A certified runaway (tries to) make amends with her hometown.

Leaving my hometown was a no-brainer, just like going to the toilet when one needs to pee. Duh, I’ll go. Somewhere far away where I can finally breathe fully and unhibitedly into the big world. I moved to California, then I traveled for a while, never considering that one day I’d have to go back.

Never in my hedonistic travel mind did I think about the abhorrent confrontation that is returning home. Not home as in a place you live in on your own without your parents. I mean home, home, the hometown, the place that burns uncomfortably with nostalgia, painful or not. It’s a place that, after years away, suddenly feels microscopic and dull. I mean - wouldn’t it?! It’s a Midwest suburb in a landlocked flat corn-fielded state, compared to the mountains and seas and immortality of all the never-ending history out there.

Here I am, world traveler: I am supposed to be fearless. Or that’s what I want myself to believe. I’ve corroborated this self-proclaimed sense of freedom as I roamed foreign streets of the world, alone, with strangers, with new friends, with that little whisper in my head affirming You got this! You’re strong! You’re here, you can do anything!

My striving towards courage is a gift to myself. Once proven that I can do the things that others gasp at in disbelief, I am satisfied. I buy a plane ticket with pride, and it validates my capabilities. Great, so I can travel now, but can I return home with that same electric halo of conviction and bad-assery?

No, because going back to my hometown doesn’t feel badass at all. It feels like a failure. It’s a retraction to the place that I wiggled to escape from my whole life, a place that never suited me.

I never missed it either. With each day I spent away from it, bits of myself that were once sculpted to that life chipped away. Until now, nothing of me remains bound to the place I once knew as home. Every time I return now, the sense of unsettlement hits deeper and deeper.

I’m not talking about the initial pang of “reverse culture shock” when you first land back in your home country after a long time abroad. That shock fades over time.

I’m talking about the discomfort of staying home, facing yourself, and all your old selves. The shocks and discomforts that don’t fade - they follow you. They force you to reconcile your whole childhood with this far-off girl whose existence now expands out beyond the limitations of this city.

Metaphysically, my will soars way above these borders, but physically, I’m here, seemingly trapped. My larger-than-life self becomes flattened down, like it’s been sat on and smushed.

Now, the hard part is figuring out how to bring that pretentiousness back down to earth. Because, girl, that moral worldly high brow is not going to get you anywhere. Whether you relate to it or not, this hometown exists. It holds very real people with real lives. Marvelous lives, even though they may not be lives that have dared to do the boldest thing, as you have. So what? You’ve chosen the scary route, the less conventional path, the path guaranteed to change your life in all the unexplainable ways only higher powers could understand.

That all means something, yes. You were fearless - but that wasn’t the hardest part.

The hard part is reacquainting yourself with a place in which you harbor animosity. Wincing with unease as you recognize a place that once suffocated and limited you, and now it hurts to exist in again. Coming back to the place that’s been here the whole time, while you ran away in a desperate attempt to sever all attachment from it. Once that homegrown mind cracks open, and the realm of faraway opportunities floods in, it’s impossible to see how your old life and self can ever meet your expectations again. There’s no longer tolerance for who you used to be when you lived in this town.

I have a dear friend whom I met while traveling in Morocco last year. She had been solo-traveling for 8 months when I met her, and she still has yet to stop. She’s still out there, rummaging from place to place. For almost two years, she hasn’t been home. She tells me that returning home is not an option for her, though she still has younger siblings and parents, and friends there. Her hometown was not always a positive place for her, and she carries scars and resentment from her past life there. Sure, some of them have been healed through the self-actualizing journey of traveling and meeting friends who have turned into family. She’s the most joyful and fearless girl I know, but underneath all that, there are still scars that won’t heal from endless years of travel. She very clearly no longer fears the uncertainty of what the world throws at her, but she does fear whatever drove her away from home in the first place, the part of her past she’s not yet ready to face.

My point is, you can float among the clouds for however long you’d like, following all the crumb trails until a bigger picture is revealed. You can throw off the veil of unknown places and discover what’s been hiding from you the whole time you were growing up in a bubble. You can do all this, in defiance of that narrow-minded self you once used to be and in defiance of whatever you wanted to leave behind.

You can hate your hometown as much as you need to. You can retract in all your stubborn ornery. You can let that beef, that distaste, manifest loudly and drive you away again.

My reflex is to leave again. Save up money quickly, just so I can relieve myself from this chokehold with a flight far away.

It’s harder to stay, though. It’s harder to make amends with something you haven’t fully accepted. I can’t fully accept this life, and I don’t fully understand the people who chose it willingly. I can’t relate to the cookie-cutter neighborhoods, the staying put on generational family turf, or the type of great nationalistic pride that often accompanies a small Midwestern town's pride.

It’s harder to swallow the bitterness of my insufferable sanctimony. I don’t like this town’s ordinariness. I’m angry at its close-mindedness and distance from anything naturally pretty - an ocean, a mountain, a redwood soaring mystical jungle that could breathe some life back into my simpering spirit.

I’m unsatisfied driving down wide four-lane streets in stop-and-go traffic amongst Suburban SUVs and Escalades. Gas stations on every corner, grungy autoshops, chain restaurants, drive-thrus, pale monotonous office buildings and strip outlets, roundabouts, and mass construction at every intersection to build more of … all of that?

I’m unsatisfied shopping in mega grocery stores with compressed aisles and sad-looking produce. As I walk through the Kroger baking section, I dissociate slightly, like im losing Wifi connection with my sense of presence, and the awful fluorescent lighting shocks my soul out of body, and I forget where I am. I blink myself back to reality with a bag of flour in my hands, speed walking away. Gosh, I need some air.

I return home, and suddenly my energy is zapped, and I feel like I’ve shrunk. How has the same world, that was once so exciting to me, that was pouring in its love through new languages and walkable cities and laughing faces, become so bleak?

Ah, the world beyond this town. As if real life only begins beyond the arbitrary borders of this state.

So it sounds like a no-brainer to leave again…. but it’s harder to be strong enough to know that you can stay, without the permanence of it being your forever.

You can stay for now, choose to enjoy the journey, while the rest sorts itself out. It takes strength to sit still and confront things you’ve run away from or things you disagree with. It takes strength to do the unexciting, ugly, boring work in the in-between moments and refrain from life comparisons of all your other friends doing awesome things. But at some point, you’ve got to. You’ve got to collect the mummified past versions of yourself growing cobwebs in their sarcophagus, and make amends with them before laying them to their final rest.

I’m still annoyed that after all my time spent away in cool places, I’ve come back to this uncool hometown. I am eager to leave, again, but not so quickly this time.

I wonder though… when I do leave.. If I will miss the ease of it all?

If I’ll miss evenings with little to do, that have led to cozy nightly movies with my dad and our coveted Orville Redenbacher popcorn popped stove-top in the Whirly Pop.

If I’ll miss running the same out-and-back route on the Monon Trail close to my home, so ordinary and habitual and mundane, but so reliable, it’s always there.

If I’ll miss going on slow walks along my unchanged path of these neighborhood streets, peeking through cute Tudor-style homes, catching window-framed views of a flash of a family’s life I know nothing about.

If I’ll miss the volatility of the weather, it’s unpredictability as a break in the mundanity, waking up every day not knowing if it’ll be spring in the winter or winter in the winter. Opening the blinds to a surprise snow, now the earth is coated bright, or a trickling warm rain, washing away the ice of before.

Maybe I’ll miss the cafe close to my house that I’ve grown addicted to, only because they have macadamia nut milk. Maybe I’ll miss the wearing of sweatpants every day, no frills, no pressure to impress, the - very real - Midwest unpresumptuousness and humility.

I can’t say I’ve fully made amends with my hometown or have a newfound soft spot for it like those leading female characters in every Hallmark Christmas movie ever (but those are so predictable and unfun)! Whether I like it or not, though, it’s part of my journey, and I won’t let it fear-monger me anymore. I’m fearless enough to stay and to trust that I can still breathe fully here, in my hometown.

Xoxo!!