Rural to City: Overcoming Anxieties About Living in A Completely New Place

From the moment I was born until I left for college, I lived my entire life in the same small town. With a population of 362 (yes, really), the village of Webster sat inconspicuously in the Smoky mountains of western North Carolina, and I within it for 18 years. When I moved to Chicago to attend the University of Chicago, I experienced a great cultural shock that I was not prepared for. The loud, bustling, and continuous movements of the city were exciting but also incredibly daunting to me who had never experienced it. Everything was different compared to my home in Appalachia, from the air to the people there was an endless number of differences.

With my excitement and wonder also came a feeling of alienation. Living in one place your whole life meant never really having to make new friends. Everyone I graduated high school with I had known since elementary school, a lot even before that. So I found myself alone in a big city without the skills I needed to reach out to and connect with others, an issue made worse by the Coronavirus pandemic that was sweeping through the nation at the time. The absence of O-Week activities and in person classes further created a barrier between my self and the social life that I lacked and made it significantly harder to make friends.

Another challenge I faced was my ignorant fear of the city itself. I was terrified to venture out into the city, completely certain I would be robbed, murdered, or worse. My feelings were born of ignorance and the rhetoric that was preached to me by those in my community when I decided I wanted to leave. They told me that it was not a matter of if, but a matter of when those things would happen. It took me about a month to even leave campus, and another month to leave Hyde Park.

A groupchat that I was in planned a trip downtown one afternoon and I decided I was feeling brave enough to go as it was a large group and I felt I would have “safety in numbers”. It was on this trip that I ended up making friends who would stick with me through my first year of college. I also gained valuable information as to navigating public transport in a large city, which I had never experienced before and was even more terrified of than anything else. For me this trip was a big deal, I was going downtown with a bunch of people I had never met – a huge risk in my mind at the time – and my thoughts were racing about the many things that could go wrong. Everything was, of course, totally fine in the end and I had a wonderful time despite having to leave early for a prior engagement.

Many of the issues I faced were due to fear and anxiety around being in a new place for the first time, strengthened by my own ignorance as to what the city was really like. I felt alienated and alone and without the skills I need to make friends or venture off campus. But it was only when I embraced these fears and decided to take risks, as I saw them, that I connected with others and experienced the true beauty of the city. I still missed my home a lot, but it was this first step – which felt like a leap to me – that allowed me to experience the city and curb my fears and anxieties.

By Sallie Hinkle