The most common question I get nowadays is “What are you doing after graduation?” The next question is usually “Where are you looking at living?”

Ah, another question I don’t know the answer to. I’m from LA county. Right now I think I would like to end up here eventually. The majority of my family is here, and I have strong emotional connections to the old parts of Southern California. But I’m also attracted to the thought of living somewhere different for a while.

Of course, having not lived anywhere else (except the North of England for a semester), I’m not sure where I’d want go. So I started by narrowing down where I think I am less likely to want to go.

I don’t think I want to move to somewhere sparsely populated. I’m young right now, and I want to move somewhere with people and energy and life all crammed in together. Eventually I realized I really just want a large, connected city. Maybe Boston, or Washington D.C., or San Francisco.

That realization actually helped a lot. Because I’m probably not going to move to a city without employment (I cold try, but it’s kind of tricky to live somewhere without income), I’m able to use my job search as a tool for scoping out cities. For example, I recently applied for a job in Washington D.C., that I would love to get, without knowing much about the city. Now I know that it’s apparently a very happening place for recent graduates, and that I have some connections to people who already live there. In short: it would be awesome. And I might not have looked without the job to push me to.

So I’m kind of letting fate play into my city search. Then comes the next problem: what about moving back?

I know that I only need to make a decision about the next year or so, but I can’t help worrying that I’ll build a life somewhere else just to start over by moving back to LA. That kind of scares me a bit. I know I won’t just lose my friends, but it’s hard thinking I might need to build my life twice. It would be so much easier to just stay in LA.

I’m not adverse to staying in Southern California, but I’ve decided I really need to not cut off the option of moving somewhere else for a fantastic job. This post doesn’t really have a solution; I don’t think the pulls to be at home and to explore the world are ever going to stop contradicting each other. It’s the familiar (and long-term goal) versus the unknown. Right now I think I need to do more exploring than long-term location building, if that makes sense. I’m young, and I feel that this is what this time is for.