The road we drive from our house to the grocery store takes us along the brow of the mountain, with spectacular views over the city of Chattanooga and beyond. On especially clear days you can see the outline of the Smoky Mountains, which are more than 150 miles away.
But clear days have been rare since we moved here. Most mornings we wake up and instead of 150 miles of visibility, we can’t even see our neighbor’s house across the street.
Fog is a common feature of the climate in East Tennessee. Clouds enshroud the tops of the mountains, fill the river gorges, and cover the city of Chattanooga often. In Texas, a foggy day is rare and scary as blinded drivers smash into the cars in front of them on their way to work. But here, the fog is just part of life. It doesn’t dampen anyone’s mood or slow traffic.
In fact, now when I wake up in the morning and can’t see across the street I don’t get depressed, I get a little bit excited. I work at a co-working space in downtown Chattanooga, meaning my commute to work each day involves driving down a mountain road which winds along the Tennessee River Gorge as it makes its way towards the city.
Often foggy days up on the mountain aren’t foggy down below. So at some point on my journey down the mountain, my car will punch through the fog and a brilliant sunny day will appear. It’s like switching from a black-and-white to a 4K TV in an instant.
It’s a beautiful way to start the day, far more rewarding than if I had just woken up to a sunny morning. Coming out of the fog and into the clear light of day is a hard-won victory over the darkness that obscured the morning. And it’s exactly how we’ve felt since we moved to Tennessee.
Belonging
We spent years trying to make living in Dallas work. For many of those years it was fun, but once we had kids everything got harder. The commutes felt longer, the summers hotter, the costs higher. It felt like we were constantly swimming against the current in a city that wasn’t made for us or our kids.
There were things about Dallas that we loved and didn’t want to leave, but over time friends and family became the only things left that we loved in the city. Month after month, Sami and I were being eaten away by the feeling that we didn’t belong in Dallas, or in Texas, anymore. It wasn’t the place we were made to live and raise our children.
We longed to be outdoors more, to enjoy natural beauty daily, to be freed from the stresses of traffic, and to live surrounded by people who shared these interests. We wanted our kids to be raised in a place where we could instill a love for these things in them easily. We wanted them to be able to be more independent, to feel the freedom of being able to walk or ride bikes to their friend’s house without fear of speeding cars, and to be able to go out in the woods and build forts whenever they want. Older generations would just call this “childhood”, but for our children’s generation, these elements of life are vanishing at a rapid pace.
We worked hard and researched for years to find somewhere that could allow us to live this life. Few places met our criteria and even fewer were within reach for us financially. Finding Chattanooga and Signal Mountain was a gift from God. In our first month here we have been shown confirmation after confirmation that this was the right move.
Neighbors
Our neighborhood is surrounded by tall trees and bubbling creeks. It’s teeming with wildlife and constantly being serenaded by songbirds. We’ve been welcomed by so many neighbors and new friends that we had to freeze some of the baked goods we received in our first week because we couldn’t enjoy them all before they went bad.
Business
From a business perspective, I’ve always been a poor networker. Even as a very social person, when I have to talk to people for the express purpose of business connections I kind of freeze up and don’t put myself out there. But here in Chattanooga, the business community has been extremely welcoming, connecting me with anyone and everyone they can, and making me feel like a valued part of the city already.
Church
We have quickly found a church we love with a strong community of people who have immediately helped us get plugged in. It’s so much smaller than any of the churches I’ve ever belonged to and we are both really enjoying being part of a tightly knit community of believers committed to building strong friendships and spreading the love of Christ to the city of Chattanooga.
Comedy
From a comedy perspective, I’ve gotten more big opportunities here in the month I’ve been here than I got the entire time I was in Dallas. I’ve been able to host an entire weekend, I’ve done several guest spots, and I am in a comedy competition coming up this weekend. Despite living up on a mountain, the club in downtown here is a shorter drive from my house than every comedy club was in DFW.
Fun
Every Saturday we go on a family hike on one of the trails in our town. This has become such a consistent feature of weekends that our two-year-old, Mac, shouts “HIKE!” and our dogs jump up and start going crazy until we get them in the car. There’s also several kid-oriented activities and places here that gives Sami and the boys plenty to do during the day.
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I don’t say any of that to brag to people who are still back in Dallas or in a city where they can’t do those things. I say that to point out that all of our work and all the agonizing we did as we thought through decision for years was worth it.
Moving here was a massive leap of faith that required major sacrifices and got us completely out of our comfort zone. That feeling that was gnawing at Sami and I for years was there for a reason. God placed it on our hearts so that we would take action.
Many people that we’ve befriended so far have made some version of this comment, “Wow you guys are really getting after it. I haven’t even been to ___ before and I’ve lived here my whole life.”
For someone who’s never lived anywhere else or who hasn’t experienced a life without access to the natural wonders we have here in Chattanooga, it can be hard to fathom why we’re so excited about getting out and doing everything we can. But we lived in a fog for years. Now that the fog has lifted we are thrilled to be able to experience life with clarity and joy.
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Dozens of people have reached out to Sami and I since we announced our move and have expressed a strong desire to do the same. Our reasons hit home with them and they’ve begun exploring, or daydreaming about, a move of their own.
But others of you who are reading this live in Dallas or some other big city and love it and would never want to live anywhere else. That’s great, I want everyone to live in a place where they feel like they can be the best version of themselves and raise their family in the place that most reflects their own values.
Still though, everyone lives in some kind of fog. There’s something in all of our lives that we wish we could break through and experience the clarity that comes from being on the other side. Maybe it’s a job, a relationship, a health situation, a house, or a church.
Or maybe it’s just a general, overwhelming feeling that you can’t explain or pinpoint. Maybe everything is outwardly fine but you still can’t find joy or happiness. I can’t tell you what that fog is in your life or how to fix it, but I do know that I’ve been there many times.
Sometimes it’s not easy to make a change. Sometimes people around you won’t understand why you need to do what you need to do . But the effort is always worth it.
The Dark Alley
A few years ago, while I was living in Plano, I walked outside to take the trash out. It was dark and I didn’t have my phone with me. I threw the trash away and then paused and looked down the alley. A voice in my head said “Just start walking. Don’t tell anyone. Just go. See how far you make it before anyone notices. Maybe you can completely disappear.”
I looked down the alley for a beat longer and then turned around and went back inside. But the thought stayed with me for months. Every time I had an opportunity where I was more than a few steps from my house by myself I thought about continuing the journey away.
After many months of these thoughts and feelings, I told my therapist about them. He said I had probably been experiencing a low-level depression. I’ve always been a pretty even-keeled person. I’m not prone to mood swings. You won’t often seen me giddy or down in the dumps. So coming face to face with the fact that I had been depressed for many months was difficult, but freeing. Years of difficult situations with family, work, and grief had caught up with me. Though most of the things that had happened were in the past and life was actually going pretty well at this time, the culmination of years of challenges was still lingering around, affecting my view of everything. It was like I’d been living a life surrounded by fog, but had convinced myself that this was just how the world looked.
I’d been gaining weight for several years before that and lacked motivation to even start losing it. My therapist pointed out that motivation wasn’t necessary to start something, which was the catalyst for my weight loss that I began in earnest a few weeks later. He also told me to seek out physical activity that I enjoyed so I could help stave off some of the feelings of depression that I was experiencing.
Within a few months I’d lost 30 pounds, banished most of my feelings of depression, and started into a very productive period professionally and creatively. The key to all of this was walking.
Though I was always active and had been walking the dogs twice a day every day for years, making regular time to go for real, long, strenuous walks changed improved my mental and physical health and my relationships, career, and and creativity improved dramatically.
The voice in my head was half-right: Just start walking. Not to get away from life, but to push away the feelings that made me want to disappear in the first place.
All of this happened because I took steps to break through the fog. I talked to someone about my struggles and then I took action to begin addressing those challenges.
I have no idea what that fog could be for you. Maybe it’s something that can be addressed with a lifestyle change, or maybe it requires a big dramatic three-state move. Either way, the best thing to do is to start talking about it with trusted people. Then start taking steps to make a change. I promise it will be worth it.
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If any of this resonates with you and you want to chat, respond to this email. I’d love to be a sounding board for you. I promise I won’t just tell you the answer is moving to a new state.
But if you do want to move here, I know my neighbors will have some fresh sourdough waiting for you.
I’ll try to be consistent with updates here on our time in Tennessee, but I don’t want this to turn into a “moving blog” and I’m not seeking to be a Chattanooga influencer.
I’m actually deep in the middle of a huge project that I started a month ago with no end in sight.
I was trying to write a “farewell to Dallas” post that encapsulated all my complicated thoughts and feelings about the city where I lived for more than a decade and it ended up ballooning into a 15,000+ word mini-book that stretches across the history of the city.
One day I will finish it and share it in some format, but there’s a lot of work to do on that before it’s ever ready.
If you’d like a teaser, here’s a cover I made for it. You’ll have to wait to figure out what any of it means.
And if you want to be the first alerted to what this big project is, make sure to subscribe.