I uploaded a life update video to my YouTube channel recently, and I wanted to write a companion post for it. I moved to a nice apartment a few days ago, after three years of living next to a very large university campus.

When I moved to Columbus, I didn’t give myself enough time to do a proper “apartment hunt”- I had to make a decision within one week, and not having any friends or family in this new city added to the challenge. I bet on there being plenty of housing being available near a campus area, so I set out to search for one near the campus of the Ohio State University. Sure enough, I found a few and made a quick decision. It really was quick- I took a Greyhound bus from Indianapolis to Columbus in the morning, looked at about 5 apartments, picked one, gave them my application, and took the evening bus back to Indianapolis the same day. I moved to that apartment about a week and a half later.

I was just out of grad school at that point, so all my stuff fit into the back of a minivan. I moved once, and I had a brief idea in my head that I’d move into a nicer apartment sometime the subsequent year. Well, life happened, and I ended up staying there for three years.

The apartment itself was good enough- the building was constructed in the 1950s and the interior was renovated, so in places, it was retrofitted to be contemporary, but the main framework was more mid-century. The real issue I had was the location. In my hurry to find a place to live, I had forgotten to have a look at the surroundings. I’d chosen an apartment with windows facing a busy street, right next to at least 5 campus bars, and within walking distance from a gigantic football stadium.

For the next 3 years, I couldn’t escape the vagaries of campus life, even though I’d already graduated. I heard the drunken revelry of loud college students. I heard the babbling rants of drunk drifters and vagabonds. I heard every passing car on the street, and every skateboard on the sidewalk. I heard the game-day tailgaters and their loudspeakers blaring country music and top40 pop from morning through the night, every boisterous shout of “O-H” followed by every equally enthusiastic “I-O!”. I even heard the wannabe boy racers with their speaker systems cranked up to the highest bass setting, and my ancient windows rattled to the beats of trap music each time those speaker-towers-on-wheels passed by.

Despite all these sounds and the resultant disturbances in my sleep pattern, I continued living there, for a myriad of reasons. One was laziness. Every time renewal season came around, I began to half-heartedly look for places to live, but was discouraged by the lack of options in the time frame I wanted and was also discouraged by how I’d have to pay more than what I was paying at the time. Then there were also all the things I’d have to do, like move or change utilities, and of course, move all my stuff, which I had much more of and wouldn’t just fit in the back of a minivan anymore.

Another reason was that I had a protracted visa change process from a student to a work visa, which really pushed plans of moving several months down the road, and I had to stay a little longer as a result.

I ended up just waiting till the decision was made for me- campus apartments are highly sought after by students, and they immediately snapped mine up after I didn’t renew my lease in a few days after the renewal period started. That’s how I finally set in motion the plan to move to a new place- something I’d had in my to-do list since 2017.

I realized how overstated my fears were about the logistical aspects of the move after I began the process a few months ago. Porting over utilities was mostly online and a bit of being on hold on a customer service call. Canceling services wasn’t as much of a headache as I thought it would be.

The actual physical move wasn’t bad either- I was able to get help from a couple of friends (thankfully I was able to make friends and luckily some friends from grad school have moved to the Columbus area since I first arrived here), and renting a moving truck was simple enough.

What I got from all this was a great sense of “Why didn’t I do this sooner?”. Hindsight is always 20-20, but this does tell me I need to stop thinking of hypotheticals that are in my own head sometimes, some unknown obstacles that exist only in my mind. Perhaps I should stop waiting for decisions to be made for me, perhaps I should stop simply continuing to exist in the status quo because of the comfort that exists in certainty and deferring decisions and actions.

In the end, I’m just glad to finally able to live out a desire I have had for a long time. A nice apartment, a lot more peace and quiet, and the fact that it makes me feel like I’m more of a “big boy”, now that I’m completely untethered from the campus lifestyle.