Goodbye Midwest...or The Opposite of Vanity

I fled the midwest while I was in my mid-twenties. I am now six months from 40, which in itself feels very strange to me.

That, without my permission, I am getting older.

My hometown is small, the sign outside of town correctly identifies it as a “Village”. Given its size, I think you’d agree. There are ~1800 souls who call it home, last I checked.

A lot of my fiction work circles a version of this little pocket of the Bible Belt, and it appears in a lot of my fiction as the town of “Larton”.

On a map, it’s called something else.

Before I packed my car and headed West, I had been suffering a good deal of restlessness.

In the area, there are three major employers, one of which was a health insurance company, one you’ve probably heard of, which gainfully employed a good chunk of families. If you got in, you had a career for life that allowed you to provide.

With some help and some luck, I was hired by that insurance company, and they paid me to examine and pay health insurance claims.

I remember feeling so fortunate. But. Six months in, there was a day where I was at my desk and I was looking at the older folks in the break room and at their cubicles, and I could not help but think about the gap between me and them, and about what would fill it.

A lifetime in that cubicle.

And my good fortune, over time, felt like a prison. I had no children (I still don’t). I had no significant other (I still don’t). No one depended on me (my only dependent now is my Husky). I certainly don’t intend to dismiss any of those things or ways we function for other people, kids and spouses.

There is honor, I think, in being that figure for others (perhaps to a healthy extent). I recognize my station is different.

Then and onward I had trouble sitting still and I had trouble controlling my day-dreaming and controlling my want for bigger things in life.

I had, in my private time and for much of my life, a meager habit of writing very poorly constructed stories, I will say. But it was a direction.

There came a day where I decided I cannot sit in that cubicle for the rest of my life. Not without having tried for something bigger.

A year later, I moved to Los Angeles.

Friends and family understood my, we’ll call it need, my need to leave. My mother was my biggest advocate, and for all of her life she was very good at it. As much as she wanted me home.

I think what was very telling, at least to me, was how easy it was for me to go. You say goodbye to so many people and things. But I never experienced any doubt in that.

I remember feeling electric when I pulled away from my mother’s home and just started driving.

Some days I think, if I had to do it over, I don’t know I would.

But some days I can very easily say I would make that same choice again.

I learned chasing something has a cost. Sometimes that price tag isn’t known to us until after the purchase.

I missed birthdays and family dinners and hardships. When my mother got sick, and before she passed, I had been making arrangements to temporarily move back to be near her.

But.

Again.

Things happen without our permission. Someone told me the gift and the curse is that life moves. Always.

The first place I lived in LA was a small studio apartment in Ktown. Near the Wiltern. The property manager was a flamboyant gentleman named Oracio. He was so lovely. And kind.

Always checking in on me.

But.

Falling in love with LA was tough.

There’s an abundance of friction and ugliness here. Vanity sits at the surface. Because it wants to be seen. Getting through it takes time and patience.

On the other side is where all the culture and community is hiding. It’s like the barrier to entry. The midwest has a similar barrier, but it’s not vanity. It’s politeness. Behind some of that is where their flavor of ugliness hides.

That can be said of most things, I suppose.

But I do miss the humility of the midwest. No one opens a conversation trying to impress you with what projects they’re in. What commercial they booked. Trying to see how you can further them.

I miss that, the “what you see is what you get”.

No navigation needed.

I met so many people my first few years here. I remember very few of them. Some are still around. True to that person who fled the midwest, I chased writing.

Some really cool opportunities came my way. This was a long time ago, the industry functioned a little differently back then. Like, more of an openness and willingness, maybe.

I was here only a few months before I got my first manager, and was spending every Saturday for a few months at Billy Ray Cyrus’s house, helping him write a film. He had this huge pedestal with an ornate bible right at his entry door. And he had the biggest dog I’ve ever seen.

I can’t remember the dog’s name.

That movie didn’t go anywhere (lol).

Many situations like that came my way, and even if they never went anywhere, I hold them with gratitude.

Whenever I go home, things are slightly different.

New stores, old ones gone. People are getting older. Some have changed, some haven’t. Some don’t want to.

But something else.

I don’t know, maybe I’ve been in LA too long. But.

It doesn’t feel like home anymore. In some ways. Like my spot is gone. My seats taken. Feels foreign to me. Now and then I’ll drive by the house my parents lived in. My high school. Little reminders and little connections to memories.

Sometimes a longing for those things again. At the other end of that longing is more longing. Then sadness.

I go back and forth on this. If LA is permanent or temporary. Depends on the day. If it’s not LA, I don’t think whatever happens next is the midwest, though.

I have fallen for Southern California. But. IDK.

It is funny, though. In conversations here, when people ask where you’re from and you say the midwest, there seems to be a fondness for our people here. There’s something about us that people enjoy.

Or crave.

I think it’s the humility.

The opposite of vanity.