A friend once told me that when a girl gets stressed out, she inevitably takes it out on her hair. Whether it be a new color or a new cut, the style or the shape of her eyebrows, or who-knows-what with the nether regions, it’s always okay to make a big, bold change to hair. Because hair is safe. It always grows back, even if you don’t want it to. And when it grows back, it inevitably grows back the same as it was before you tampered with it. You can count on hair.

I’ve recently realized that when I get stressed out, I move. Most times to a new apartment, sometimes to a new city, and occasionally to a new country.

When I was still in high school, my parents told me they were moving to Las Vegas. So, I moved out, into my very first apartment, at the age of 17. It was over-priced, over-sized, and the completely wrong location for someone who was going to be a freshman in college in a few months. But it was still my first home as an independent adult.

To further the stupidity of this decision, I also moved there with a guy in order to be able to afford the outrageous rent. But when it quickly became blatantly obvious that things weren’t going to work out, I did something I’m still pretty proud of. I made him leave. And looking back now, that remains as the only time I’ve ever stood up for myself enough to do that. In every other situation, I’ve just deftly extricated myself.

The next time I moved was only a few short months later. This was the first time, but not the last time, that I’ve broken a lease. A friend helped me realize that I couldn’t have a proper experience as a freshman in college when I was living in an apartment complex about 20 minutes away from campus.

I made the decision that yes, I did want to live in the dorms. I made this decision in what I now realize is in completely typical, predictable fashion. Meaning I made this decision only about one week before my first semester of college started.

The lottery for getting placed into university-run dorms was over, but I was lucky enough to find an open room at a private dorm. Having just paid to break my lease at the first place (at the cost of one-and-a-half months’ rent), I warily signed this year-long contract, but reasoned that the school year was actually only lasted for nine months.

I coordinated all of my muscular male friends to move my belongings into the fully furnished dorm.  Then, I distributed all of the furniture I had since acquired to my various friends who were moving out, now that we were all legal adults.

After I moved into my room on the 17th floor of the private dorm, I quickly found out that it was known as the Greek watering hole. And that it deserved its reputation as such. I spent that year (or rather, nine months) sharing a suite with a red-headed, ex-cheerleader sorority girl. I often discovered a random frat boy, clad only in his boxers, passed out drunk on the grimy floor of our shared hallway.

The summer after my disastrous freshman year, I moved into an sprawling, third-floor apartment in North Austin, which had a bathroom and closet that, combined, was easily bigger than my room in the private dorm.

This was not the first time that I had lived alone, but it was the first time that I was actually alone. In my first apartment, there was always one or more people staying over. At least six people had copies of my key, and two of those six even had gate and garage openers. But now, since my friends were no longer living at home, they were spending more time at home in their own places.

I hated living alone. And I blame my intense hatred of living alone for my next bad decision made on a whim, which was to pawn that lease off on a friend and then move in with a boy after only a few months of dating him.

It didn’t work out. No big surprise, and no big deal. I was getting rather experienced and adept at this lease-breaking thing. I moved out after only a month, if even that.  However, I was starting to feel sorry for my muscular male friends, who routinely had to carry my couch, recliner, queen-sized mattress and bed frame, countless boxes of clothes, and worst of all, my obscenely heavy 36″ television, up and down multiple flights of stairs. With this move alone, there were no less than six steep flights of stairs involved.

I wasn’t sure where I would go, but it turned out that an acquaintance of mine was looking for a new roommate to live with him in his condo. His former roommate was taking all of the living room furniture, including the television, so I was the perfect prospect for replacement.

I loved that roommate and that condo. To my credit, this was the beginning of longer-term living arrangements in my life. I stayed in that place for two years. Though, I wasn’t actually there for the whole time. After breaking up with a fairly long-time boyfriend, I spent the last chunk of my scholarship money to spontaneously sign up for a study abroad program and take off to Paris for a semester.

Pretty much as soon as I returned, I decided I wanted to learn Chinese next, and then promptly signed my life away to spend a year studying abroad in China, beginning the following summer. When the time came, packed my stuff into storage and, well, moved to China.

My moving expertise became apparent, as I purchased almost 20 clear plastic storage trundles from Target to pack my things in. By the time I was finished packing in these boxes, it was as if I had a plethora of perfect puzzle pieces, to be neatly stacked together in my storage unit.  Which looked more like a work of cubic art than a storage unit.

After spending a year in the dismal dorms there, I came back to Austin and lived on West Campus for a year and a half, renting a room with high ceilings and a decorative fireplace in an old, dilapidated white house. I didn’t have a kitchen and my room suffered from a flea infestation problem in the warmer months, but I did have a bathtub. Which was better than showering on a cinderblock, like I did all year in China. Comfort is very relative.

After graduation, I moved to New York. I had a great apartment and a great roommate, but didn’t really think that Manhattan was all that great. So, when I got a job offer in California, I adeptly coordinated a transnational move in a matter of a few days.

By this point, I’d already had two very successful living situations as a result of answering postings on Craigslist. In both cases, I didn’t even meet my last two roommates in person before I signed contracts. Even meeting upon move-in, there were no issues. Even so, this time around, I met my roommates in advance, even hung out for a few hours and had a good time, before we got around to signing the papers and moving in a few days later. Except that this time, it didn’t work out. At all.

Maybe it’s because this was only the second time I had ever lived with female roommates. Or perhaps it’s because this time there were two of them. And they were a couple. Whatever it was, after months of coming home and locking myself in my room to avoid conflict, after the upteenth fight over absolutely nothing, after one of them still wouldn’t speak to me after I had been out of town for over a month, I decided that enough was enough.

Since I’m spending the next few months back down in Austin for work, I couldn’t justify paying a rather ungodly sum for rent (nearly half of my monthly income) for what was, essentially, a glorified storage unit with evil overlords.

I was leaving for Austin on a Saturday, so naturally, on the Wednesday night before that Saturday, I decided I was moving out. Within a matter of hours, I had broken the news, come to an early lease termination agreement, booked a storage unit, reserved a car and a truck, started packing, and put my boyfriend on the next plane to San Francisco to come help me move.

Like I said. I’ve gotten pretty good at this whole moving thing.