There's a process in the cross-continent move.
Throw out 3/4 of your things - mostly furniture, if you can help it.
Pack four large plastic bins of: kitchen essentials, clothing essentials, camping essentials, aesthetic essentials. Clothes into your travel bags. You are, after all, going someplace else.
Set aside road trip budget. Plot route.
Pack. Spend every night packing. Devote one night to the kitchen, the next to the bedroom.
Call your friends. See if they want free, slightly used furniture. Mention casually that your cats are unkind to leather couches and also spider plants. The former is comfortable, the latter is good at enduring the semi-regular chewing of restless felines.
Drink as much as you feel necessary, pre-launch procedures are fraught with impatience and nerves. Scout around your new workplace.
Call your friends. See when they're free to get dinner, and also who has a guest room for once the men have come to take away a smile pile of boxes - your dresser - your bed. Mention casually that you'll sure you'll be back in town fairly regularly.
Annually is indeed regularly.
Breathe. Do this often. Do this regularly. Do not stop breathing.
Consider that you now have an art to a science. There are professionals who will come in after you and scrub the refrigerator, the floors, the tiles in the bathroom. Afterwards, they will deliver the keys to the landlords, and the papers will be forwarded to an address somewhere near your new time zone.
Drink, with the people you want to remember. Drink with a few people you will comfortably forget. Regret is a luxury that does not have to be indulged.
Send multiple friends across the country a sequence of increasingly disjointed Facebook messages discussing small windows of whatever part of this process you're currently arranging logistics for. You do not have a place to live yet, or a temporary room while you work through reconstituting existence in a city you've visited thrice.
Breathe.
Sleep as much as you feel the need to. Adrenaline seems to increase the efficacy of the stuff, and there's enough to do that you won't have time to notice the drag.
Examine your apartment options. Check what the common features are. Learn what's a reasonable ask and what isn't. Stained glass, clawfoot tubs, polished wood floors: check. Gas stoves, check.
Off street parking: less of a check.
Rent: still cheaper than the Bay Area
Breathe.