The writer who moved to a Hallmark town

What it says

What kind of piece this is. It ran in an American lifestyle magazine and the genre is clear: a first-person narrative that draws lessons from personal experience and offers them to the reader. It addresses someone in the state the writer was in when she moved — mid-twenties, spent, at a break point. And the line it follows is that moving to the right place did the healing.

In her mid-twenties, as the pandemic was settling down, the writer goes through a hard breakup. Grieving the man she loved, she also loses the apartment they shared; she moves back into her childhood bedroom for a while and starts scanning cheap flats with fast move-in dates. The two feelings she copes with worst arrive at once: instability and uncertainty.

She ends up renting in a small town at the edge of the woods in New Jersey — a place straight out of a Hallmark film. Her college-era dream had been the opposite: living in a big city, walking to a journalism job with a coffee in hand. She lived part of that, commuting from New Jersey into Manhattan every morning. But for someone easily overstimulated and prone to anxiety, the pace didn’t hold — after a few years, she says, her nervous system was spent.

First lesson: wanting peace is not a shortcoming. Her sister-in-law predicted she would move out within a year, that the flat would keep reminding her of the lowest point of her life. The opposite happened. She rises with the sun, brews coffee, eases into the day with a book or gentle yoga. Then she walks downtown and writes at the same coffee shop, where the owners and baristas know her order by heart. Once a month the full moon comes through the skylight in her bedroom. Those small, intimate moments, she says, healed her both from the breakup years earlier and from countless stresses since.

Second lesson: you are never too old to find your people. When she arrived she knew almost nobody in the area; childhood and college friends were scattered across the country. Going through a breakup in a small, quiet town left her feeling thoroughly alone. Deciding she had nothing left to lose, she put herself out there: small talk with shop owners and their stories, the town’s writing community, events at the bookstore on the main strip, yoga classes where she pushed herself to talk to the other women. Years on she has a circle of familiar faces — the chatty town grandpa, an empowering yoga instructor, the elderly neighbour downstairs. She doesn’t claim the same community is impossible in a big city, but says there is a particular warmth to a place where everyone knows your name and your story.

Third lesson: make room for what you love. At the journalist’s pace she had almost no time for herself or her interests. The town returned her to childhood passions: creative writing, reading, singing, time outdoors, baking. Around her she saw people who had followed their own plans and started something — a man who moved from abroad and opened a coffee shop, a woman running her own flower shop, an artist who founded the town’s first bookstore, which has a separate space downstairs for writing events and open mics.

A few years after moving she left her full-time job for freelance writing. She can now pick her clients and her projects, carve out time for books and poetry, and no longer worries about climbing a corporate ladder. That is the irony she ends on: her career, she says, has never gone better.

The account above is our own rendering of the piece, not a translation or reproduction. The original text is at the link in the source box.