p>\n<div class=\"read-original\">Read the original article on <a href=\"https:\/\/www.businessinsider.com\/move-often-every-few-years-pros-cons-2026-8\">Business Insider<\/a><\/div>\n<p><em>Source: <a href='https:\/\/www.businessinsider.com\/move-often-every-few-years-pros-cons-2026-8' target='_blank'>Read the original article on www.businessinsider.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The author has never lived anywhere longer than five years. Courtesy of Chloe Gordon Cordover I&#8217;m 30, and I&#8217;ve never lived anywhere longer than five years. We moved a lot because of my dad&#8217;s job, and I continued moving frequently on my own after college. I feel as though I have wide, rather than deep, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4372,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36,3],"tags":[43,29,33],"class_list":["post-4371","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-share-suggestions","category-technology","tag-impact-vwagy","tag-signal-avoid","tag-stage-stage-4"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureknowledge.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4371","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureknowledge.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureknowledge.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureknowledge.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureknowledge.in\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4371"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/futureknowledge.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4371\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureknowledge.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4372"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureknowledge.in\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureknowledge.in\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureknowledge.in\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}