I Moved to Arizona Alone. Here’s What Starting Over Taught Me

Somewhere in the middle of packing my Mazda 3, I had to decide what deserved one of the very limited square feet available for my new life. Clothes made the cut. Shoes made the cut. The usual things a person might need after moving 2,000 miles from home made the cut. So did eleven or twelve lacrosse sticks, because apparently I believed I was relocating an entire women’s lacrosse program by myself.

It was 2011, and I was moving from Maryland to Arizona. My mom came with me for the two-day drive, which meant I wasn’t technically alone in the car, but I was alone in the decision. We stopped in Oklahoma City to see family and then kept heading west, leaving behind every place that had ever felt familiar. I remember thinking I would stay in Arizona for a couple of years, do something different, have a few stories to tell, and eventually return to the East Coast.

That was fifteen years ago, so clearly the temporary relocation went well.

Before Arizona, most of my life had followed a route that made sense. I grew up primarily in Maryland, went to South Carolina for college, moved to Virginia to coach college lacrosse, and eventually returned to the Washington, D.C. area for a job with a government contractor. I had a stable career and was still coaching, which was the part of my life that had always felt most like me.

None of it had come easily. My parents divorced when I was young, and I grew up in a single-father household where we did not have a lot of money. I took out student loans, earned academic and athletic scholarships to play lacrosse in college, and worked because I needed to. There were times my bank account was overdrawn and plenty of times when failure was not a cute opportunity for personal growth. It meant not being able to pay for something.

By my mid-twenties, I had done what I had spent years trying to do. I had graduated, found a good job, and built a stable life. I was proud of that. I was also beginning to understand that achieving the next sensible thing and choosing the life you actually want are not always the same thing.

There wasn’t one dramatic moment when I threw a coffee cup across a conference room and announced that I was moving west. I just had a persistent feeling that there had to be more than repeating the same week indefinitely. I wanted to explore. I wanted to find out who I was somewhere that didn’t already know me. When the opportunity came to coach at Phoenix Country Day School, I decided to take it.

I knew one person in Arizona. From Maryland, one person sounded reasonable. You only need one person, right? Shortly after I arrived, that person moved away, and I learned that “knowing one person” and “having a life somewhere” are two very different things.

When brave feels a lot like lonely

If this were the polished movie version of my story, Arizona would have rewarded my courage immediately. I would have stepped out of the car beneath a perfect desert sunset, felt the warm breeze on my face, and known I was exactly where I belonged.

The real version involved a recent breakup, the worst boss I have ever had, and my first Phoenix summer. I do not know who decided “dry heat” was reassuring, but a hair dryer is also dry heat and I do not want to live inside one.

More than anything, I was lonely. My family was 2,000 miles away. I knew people through lacrosse, but I didn’t yet know anyone deeply enough to have the kind of person you call when everything falls apart. In your twenties, it is possible to be surrounded by people and still feel like nobody really knows where you are, both literally and emotionally. Everything in Arizona looked different, felt different, and worked differently. I kept wondering whether I had made a brave decision or just a very expensive mistake with excellent scenery.

Lacrosse gave me somewhere to belong before Arizona itself did. My players, fellow coaches, and the families around the program became my first Arizona family. I coached at Phoenix Country Day for two years and loved it. Later, I took a higher-paying job that made the afternoon practice schedule impossible, so I moved to Horizon High School and kept coaching. Jobs changed. Teams changed. Lacrosse remained the thread that connected me to people and gave structure to a life that otherwise felt unsettled.

Even with that community, I considered going home more than once. I would get close to leaving, and then some small obligation would keep me in Arizona for a few more days. One week, I had already committed to coaching a clinic. The next, someone reached out about a job interview. Then there would be another practice, another opportunity, or another reason it didn’t make sense to pack the car just yet.

I used to think big life changes happened because people made one fearless decision and never looked back. Mine happened because I kept delaying my escape by approximately one week at a time. There was no swelling soundtrack. There was mostly me thinking, “Well, I can’t dramatically flee the state on Thursday because I said I’d coach that clinic.”

Eventually, one more week became one more season. One more season became a life.

Becoming a mother, and finding Arizona with her

In 2013, I found out I was pregnant. It was unplanned, unexpected, and one more reminder that life was not particularly interested in the timeline I might have chosen for it. My then-partner and I decided to have the baby, got married, and moved to Prescott for his job.

Prescott did not feel like home to me right away. I was a new mother in another new town, and I no longer had lacrosse as a built-in community or outlet. New motherhood can make your world feel enormous and incredibly small at the same time. You are responsible for an entire human life, but some days your own world extends only as far as the next feeding, the next nap, or the next desperate attempt to leave the house with everything a baby apparently needs to survive a ninety-minute outing.

So my daughter and I began going places. Prescott became our starting point for weekend trips around Northern Arizona. When she was little, we explored together because I needed to get out of the house and see something beyond the routine in front of me. As she got older, the trips became more adventurous. I went with her, with friends, and sometimes alone. I returned to Sedona over and over. Slowly, the part of Arizona that had once felt foreign began to feel like mine.

One of my clearest memories from those years is taking my daughter to the lava tubes near Flagstaff when she was around three. I carried her in a backpack at first because the route is cold, wet, dark, and uneven. It is not exactly a toddler-friendly stroll through a botanical garden. She wanted down anyway.

Every parent knows the calculation that happens in a moment like that. You look at the terrain. You look at your tiny, wildly confident child. You consider every possible injury. Then you realize she is going to keep asking until one of you loses the will to continue, and it probably will not be her.

I let her walk.

She climbed through the lava tubes herself. She got cold and dirty. At one point she scraped her knee, but she stood back up and kept going. I watched her move through that cave with the absolute certainty of a three-year-old who had never considered that she might not be capable, and I remember thinking, “Oh my gosh. That’s my girl.”

I was proud of her, but the moment reached deeper than that. All of those small weekend adventures suddenly felt worthwhile. We were not just filling empty Saturdays or finding something to do in a place that had not felt like home. We were learning how to meet the world together. She was discovering that hard things could still be fun, that getting dirty was survivable, and that a scraped knee did not have to end the story. I was learning some of the same things, although I had a few more years of overthinking to work through.

Exploration became part of how I mothered and part of how I found myself again. It was not always a massive trip or an epic view. Sometimes it was simply choosing not to stay home, even when staying home would have been easier. That choice added up.

Building when there was no solid ground

Years later, life asked me to start over again, this time with considerably more responsibility and significantly less room for error. In 2020, I was going through a divorce. My ex-husband had moved out. I had been a stay-at-home mother for several years, and I suddenly needed to earn an income while caring for two children at home. My daughter was in first grade, my son was a toddler, and COVID turned school into a collection of video calls that required far more parental involvement than anyone had advertised.

I was trying to keep a first-grader focused on a screen, care for a small child, process the end of my marriage, and figure out how to support us. At the same time, I had decided to get into weddings. I filmed my first one on March 14, 2020, just days before everything shut down.

It was impeccable timing. If I ever write a business book, the first chapter will be called Launch Your Wedding Company Immediately Before Weddings Become Illegal.

There was no pause in which life settled down and gave me the emotional space, financial cushion, and uninterrupted childcare necessary to reinvent myself. I had to build while the ground was still moving. Couples were canceling or postponing weddings, so I began offering livestreaming. They could still get married, and the people who could not be there could watch from home. Not many people around me were offering that service yet, and it gave me a way to keep working when the business I had planned no longer made sense.

I did not feel fully prepared. I did not wake up every morning overflowing with confidence and positive affirmations. I was tired, scared, and responsible for people other than myself. I also knew that waiting for certainty would not pay the bills. So I learned what I needed to learn, solved the problem in front of me, and then solved the next one.

That season changed the way I understood my own capability. For years, some version of “I’m not sure what I’m doing” had been running quietly in the background of my life. During COVID, I did not have the luxury of indulging it. I had children depending on me and work that needed to be done. Over time, the voice changed. I stopped asking whether I was the kind of person who could build a successful business and recognized that I was already doing it.

I did not build after the ground stopped shaking. I built while it was crumbling, and the business grew because I was willing to adapt before I felt ready.

There was never going to be a roadmap

Since that first drive west, I have lived in Phoenix, Prescott, Sedona, and Flagstaff. I have become a mother of three. I have built businesses, coached athletes, photographed the night sky, fallen in love again, helped create a nonprofit, and started over more than once. I have worn so many hats that, at this point, they probably need their own closet.

None of those chapters arrived in the correct order. There was no master plan connecting the government contractor in Maryland to the lacrosse coach in Phoenix, the new mother exploring Northern Arizona, the filmmaker building a wedding business during COVID, or the woman I am now. I can make the story look tidy in hindsight, but it did not feel tidy while I was living it.

That is why I do not believe there is a roadmap to success, or to life. There is experience, instinct, work, and the next decision. Sometimes you know exactly what you want. Sometimes you only know that the life you are living no longer fits. Either way, clarity usually comes after you begin moving, not before.

I did not have wealthy parents, a trust fund, or a perfect fallback plan. I am not saying that because struggle automatically makes a story more meaningful. I am saying it because fear is logical when a decision has real consequences. Moving to Arizona was scary. Staying was scary. Starting a business in 2020 was scary. Being capable did not mean I was never afraid. It meant fear did not get to make every decision for me.

If you are sitting in a life that looks fine on paper but feels too small, I am not going to tell you to quit your job this afternoon, pack twelve lacrosse sticks, and drive to Arizona. That would be strangely specific advice, and your car may not have the cargo space.

I will tell you that you do not need to see the entire route before taking the next step. You can make the call, submit the application, try the thing, take the drive, or keep one promise to yourself. You can stay one more week and see what appears. The first step does not have to look brave or impressive from the outside. It only has to be honest.

I moved to Arizona believing it might be a two-year chapter. Fifteen years later, I am still here. Not because the choice immediately delivered a perfect life, and not because I always knew where I was going. I stayed because each version of me made the next decision she could live with, and those decisions slowly built a life I could not have imagined from Maryland.

I was never waiting for someone to hand me a map. I was learning that I could make my own.