Someone asked Morgan Freeman how he made it out of poverty. His answer was simple. The bus drives every day. He just got on it.

Most people hear that and think ambition. Deciding you want more and going after it. Man escapes poverty through sheer will, makes it big. I keep thinking about what he left on the seat behind him.

Getting on that bus means leaving the people who shaped you. Parents who did what they could with what they had. Siblings who stayed. Friends who'll still be there next summer doing the same things. You might love them and resent them at the same time for not being braver or more ambitious. Probably both.

But the harder thing you leave behind is the version of yourself that made sense in that place. The way you talked, what you found funny, the strategies you built for getting through the day. Your entire operating system was built for that environment and it worked there. It got you this far.

The bus takes you somewhere that operating system needs adjustment.

The challenge of a new city isn't learning street names or finding the store. It's realizing that the person who got on the bus isn't equipped for where the bus is going. The instincts are off, and the things that made you competent at home make you invisible or awkward.

So you rebuild piece by piece. You swap out the learned behaviours for new ones. New way of reading a room, new sense of what matters. And every piece you replace is a piece of home you're quietly letting go of.

That's what breaks people. The in-between, where the old identity no longer works and the new one hasn't settled in yet. You belong nowhere for a while. The people back home think you've changed. The people in the new place don't know you yet. You're suspended between two versions of yourself and neither one is solid.

Then you go back to visit.

Christmas, a funeral, or someone's birthday. The old version of you tries to boot up the moment you walk through the door. The accent thickens, the jokes come back, the posture shifts. You catch yourself trying to fit a room you outgrew. Your leaving was a verdict on their staying, even if you never said a word about it. Some resent it quietly. Some are proud of you in a way that creates distance instead of closeness.

And if you did well, it gets worse. You can't talk about your life honestly without it sounding like bragging in the room you grew up in. So you edit and downplay, you become a version of yourself that fits the old context. Every visit is switching between two identities and belonging fully to neither.

There's additonal layer I did not see coming. When you're tearing everything down and rebuilding fast, you can't always tell which pieces were survival strategies and which pieces were actually you. The loyalty, the directness that came from growing up in a place that didn't have time for subtlety. Some of that was genuine and worth keeping. But it gets thrown out with the rest because you're moving too fast to sort through it carefully. I think some people rebuild so thoroughly they lose something real in the process and only notice years later when everything works but something still feels missing.

The bus drives every day. The real price of the ticket is the willingness to let the person who got on become someone the people back home might not fully recognize. And to lose a few pieces of yourself that deserved to make the trip.

I've done this more than once. The thing I keep paying attention to is the moment I catch myself performing the new version instead of living it. That gap is where the whole thing actually happens.