Moving to Denver: The Full Story
I moved from Arizona to Denver just over a month ago, which means I’m no stranger to the question, “So what brought you to Colorado?”
I’m never quite sure how to answer that.
Do I tell them what I want to believe myself? That my decision to move to Colorado was based on a trip I took to visit some friends for New Year’s 2025, where I fell in love with the state and all its natural beauty?
It’s not a total lie, but I can still feel my reporting professors scowling at me from beyond the astral plane when I say it.
Or do I tell them the much messier, more complicated truth?
That I happened to apply for a job in Denver in a desperate bid to get out of Arizona, and maybe put my foot in my mouth when I said I could make a three-week transition period work?
I had to put my money where my mouth was, and I did in fact make it work more elegantly than I ever thought possible. But that doesn’t mean it was easy.
I will fully admit that in the twenty-six years I’ve been on Planet Earth, I’ve always been more of a dreamer than a doer. There’s nothing more satisfying to me than imagining my life if only it were different - a different job, a different city, a different personality - anything but where I currently am and what I’m currently doing.
But the dream of leaving Arizona has always been a bit different for me.
Ever since elementary school, when I learned that the map of Arizona was just a small part of the rest of the world and that I could leave Arizona, I made that my entire life goal. There was a whole planet out there to explore, and most of it wasn’t a desert that hit 120 degrees Fahrenheit in the summers? There was color in more than just the sunset, and landscapes that weren’t fifty shades of beige?
SIGN ME UP.
The chance to finally leave my hometown and home state to see the world was one of the biggest reasons I ended up joining the Navy right out of high school - that and the fact that I was smart enough to get into college but not quite enough for a full-ride scholarship, but that’s another story for another day.
When I ended up getting med-boarded out (again, another story for another day), I was only nineteen, so I made the drive with my mom’s help from South Carolina all the way back to Arizona.
From 2020 through 2024, I tried to move out of my parents’ three more times, each time ending up right back in my childhood home.
I’m incredibly grateful and incredibly lucky that I could move back in with my parents and that they could support me while I worked and paid off debt I had accrued through bad decisions, but most of the time I felt like a trapped animal snarling and clawing at the walls of an enclosure.
The enclosure was wide open, though. I was an adult. I could leave at any time, really. But the world outside the enclosure was much more dangerous - and deep down I knew I was absolutely not prepared for it.
Willow Springs Lake, only a two hour drive northeast, became a place of solace for me. Any time I was stressed, or angry, or frustrated, or got into a fight with my parents, I would grab my camera gear, throw it into the passenger seat of my car, and drive up to the woods, blasting whatever playlist I had made that felt relevant.
I would wager that most of the 120,000 miles on my car are from making that drive repeatedly in 2020 and the ensuing years, especially towards the end of 2024 and early 2025 when my parents retired and put the house on the market as they prepared to move to North Carolina.
I ended up moving in with my grandma who lived down the street for a few months until I found an affordable enough apartment closer to work, then helped her with moving out to a house near my parents in North Carolina.
It wasn’t long before I realized that with my parents and grandma gone to North Carolina, there was nothing holding me in Arizona anymore.
The enclosure wasn’t just wide open - it was gone. I had waited too long, and now I had to make sense of the world on my own.
I chose to have a quarter-life crisis instead.
Here I was, with a college degree and eight years of being an adult under my belt, and I was still in the same place where I grew up. I had been running in circles, dreaming of leaving but never actually doing anything to achieve that goal.
Out of the blue, my YouTube recommendations spat out a video from The Ash Files, called “this is what change really feels like.”
I must have watched that video ten times over the course of a week. It kickstarted neurons I don’t think had ever fired before.
Around the same time, two powerful phrases entered my vernacular:
“You can just do things,” and
“No one is coming to save you, but no one is coming to stop you.”
My modest studio apartment in a decent area became a prison of my own making. My job became a means to an end; the passion for helping people get into photography transformed into a passion for getting the hell out of Arizona, at any cost.
There’s safety in dreaming, though. A dream is always illusory, and it can change on a whim. If you don’t like how things are going, you can simply wish it away and take things in a completely new direction.
Dreams aren’t susceptible to things like feasibility, or financial stability, or having the discipline to make them happen.
Real life is much more dangerous.
You can’t just change direction on a whim. You need plans, you need money, you need to be able to see it through without giving up when things don’t work out the way they did in your head.
Having dreams is important - nothing you want can happen without a dream first - but it’s also important to set goals to make those dreams happen, if you think they’re worth the effort.
So with the help of a therapist, I set a goal: Be out of Arizona by May of 2026, the point when my lease would be up for renewal.
I started with the goal of getting to Vancouver in British Columbia, Canada. Between my monthly disability pay and a little discipline, it was actually more affordable than Arizona, especially with the currency conversion being in favor of the U.S. dollar.
I booked a trip out there for my birthday - I had PTO, and it was a place I’d always wanted to visit. And it would be a great opportunity to scout the city to see just how livable it really was.
It was great, and I fell in love with Vancouver, but I quickly found out through researching the visa and immigration process that it was going to be less than possible within eight months.
So the goal changed, as they often do: instead of getting all the way to Vancouver, I would keep saving money for a student visa.
By the time February rolled around, though, I realized I still wanted out of Arizona. I could stay if I really had to, but I didn’t want to have to stay in Arizona anymore.
I started looking at the internal job portal, and saw openings all across the U.S. I threw my resumé into a few, including in Denver and in Oregon. I wasn’t expecting to hear back, of course, but it never hurts to try.
Of course, applying for several positions and then going on vacation for a four-day weekend wasn’t the greatest idea in the world. But when I got back, I had a week of interviews ahead of me.
(Personally, I absolutely hate interviewing for jobs. It feels like an agonizing game of social chess, where the slightest wrong move is an unrecoverable failure.)
And after the week of interviews, I had internally resigned myself to staying in Arizona for another year. It was already the middle of March, and I only had another week to let my apartment complex know if I intended to renew my lease.
When I interviewed for the Best Buy in Denver, I knew the manager I was talking to had trepidation about hiring someone currently in another state, but I talked a big game about having enough money and being fully prepared to move already.
“Ideally I would appreciate being able to start in May to have ample time for the move, but if you need me to start sooner I can absolutely make that happen,” I had said.
Spoiler alert: I had done zero research. I had no idea how much it would cost to move to Denver. I had no idea how much an apartment would cost. I also had no idea if I could actually make that happen.
So when he called me three hours later and offered me the position, of course I said yes with zero hesitation.
It was March 20th when I accepted the position, with a start date of April 19th.
With some serious help and advice from my friends and parents, I was able to order a U-Box and get most of my stuff shipped directly to Colorado. It was cheaper and easier to deal with than renting a truck, especially with gas prices the way they have been.
Over the course of the next several weeks, I made sure to clean my apartment and pack the remaining items I had into boxes that would fit in my car. Fortunately, nothing had to be thrown out for a lack of space.
It only took two days to drive to Colorado Springs. Two of my closest friends have a place they let me stay in while I looked for an apartment in Denver, something I’m incredibly grateful for.
Luckily it only took a few days for me to find a place and get approved, and I was able to move in on the 17th of April, which gave me a whopping two days to get unpacked and acclimated.
I’m still not sure how I got all of that done in less than a month, but it ended up working out perfectly.
I wish I could say it was an easy process, but I still left a lot behind. I may have hated the state of Arizona, but there’s a lot I do miss.
I miss my old coworkers. I miss my friends. I miss my hockey league more than anything.
Those relationships almost made Arizona bearable, and I knew I was going to miss them when I left, but knowing what’s going to happen doesn’t make it hurt any less.
It’s only been a month and I’m sure it’ll take time to keep adjusting, but I do feel homesick often.
It still feels like I’m going to wake up one morning and this entire move will have all been an elaborate fever dream.
But as long as I keep moving forward with intention, the future looks bright.
I live in Denver now, and I can’t wait to see everything that Colorado has to offer.