Moving... Again?

This is Part I of the author's look at the rigors of moving for a broadcast journalism career. Part II is here .

People often ask me if I grew-up here in Washington state. No, I explain, I targeted the Pacific Northwest for jobs after grad school because I knew this was the place. This was the place from which I'd never want to move.

I'm tired of moving.

There was moving to DC during college for internships at CNN and Dispatch Broadcast Group . There was moving to Anderson, South Carolina, after college for my first real TV news job. Plus, moving to Greenville, SC, for the same station because that's where the great stories and more accepting people were.

Then there was my move to Anchorage, Alaska, in the first iteration of my Eat, Pray, Love adventures. After that, it was back to South Carolina to help launch a new NBC affiliate in Myrtle Beach, where I anchored mornings. And let's not forget Cincinnati, where I realized I'd had enough. At the same time, I was going through one of those relationship breakups that leaves you thoroughly gutted.

I was breaking-up with daily journalism as he was breaking-up with me.

It was a lot.

I decided to move to Shenzhen, the Silicon Valley of China, to film a documentary on the widening chasm between the mainland's super rich entrepreneurs and supremely poor farmers. To pay for food and rent, I taught English to some of the best humans I've ever met. The adolescents' and young adults' willingness to be vulnerable in sessions with me and share some of the most intimate details of their lives, including a boy who was brutally beaten at school because his peers perceived him as gay, convinced me that I wanted to be a therapist.

This was the second iteration of my Eat, Pray, Love adventures.

My tiny studio apartment with its couch next to the bed sometimes still fills my thoughts as I try to drift off to sleep amid the humdrum of American anxieties. It might be my favorite apartment ever. From my window, I could see brilliant green mountains that lead to the bay separating Shenzhen from Hong Kong. Directly underneath me was a major highway where sirens signaled another ambulance taking a patient to the hospital down the block, all day and all night. And yet, out there, in that vast no-go zone between the mainland and Hong Kong, was silence and beauty.

Instead of cognitive dissonance, I felt strangely at peace.

But while I was there that spring and summer of 2014, the government cracked-down hard on Hong Kong journalists and publishers who dared set foot on the mainland. And they didn't keep it a secret. The Communist Party made sure the stories were given prominent coverage in the English-language edition of The People's Daily, copies of which were everywhere, including at my work.

Back in 2014, I usually had little difficulty using a VPN to get around China's Great Firewall and voraciously read the New York Times's coverage of what was happening.

Reading the Times online, I learned that a journalist with American citizenship was among those who'd been arrested. All were likely targeted because of their work on projects critical of China's new president, Xi Jinping, and other political elites.

It was becoming clear Xi would not be China's Gorbachev. Yet we had no idea he wanted to be its next Mao .

I no longer felt safe, and I headed back home.

By the time I landed in Chicago, I had changed as a person. Those students back at the Meten language training institute had changed me. My time alone as a foreigner in a city of 11 million had changed me.

I still remember sitting my parents down weeks after my jetlag wore-off and explaining that I wanted to apply to grad school to become a mental health therapist. I wasn't married at the time. But by the look on their faces, you would've thought I'd announced I was getting a divorce.

I was done moving. I was done chasing the job that was supposed to get me to that job that would supposedly be the launching pad to my dream job.

"Broadcast news is like the military," I was telling someone the other day. "You have to move every two or three years to help your career."

After decades of writing scripts about other people's lives, I needed to become the author of my own life. I would apply to WashU in St. Louis. I would make it my mission to help people suffering from trauma. After interviewing so many traumatized people over the years and wondering what their lives were like after the murder, the storm, the fraud that put them in a category they hadn't even conceived of – "survivor" – I thought it was what I owed the universe.

It was what I owed myself.

It was also not lost on me that my ex-boyfriend would have hated me becoming a therapist.

I processed this and the many ways I had previously lived, behaved even, to please others with a wonderful psychodynamic therapist in St. Louis. She helped me understand and accept that it was really OK for me to live the life I wanted to live. And even in those sessions, putting down roots in the Pacific Northwest was a big topic.

This is where I can breathe, in all senses of the word.

Next week:

I'll look at strategies for staying mentally healthy if you do have to move. Yes, We've Got Issues is going weekly! Find us in your email box or LinkedIn feed every Thursday morning.

(UPDATED on June 8, 2023: Part II has now been uploaded and is available for reading here .)

What I'm watching:

Bama Rush (HBO) – Come for the hype. Stay for the brilliant look into the lives of today's undergraduate women. The mental health challenges are immense. I've also never seen a filmmaker so gracefully introduce herself as a character and with such powerful results. The trailer for Bama Rush is available on YouTube .

Jury Duty (Amazon's Freevee) – I didn't know what Rusell was getting us into when he wanted to watch this the weekend the first episodes dropped. But he found a gem. Not only is Jury Duty groundbreaking and genre-bending, it makes you feel good about human beings again. I hope great things continue happening for Ronald Gladden. (It looks like Amazon's Prime Video is now offering the series ad-free .)

Feedback? Story ideas? Want me to Zoom with your group about mental health?

You can email me or send me a message on LinkedIn .

Matthew Nordin, LICSW, is a fully licensed psychotherapist in Washington state. He specializes in treating trauma/PTSD with EMDR. He sees clients who also suffer from anxiety, grief, major depression, and bipolar disorder. Matt’s diverse clientele includes creatives, journalists, first responders, tech workers, and adolescents, including members of the BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities. You can learn more at mindful.clinic .

Matt is also a Murrow Award-winning broadcast journalist who has appeared on the BBC, CNN, ABC News Radio, CBS News Radio, and network television affiliates across the country. Matt and husband Rusell Cuya can often be found traveling throughout the Pacific Northwest with their cavalier King Charles spaniel, Harry. Their "royal" pup pretty much runs the show.

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