16 Things That Happen When You Move From The Midwest To The East Coast

1. You will realize that the East Coast isn’t as rude as everyone says it is.

2. That being said, when you go back home, you will be shocked at how nice everyone is. You will drop a mitten in a grocery store and three people will chase you down to give it back. Not a group of three people. Three separate individuals.

3. Your new friends will only call you the name of your home state.

4. People back home will act like your life is from Sex And The City. You will have to awkwardly admit that the most exciting event in your life is when your local bodega has Ben & Jerry’s Half Baked in stock.

5. You will feel like a broke plebian every time go out in your new neighborhood, because who can afford a $12 drink? You will feel like a Mr. Moneybags every time you go to the bar while home for Thanksgiving, because who can refuse a round of $2 shots?

6. After every bad OkCupid date, you will secretly wonder what your life would be like if you had just married that weird kid that had a crush on you in middle school. You could be happy in the suburbs with 3 kids already, right?

7. You will see more people wearing a winter coat on a 50 degree day on the east coast than those wearing a winter coat on a 10 degree day in the Midwest.

8. You will get into at least one drunken bar discussion in which you will try to convince your new friends that [insert your home state’s residents] are the original hipsters, because they liked flannel/beards/PBR before it was cool.

9. People will come up to you at a bar and ask you, point-blank, if you are from the Midwest because Game Recognizes Game.

10. Your mother will ask you to move home every time you GChat. She will bribe you with home cooked meals, promised shopping trips, and even try to guilt you by reminding you that your father “isn’t getting any younger.”

11. Within the first few months of moving to your new city, you will find your home team’s sports bar.

12. But, you will be annoyed when your friends come to visit you and want to go to that bar. Like, why would you want to see a Packers bar in NYC, when you live in that state 365 days a year?!

13. Back home, you thought that Trader Joe’s was pretentious and kind of expensive. Now, you will be able to get in and out of that bitch in 20 minutes during Monday-Post-Work-Rush-Hour because, let’s be real, you’ve memorized their inventory layout.

14. You will wear your home state sports team t-shirt out to the bar. And dudes will hit on you because of it.

15. Your new friends might think you’re a bit of a lush before you explain to them that no, this is the right way to make and consume brandy old-fashioneds.

16. You’ll feel like an outsider in your new city, and you’ll feel out of place when you visit home. As you make new friends and become homesick, you’ll wonder if you’re “forgetting your roots” or simply trying to make a life for yourself. You will want simultaneously to move back to your hometown and to never go back again. You will realize that being adult means moving forward, there will be growing pains, and ultimately, you have to do what makes you happy, even if it’s a thousand miles away from the place you once called home.