When I was eleven, my family moved from a small town near Multan to Karachi, which is about nine hundred kilometres away. My father had been offered a job at a shipping company, and it was too good an opportunity to miss.
I'd lived in the same house my whole life, a single-storey house with a courtyard where my grandparents lived with us. In Karachi, we moved into a fourth-floor flat in Gulshan, which felt tiny and very noisy in comparison.
The moving process was exhausting. We spent about two weeks packing everything into old boxes, and my mother insisted on wrapping each glass in newspaper. My job was to label the boxes, and I remember writing 'BOOKS - VERY HEAVY' on almost everything. A truck took the furniture, and we went by train, which took about sixteen hours. When we arrived, the truck was a day late, so we slept on the floor on blankets borrowed from the neighbours.
My feelings about it changed over time. At first I was miserable. I missed my friends, the space and especially my grandparents, who'd stayed behind. Karachi felt huge and overwhelming, and the kids at my new school thought my accent was funny. But after a few months I started to appreciate the advantages: there was a library near our flat, the sea was only half an hour away, and I made a close friend who still lives in the same building. Looking back, the move shaped who I am. It made me more adaptable, and I'm no longer afraid of starting again somewhere new.