Tabitha Goes Pacific Northwest: How I Went From Terrified to a Whole New Era, Part 2

Let me paint you a picture.

Single mom. Empty nester. Solo business owner. Podcast host and co-host. A business pivot in progress. A cross country move in under 60 days. A dog who absolutely does not care about any of that and needs to go outside right now.

That is my current life and I am not saying that to brag or to rant. I am saying it because I want you to understand one thing very clearly.

Why am I doing this?

When I first started playing the where do I actually belong in the world game, I went looking for someone who had done this before me. Someone who had navigated a massive personal fresh start while running a business full time, while being a solo parent, while being an empty nester, while restructuring their entire identity at the same time. Someone who had filmed the content, written the book, left the breadcrumbs.

Nobody had.

I looked. There was nothing. Which honestly felt a little rude. Like how dare you not know this moment was coming in my life and prepare accordingly. Very selfish of all of you.

So here I am, flying this thing for the first time and flying completely blind. Super fun. Really loving it. Yay. That was sarcasm.

I will say there is an entire genre of romance novels where the heroine does the reverse of what I am doing. Leaves the big city, moves somewhere slow and charming, falls in love, gets a dog, bakes something. I was not having the s*x that comes with that storyline so that particular blueprint was not going to work for me.

Which means I am pioneering this thing myself. For me and now, lucky you, for you too. You are officially my accountability buddy whether you signed up for that or not. Welcome. I am glad you are here.

Now let me tell you where I actually am right now because I think context matters.

As I write this I am staring at approximately 17 boxes sitting behind my laptop, just outside the frame of my very carefully Zoom optimized office backdrop. And that is only the office. I have roughly 55 days until I move out and before you ask why I am already packing let me explain something important about myself.

I am a maximalist.

Not in a casual way. In a I have an ungodly amount of artwork, crystals, plants, and a genuinely unexplainable collection of weird sticks I found at various points in my life and decided I should keep kind of way. People find things and think that is so Tabitha and they are correct and they bring them to me and I love every single one. My home has been fully lived in for six years and this past year especially we spread ourselves into every single room. I have supplies for hosting bingo night for 100 people. I have everything required to throw a full high tea. Because what if I needed to? You never know.

Moving has also forced me to come face to face with another truth about myself. I am an aspirational buyer. A one time use acquirer. I have looked certain items in the eye and had to ask myself with complete honesty, will I love this stick 2,000 miles away? Is this worth paying to have moved across the country?

Thus began mission declutter and it has been something else entirely.

I have been working through the house in chunks, tackling random cabinets, closets, and rooms rather than trying to do it all at once, because looking at the whole thing at once makes me want to lie down on the floor and not get up. The hardest spots were my bookcase and my closet. Texas requires a whole specific lifestyle of clothing and standing in front of my cowboy boots, the ones with the bottle cap opener on them that I have had since the early 2010s, and saying goodbye to cowgirl Tabitha was a moment. I took my closet down by two thirds. Between me and my kid we had an entire wall of bookshelves and we had to be honest about what we would actually read again versus what we were keeping out of sentiment or guilt.

I have been hauling boxes of glassware to donate to rage rooms which feels poetic. Consigning and donating clothes. And leaving books in the little free libraries scattered around town, which is harder than it sounds because you have to be very careful. You cannot exactly leave your smut novels at a children's library. Placement requires strategy.

And somewhere in the middle of all of this, I started to feel something unexpected.

Lighter.

Not just physically, though getting rid of the random stick collection does help. But genuinely lighter in a way I did not anticipate. Like the act of deciding what actually comes with me into this next chapter is doing something beyond just making boxes easier to carry.

Now here is where this becomes a business conversation because it always does.

I am doing all of this while running my business. While my kid is in the middle of award season and finals. While trying to protect my time with the friends and family I am leaving behind. While preparing for my final nonprofit fundraiser which is happening in less than a month. The question I kept coming back to was how do I do a cross-country move while running a business, plus a road trip across America with my kid and my dogs, without completely losing my mind?

And this is not the part where I tell you I hired professional movers or built out a team of employees or decided to sell everything and start over. First off, I got a quote on professional movers and WOW…what lucrative business. Even the girl on the phone felt awkward quoting me. Plus, I am too much of a hands on person for any of that right now.

What I am doing is working in one area at a time before moving to the next. It keeps me from feeling like I have been packing the kitchen for seventeen years. I started with decor first because decor is genuinely the worst thing to pack and I wanted it behind me. Wrapping my crow lamp was an experience I would not wish on anyone. Pairing socks was even more enjoyable.

But the biggest shift that has come out of all of this is one I did not see coming.

Boundaries.

Real ones. Not the kind I talked about having. The kind that are actually showing up in how I work right now. I have had to define my work time and my personal time in a way that does not let one eat the other, because right now if I do not protect both nothing gets done well. 

And that has made me so much more intentional about the clients I am taking on. I always watch for red flags but I have also historically been someone who will take on a client who needs more hand holding because I genuinely want to help them get there. And sometimes that is beautiful. And sometimes it costs me more than I realized because the boundaries start stretching and stretching until there are no boundaries at all.

That is not a habit I am bringing to Portland. New era, Tabitha protects her time the same way she protects a client's strategy. With intention and without apology.

I am also, for maybe the first time in my life, saying yes when people offer help. My kid is older and fully in on the chaos. Friends have offered hands and I have let them through the door even when the house is not perfect, which it absolutely is not, and honestly the neighbors probably just think I have a drinking problem because I keep disappearing into the house with liquor boxes. (The BEST packing boxes ever!)

But here is the thing that keeps hitting me while I pack.

I could have done so many of these things years ago. Held boundaries. Accepted help. Let go of what was not serving me. The decluttering is literal but it is also very much not.

People talk about entrepreneurship as a healing journey. Personal development on steroids. And I have nodded along to that for years because it is true. Entrepreneurship will absolutely find every crack in your foundation and shine a light directly into it.

But moving? Moving picks up where entrepreneurship left off and says hold my beer.

I was standing in my closet wrapping baby heads (don’t worry, their dolls) wondering why it took boxes and bubble wrap and a cross-country destination to teach me things I thought I already knew. Turns out I knew them intellectually. The move is making me actually live them.

The revelations just keep coming. That is the thing nobody warns you about. You think you are just packing boxes and you end up accidentally doing the work.

So here is my question for you.

What would you let go of, physically, professionally, or personally, if you knew something better was waiting on the other side?

I will be talking through all of it, the business stuff, the big life stuff, and everything in between, on my podcast. And if you have been around long enough to remember when Slight Look lived on YouTube, well. Welcome back. She has been through some things and she has a lot to say.