If you missed it, I recently moved from one town to another, about 10 miles apart. I temporarily live with an elderly relative. I had been in the place I was living for 6 years, and hadn’t planned on moving as abruptly as I did. I plan to write about the positive aspects of my new arrangement. But for now, the negative.

The trauma of the Big Move is beginning to fade (as the childbirth books assured me it would), but I continue to have nightmares in which the movers are downstairs, there’s junk everywhere, and I have no boxes. Probably also I am naked in front of a crowd and my teeth are falling out and my feet are stuck in molasses,  I don’t remember those details. When I inevitably wake in a pool of sweat, I try to manifest some more friendly dreams, dreams that hopefully involve Javier Bardem wearing coveralls. But I digress.

Everyone, but everyone, has commiserated with me when I’ve said that moving from one residence to another sucks the big one. Which it does, hoo boy.

But it’s not until you’re deep in the reality of it that you remember exactly the many, many, torturous ways that it sucks. AND blows.

The endlessless of packing. There’s always one more closet, one more cabinet, one more rat’s nest to sift through, to stuff into bags, boxes, garbage cans. Days/weeks/eons of packing go by and there is no discernible evidence of progress.  Rip goes the tape, crunch goes the newspaper. Grind goes my gears.

Shame factor. I cannot, cannot believe how much shit I have accumulated. I feel like a pathetic hoarding pack rat. As the boxes mount up and as I assess the many many labels that read “curios” or “tchotchkes” or “collectibles”, I cringe. The friends that have helped out have been endlessly cheerful and supportive throughout the process, but in my darker moments I think I can hear them thinking “Jeezus, got some more CRAP for me to bubble wrap, Hambox?”

Accelerating madness. As I stare down the barrel of the movers’ arrival, the frenzy begins and organization ends — drawers are upended into weirdly-sized cartons scrounged from the dumpster behind the liquor store. Tape is slapped across bulging seams, labels are abandoned. This is also when I start thinking the extra dark (chocolate) thoughts: “What if this really doesn’t end? What if I’m in stuck in some time/space loop? What if packing makes me die?”

The death march. Moving day! No matter how many green, green bills I throw at the situation, I have to carry and hoist and march and haul all damn day. This was a particularly poorly-planned moving scenario, which was my fault. I needed to put more green bills towards a correctly-sized vehicle and a couple hearty movers. Instead, I had a fleet of able-bodied boys but access to only a woefully too-small pickup. Which led to multiple trips (between the old place and a storage unit and my new residence) and a looong day (with yet more green bill output towards meals.) The people involved were fabulous but we can all agree that that was one completely unsexy day of sweat and grime.

Speaking of sweat and grime. I gave up on having any sartorial pride whatsoever. Sweats and sneakers and do-rags, every dingdong day. Packing tape roll bracelets and Sharpies clipped to every neckhole. Horrible. I know, I know, I had an excuse, but to feel at one’s most unattractive during one’s most stressed-out and physically demanding time ever, it just made everything even yuckier than it already was.

And speaking of yucky. And now, we clean — the big Deposit Clean, as Evany puts it. After a backbreaking bout of hard cleaning labor, I did not even finish by the end of the last day of the month, and so had to pay another day’s rent for the privilege of coming back and doing some more. Scrubbing the frakking floor with a frakking nail brush, wiping the sinfully fugly ceiling fans, inhaling many non-fun carcinogenic cleaners, and, at one point, crying in the corner next to the pile of Goodwill stuff. My boss called at some point, idly wondering if I was ever going to come back to work. To her eternal credit, she sensed my tone and showed up with lunch, rubber gloves and a willingness to clean my tub. Now that’s a boss.

Adjustment period. The transition to my new living situation is not something I’ll go into here, but it has not been easy. My elderly roommate is kind of a handful and we’re both still trying to get used to each other.

I’ll also not go into detail about the wrangling with the property manager (who ended up being quite fair with the deposit return, but not before a whole bunch of mind games); the bizarre march of humanity that took away my castaways via craigslist; and that one morning where I really did think I might die, as I stood on a ladder, batting at cobwebs with a broom while enduring a migraine of epic proportions.

I will, however, say thank you to the small but excellent group of friends and family who went above and way, way beyond to help me. Sammy, Shana, Judy, Turq, Dave, Annie (via email), the moving boys — I leaned on you hard and you just smiled and kept digging in.

This was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. I wish I were kidding.