Finding a Reason to Stay

I’m a nomad at heart. I’ve moved around a lot, and I can always find a reason to leave.

What I didn’t expect this past year was to find a reason to stay.

About a year and a half ago, I moved to Boston for a job. But six months after I got here, I lost the job, and with it, my entire reason to be here.

Since I had gone to college in Boston several years ago, I’d already experienced living in this city, making me antsy to move on and try to make a new place my home.

But then I discovered a completely different reason to stay than the one that brought me here. (Life’s funny that way.)

While I was still at the job that brought me to Boston, one of my co-workers gave me a guest pass to his climbing gym. Though I’d tried climbing a handful of times before, this time something clicked, and I was suddenly obsessed.

I started climbing a few times a week, switching it up between a couple different climbing gyms because they were both equally far from where I lived.

When the lease on my original Boston apartment ended, I searched for a sublet in Somerville, just to be closer to Brooklyn Boulders.

I started climbing nearly every day. I also started taking yoga classes and fitness classes. And I started meeting new people and making friends with the familiar faces I saw every day.

This place is full of amazing humans who inspire me  – the people at the front desk who always greet me (and everyone who walks in) with such authentic enthusiasm, the route setters who constantly create new ways to play on the walls, the trainers who push us to be stronger, the crew that works hard to keep the space clean and beautiful, the awesome fellow climbers who support and encourage each other, and the true friends who I can always laugh with and talk to about anything.

Thanks to the people I’ve met here, I’ve gone sport climbing outside, learned how to do pull-ups, taken a salsa lesson, jumped off a ledge (while attached to an auto-belay), and even played Dungeons & Dragons for the first time ever.

Thanks to the encouragement of those same people, I’ve tried harder, tried things I thought I couldn’t do, learned to rest, learned to let go, become stronger, and become more vulnerable.

I’d be living a lesser life right now without the people I’ve met here.

So until I find a reason to move on, this is where you’ll find me. Home is where my people are, and my people are the wonderful passionate weirdos at BKB Somerville.