Cognitive Dissonance

Here's a funny thing about moving to Utah that I didn't anticipate. In Michigan, you only get one license plate when you register your vehicle, so if you see a license plate on the front of a car, it means the car is from out of state. Since most cars in Michigan don't have front plates, my subconscious has been trained to notice when a car does. On top of that, my subconscious has been trained to notice Utah license plates, because Utah license plates are rare in Michigan, and if I saw one it usually meant that either I knew the owner, or it was someone from the stake. Put those both together and front Utah license plates really sent my radar up.

And here in Utah, every car has a front Utah license plate.

The first couple days that I was out here were a constant unobtrusive-but-slightly-distracting battle between my conscious and subconscious mind. Every time I passed a car going the opposite direction my subconscious would get excited and shout, "Look! A Utah license plate! On the front!" and my conscious mind would sigh and roll its eyes and say, "We've been through this a hundred times already..."

I'm getting better now that I've been here for a few days. But this conscious/subconscious battle kind of reflects the same cognitive dissonance I'm experiencing in coming back to Provo. I've tried to explain this to a couple people and I'm not sure if it makes sense, but I'm going to try anyway. See, I just made this really huge change in my life. I graduated. With my PhD. I moved. Across the country. I accepted a job. A good job. A possible-career-type job. I left behind places and people and experiences that stretched me but that had nevertheless become comfortable. This is a really, really big change for me.

And so in coming here my subconscious feels like everything should feel new and different, both in the good ways, where every turn down every street is a new discovery, and in the bad ways, where I constantly compare everything to what I knew and loved only a few weeks ago. But it doesn't feel different. Of course it doesn't. In fact, my conscious mind never expected that it would because after all I lived six years of my young adult life here, and even if they were nonconsecutive years, that's still longer than the five years of my young adult life that I spent in Michigan.

It's weird, in a way I'm not quite sure yet how to interpret. Add to that the additional layer of being in a very familiar place in an entirely new capacity, and it's enough to make me want to curl up in a little ball in a corner of the basement room of my sister's apartment where I'm staying for the week. Except that I also want to go out and meet new people and run my old running routes and start preparing for classes and decorate my very own apartment and cook for my siblings and live it up in my new life. Like I said, weird, and hard to interpret.

With all that said, I miss Michigan. A lot. But I also came to campus for the first time today and it just felt right, and for every unsettled feeling I've had about being uprooted (and I've had lots), I've had an equally settled feeling that this is a good place for me to be right now. My cognitive dissonance will work itself out, just like my ability to not notice front Utah license plates is slowly working itself out with experience.