This as-told-to article is based on a conversation with Aley Clark, a lifestyle and wellness writer and content creator who relocated from South Carolina to Chicago in March 2023. It has been edited for length and clarity.
I moved from Moncks Corner in South Carolina to Chicago in March 2023.
I really just needed a new start. The south is pretty slow and I felt very stagnant there. I wasn’t really growing. It felt like it was time to go, and I just always had an itch for bigger cities.
I’m a lifestyle and wellness writer. I can write from anywhere.
I didn’t have any close friends in Chicago before I moved. It was a fresh start.
Meeting new people is like a muscle you tap into. I did it when I moved to New York and LA. I’ve also lived in Indiana and North Carolina.
A lot of the connections that I’ve been able to make in Chicago happened because of social media. It did a lot of the legwork. People are starting to engage in my content on TikTok, and so it’s helping to translate into real life.
When I first moved to Chicago, I was going a lot of places by myself and putting myself out there and speaking to people and then hopefully making a connection.
But there’s a season for connecting here, and you have to get on top of it because people are outside for the summer. Once people are inside, you’re barely going out, and you’re barely going to connect with people. All those coffee meetups and “let’s go get drinks” — it’s done for the dark of the winter.
[Chicago is famed for its cold winters. From 1991 to 2020, Chicago had an average daily maximum temperature in January of 31.6 degrees Fahrenheit and a minimum of 18.8, according to the National Weather Service.]
When I first moved to Chicago in March 2023, it was still winter, and it was cold, so there really wasn’t a lot of socializing.
I think I got a little bit spoiled this winter because a lot of Chicagoans were saying this winter really was light. So that extended the social season a little bit for me, and I was able to take advantage of that because I would still go out.
But when the new year hit, I was indoors, I was not doing anything. I live by myself. It was too cold to even think to leave the house, even think to hang out with friends. I was just at home nesting, enjoying my own space.
On the days that we had that were a little bit warmer and above freezing, I was making an effort to continue to meet people.
It was actually a lot easier making friends in LA. Once you find out somebody is a transplant in LA, it’s just really easy to connect with them. When I was in LA, I was a part of some different communities, including a community church group. Plus, work allowed me to connect with different people. That really helped to bring my social circle together.
I am still trying to figure out what it means to build community in Chicago. I’m doing that through my wellness collective, Black Girl Playground. It serves as a digital and physical third place, with play, joy, and creativity at the forefront. I feel like I’m in my own social experiment, trying to build community.
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