Confessions of a serial mover

Always moving, never arriving

Last time I moved house, I had a mental breakdown. Not a frazzled mum moment, either. Total collapse. The kind where I sent the kids away, saw an emergency psychiatrist, and couldn’t get out of bed. I put it down to burnout: work, parenting, relationships, life. The move was just one stressor on a teetering stack of stress.

But I’ve just moved house again, and now I’m not so sure.

In the last three weeks, I’ve been swept along in a familiar surge. I’ve spent late nights painting, sorting, and putting together flat-pack furniture. There’s a low pressure, a gripe in my belly, to SORT THINGS OUT, get them right, make the house feel good. Underneath the nesting, there are jolts of panic. Moments of loneliness, grief. A blankness where my hands don’t look like mine anymore, my new bedroom a foreign place.

These are very old feelings, made to feel new.

In my 36 years, I’ve moved 36 times. I’ve lived in houses for as long as 4 years, and as little as 4 weeks, not counting nights as an unhoused teenager where I crashed on couches or slept rough. I assumed I’d be immune to this by now - before we shifted, I was more worried about the cat’s feelings than my own wellbeing! But looking back on that breakdown now, my immune system might not be as strong as I thought.

Even a one-off move is hard. There’s grief, even when you’re upgrading. Stress, even when it’s planned. Loss, even when you’re choosing it. But when it’s a pattern - when you’re constantly uprooting, replanting, trying to grow again - it can rewrite you.

In a move, daily life is recoded. The comfort of autopilot stays in the old house, but the load comes with you. There are still dishes to wash, bins to put out, but now there’s friction in everything. Where do the tea towels go? Which switch does what? What day is recycling? Making toast becomes orienteering. Where did you put the peanut butter? Is this the right spot for the jug? The unfamiliar turns to fatigue.

And then the real questions creep in: Are you the same person in this house, with the same habits and patterns, or will you become someone new now?

…Probably not. But you’ll feel like it, as you ask different questions. Filling your space with you isn’t about where the furniture goes. Getting it right means asking How do I live? Which of my things do I really need? How much TV do I watch? Do I even use these bathroom products? WHO AM I HERE, AND WHO HAVE I ALWAYS BEEN?

Our new home has a beautiful view. Before we arrived, my subconscious tied it to a sense of calm, escape, respite. A holiday vibe, like a hotel room with a nice balcony. But a few days in a hotel is nothing like relocating your world, is it? I didn’t arrive here with a suitcase but a whole life stuffed into boxes, scattered, hopeful, and messy.

The traces of the last people are everywhere. What did they use this cupboard for? What do they have against overhead lights? The smells are off. The shadows fall in new places. I don’t know how to live here yet. I reach for something that isn’t there, or doesn’t fit, or isn’t me anymore.

Putting yourself and your things in a new environment is a quandary of sorts. You find yourself wondering: what needs to change about the space to accommodate you - and what needs to change about you to fit the space? Everywhere you go, there you are – sure. But you are not the same you in every place. Work You and Pub You speak differently. Friend You and Family You love differently. Last House You and This House You are not the same.

As a kid, most of my moves weren’t just to a new house; they were to a new life. A new town. A new school. Lost family. Lost relationships. Lost history. Loss. In foster care, it meant new rules, new bedrooms, new housemates, new parents, new expectations.

Now, even when I’m standing still, I’m moving. Serial Mover is part of my identity. I restructure my work. Relaunch my ideas. Pivot just when something starts to work. I call it growth. Post on Substack about the beauty of reinvention. Delight in the sense of progress. Every move feels real, important, and necessary. My fingers tingle at the prospect of shutting things down, throwing things out, and sorting through accumulated waste. Improve. TIghten. Refresh. Every time, I believe this will fix it. This house. This programme. This routine. This promise to solve the problem of me.

Place and identity are connected in powerful ways. Local government knows this better than anyone. How people feel in and about their neighbourhoods affects how they behave, how safe they feel, and how connected they become. Councils, our guardians of the commons, placeshape, blurring the lines between policy and psychology. Change the place, change the person.

This makes moving - especially when it’s frequent or forced - much more than a logistical exercise. Moving is existential. It scrambles the routines that reinforce our identity and forces us to become someone slightly different.

And it’s not the same for everyone. There’s a class layer here, too. Moving by choice is not the same as moving because of eviction, job loss, divorce, or foster care. Moving between rentals at a landlord’s whim is not the same as buying a house. Shifting house means shifting lives, and it’s not always to something better.

Housing insecurity is a key predictor of shitty outcomes across almost every area of life – education, health, employment, and belonging. We get sicker. We feel sadder. We do worse in school. We find it hard to keep social ties. The admin is a nightmare. Chronic stress from uncertain living arrangements is a blinking red light, and many people in our community have to sleep with the light on. In New Zealand, one in six renters moved last year. Māori and Pasifika families face disproportionately high rates of housing instability. These aren’t neutral statistics; they are social and economic indicators that compound harm and make hard lives harder.

This move, my latest, is a good one. It is in the same area, in a wonderful home we have chosen with hope, happiness, and delight. The kids stay at the same schools and keep the same friends. We have the same general rhythm. I am moving on my own terms… and yet, somehow, I’m not just making this move. I’m bringing every other house, every other move, every earlier version of me along for the ride. I don’t consciously think this, but it’s there, lingering underneath. The sense that everything is temporary. That I should keep things light, in case we have to leave.

I come from a long line of working-class women with clean floors and chaotic lives: tidy homes and thin margins. For us, home isn’t just about place. It’s how we understand ourselves. We nest, fuss, and fix. We control our environment when everything else feels out of reach. My impulse to sort things out and get things right isn’t about the anal or the aesthetic. It’s at the heart of how I understand my worth, value, and job as a mother, carer, and provider.

I painted my daughter’s room until 2am this week. The house needs to be safe, or nothing will be. To be right, for the rest to follow. To work, so the rest of us can.

And in a world where our kitchen tables are our workplace, it feels more urgent than ever. Like many women juggling the impossible, I face a constant pull between putting a load of washing on and getting my work done. As I write this sentence, I smell something weird from the kitchen. I’m fighting the urge to run the Insinkerator. And now that I’ve written that sentence, I’m going to do it.

(Done. Still a weird smell. Further investigation required.)

And with all of this said, my mind starts to wander. What does “home” mean now anyway - in late-stage capitalism, with its blurred boundaries and constant pings and demands? When care, control, creativity and commerce all live in the same private-public-private domain. When our vacuum cleaners map our houses, to sell our information to advertisers? Where we blur our backgrounds on Zoom calls, swap popping in for a cup of tea for scrolling a social feed, check emails on the toilet and group our books by colour for a visual pop? What is home, now, when our wellbeing, worth, and work have all moved into the spare room?

I don’t know. There are lots of things that I’m much less sure about than I was when I started writing this. Things like:

Who are we, really, without our routines to tell us what’s next?

What happens to a person, a life, or a community in constant beta?

What part of ourselves are we trying to unlock, to reach, with the next move?

I don’t know, man.

That smell might be in the bin, actually. I’ll have a look.

Til next week,

AM