When I set off to college I thought “there’s no better place than home” for me that home was Miami. As time went by however, I wanted to come less and less and I wanted to enjoy my new home in Tallahassee (or really anywhere else) much more. No offense to Miami but that drive from Tallahassee is a solid 8 hours… on a good day… with no traffic… and no stopping.

Moving back home after college was certainly a shock for me as well in more ways than one. For starters I was no longer sharing a home with my best friends who are now living a couple hours away from me. Everything here felt so far away after living in a tiny college town – everywhere I went seemed to be at least 30min away. And if I thought the distances were bad, the cost of living was even worse. Needless to say, I had lost the feeling I once felt when I spoke about home. I spent more time complaining about the things I didn’t like than trying to find things I did like. It was like seeing your high school crush and thinking “what did I EVER see in him?!?!”

Home no longer felt the least bit familiar.

Still, there wasn’t much I could do except learn to deal with it and rekindle my love for the city as I now had a job and – at least for the time being – a life to life to live here. I spent quite a bit of my free time alone and devoted A LOT of that alone time to Hulu and Netflix until I looked at myself in the mirror one day and realized I needed to put myself out there. There were so many things I had told myself I wanted to do more of – Yoga, traveling, writing and getting back into art – and things I needed to do to get my career rolling – networking, building my resume, etc… But still feeling a little uneasy throwing myself out into the city I wished I had a key to all the places to go, a friend I could drag along or at least have something that could help me make a friend to drag along. (Is Tinder for finding friends a thing?)

This is when I came across ‘MeetUp‘. a site for “… neighbors getting together to learn something, do something, share something…” Reading this I thought,sounds simple enough, so I went for it. You make a profile and pick some topics you’re interested in and voila! groups appear of people around you who are also interested. Then you pick the groups you want to join and the invitations to join an event start rolling in.

Though it certainly doesn’t solve all of my problems – I’m looking at you, cost of living – MeetUp gave me that little push I needed to explore the topics I love with people who are just as passionate. It helped me realize there is so much good to Miami that offsets the bad, that even in my hometown there is much I have yet to see and that adulthood doesn’t equal boring Hulu/Netflix lady.

I am now looking forward to the many adventures I will get myself into while MeetingUp with Miami.