Leaving Watseka

I left Watseka in July 2024, which sounds much neater than it felt.

People talk about leaving home like it’s one clean decision. For me, it was more like a slow leak. By the time I actually packed my things and moved to Chicago, I’d already been imagining it for years. I’d been staying with Mila regularly since I was sixteen, so Chicago wasn’t some mysterious city glowing in the distance. It was already real to me: her apartment, the train noise, the musicians I’d met through her, the shows, the streets, the feeling that there were people taking music seriously in a way I desperately wanted to be around.

That was a big part of it. I didn’t leave Watseka just because I wanted bigger buildings and better coffee, although I am not above either of those things. I left because I wanted to get better. I wanted to play with better musicians, write sharper songs, learn faster, and stop feeling like my whole future was being quietly negotiated by people who had already decided what kind of girl I was.

Watseka was home, and I’m not going to pretend it was some terrible little prison. It gave me Nana and Pop, horses, back roads, quiet nights, my first songs, my first love, and enough emotional material to keep a songwriter busy for an annoyingly long time.

But it was small.

Small can be sweet. Small can also mean everyone remembers the worst haircut you ever had and somehow treats it as character evidence. In a town like that, you don’t just walk into a room. You walk in with your family history, your old mistakes, your awkward phases, your school reputation, and whatever somebody’s cousin thinks they heard about you in 2018.

Very freeing. Very normal. Great for the nervous system.

I was ready to be somewhere I could make new mistakes. More stylish ones, ideally.

Leaving Nana and Pop was the hard part. They had raised me, and even when they drove me crazy, they were the people who kept life steady. There wasn’t some huge emotional goodbye speech, because that’s not really how our family works. Nana made sure I had practical things. Pop checked the car and gave advice that was technically about tyres but spiritually about not ruining my life.

That’s very Pop. He can turn basic vehicle maintenance into a moral philosophy if you let him.

I think they were proud, but worried. Which was fair. I was eighteen, stubborn, broke, and fully convinced that ambition counted as a financial plan. I had a guitar, notebooks, some songs, and the kind of confidence that appears when you don’t yet understand how rent works.

Moving in with Mila made the whole thing possible. She had moved to Chicago when she was eighteen to go to art college, and by the time I arrived she already had a real life there. She had her work, her art, her friends, her routines. She loved me, but she was also very clear that she was not adopting a stray singer-songwriter with eyeliner and unresolved parental issues.

Rude, but fair.

I think that was good for me. Mila gave me a landing place, not a fantasy. She encouraged me, but she also expected me to contribute, work, and take the music seriously. She knew I wanted this badly, and she also knew wanting something badly is not the same as being ready for it.

Living with her again was different from visiting. When I visited, I could romanticise Chicago. I could go to shows, meet musicians, stay up too late, write dramatic notes in my phone, and then go back to Watseka before real life caught me. Moving there meant the city stopped being a movie and became a place where I had to buy toilet paper.

Nothing kills artistic mystique faster than budgeting for toilet paper.

Still, I felt something open almost immediately. Not in a magical way. More like someone had cracked a window in a room I’d been sitting in too long.

Chicago had better musicians, more noise, more ambition, more ways to embarrass myself publicly and call it growth. Through Mila, I had already met people who could actually play, people who challenged me, people who heard my songs and didn’t treat them like a cute hobby. That mattered. I needed to be around people who made me slightly nervous in the right way.

Watseka taught me how to observe. Chicago is teaching me how to move.

I’m still figuring it out. I’ve only been here six months, so I’m not going to act like I’ve cracked the city or become some fully formed urban phoenix. Most days I’m still one awkward interaction away from calling Mila and asking if adulthood has a returns policy.

But I know I was right to leave.

Not because Watseka had nothing left to give me. It gave me plenty. Maybe too much. That’s the problem with home sometimes — it gives you your first language, then gets offended when you start needing new words.

I still hear Watseka in my songs. I hear it in the quiet parts, the family ghosts, the backseat memories, the stubbornness, the guilt, the need to prove I can be more than the version people remember. Leaving didn’t erase any of that. It just gave me somewhere new to take it.

I think that’s what I wanted most.

Not to become someone else completely. Just to find out what happened when nobody was standing there with an old version of me in their hands.

So yes, I left Watseka.

I packed the guitar, the notebooks, the complicated feelings, and probably not enough socks.

And somehow, that was the beginning.

Anni x