Nobody else in today’s meeting was born in New Jersey.
Find someone in the room with the same size hand as you. Check. Find someone who read the same
book as you in the past year. Check. Find
someone wearing the same color as you. Check.
Find someone who was born in the same state as you ...
It’s the only one I missed. Everyone else was born in Iowa.
This post contains my reflections on the three major moves to
three different states I have made since I left my parent’s house seven years
ago. A few disclaimers before I begin:
1). I do not look down on people who don’t move.
Maybe I once did. Not now.
2). I started writing this post several months ago, and
it would have been a much different post with a much different tone if I had
finished it then. Just goes to show that my feelings on this topic will always be dependent on whichever phase
of the moving/re-adjusting cycle I happen to be in at the time.
3). I am by no means the poster-child for big moves.
Many readers of this blog have moved farther and more frequently than I have. I
lived in the same house for the first 18 years of my life and since then have
never lived more than a six-hour drive from home. Except for a semester in
Australia and a summer in India, I have not lived outside the American Midwest
(despite being born in New Jersey). Starting over is starting over, but my
experiences are relative.
Ok.
I grew up in what I would later learn is a privileged suburb
of St. Louis, though at the time I just assumed it was completely standard. 99%
of students from my high school go on to college (according to Wikipedia), and
about half of those go out of state. It’s just a given that if your parents can
afford it, you’ll end up in another state. No questions asked.
I chose to go to Indiana University through a series of
events that is still hazy to me, but probably had something to do with the fact
that it was out-of-state while not being too
far from home.
Although I never moved in my childhood, I had always assumed
that college would be my first of many future moves, because travel and
independence and career were so encouraged within my family and community.
But when the time came to actually leave for college, I did
not want to go. I am extremely attached to the familiar and nostalgic by
nature, so the fact that I ever even left home in the first place is probably
100% a product of the culture in which I was raised. If I was born in another
place, to another family, I believe I might have been perfectly content to
marry my first boyfriend and never leave home.
But still, I was at least partly excited for college.
Because I assumed that everyone at IU would be in the same boat as me—away from
their home-state for the first time and eager to make new friends, just as all
my old high school friends would be as they scattered to their new schools
across the country.
Wrong.
Besides my roommate and me, everyone on my freshman floor
were from small, rural towns in Indiana. They were all rooming with their best
friend from home. Most were engaged to their high school sweetheart. They went home
every weekend to hang out with their families. No one planned to ever leave
Indiana.
I felt shocked and strangely betrayed by these girls. I had
moved away from my family and friends and broken up with my boyfriend the week
before so that I would be fully available to immerse myself in a new social
life here, starting with my floormates. Because that’s what I thought you were
supposed to do.
While these girls spent their weekends at home, I spent mine
on our eerily quiet hallway learning the hard parts of starting over that
nobody had warned me about: It’s lonely, it’s boring, it’s sad, and it takes a
really long time to know that you’ve made the right choice.
But also, of course, that it does get better. And it did. I
adjusted. I made friends. I even met the love of my life.
Four years later I was making plans to move somewhere new
for grad school, as had always been my plan, while most of my college friends
were making plans to stay and settle in Indiana.
I was in a bar with Doug one night before I left when these
lyrics came on:
And here I go again on
my own
Going down the only
road I’ve ever known
I teared up. “I don’t want to go again on my own!” I cried
into Doug’s shoulder.
Later he played Dancing
in the Dark by Bruce Springsteen for me, and made me pay attention to this
lyric:
You can’t start a fire
worrying about your little world falling apart
So I tried not to worry about my little world falling apart
as I packed up and moved to Illinois. (I’d been planning to go to grad school
in California forever, but made a
last-minute decision to go to Illinois instead. Read into that what you will).
At grad school I mostly met people from Illinois, and
started to catch on that everywhere I go I will meet people who have never left.
Starting over was slow again, and boring, and lonely. But then I came to love
it. My friends there were amazing and I wanted to keep them forever.
Then I blinked and it was over.
I remember sitting in the back of the classroom on the last
day as my friends all filled out their applications for Illinois licenses at
the table in front of me. It’s happening
again, I thought. Everyone I love is
staying and I have to leave.
Then I moved to Iowa.
A month after my move, I met a woman at a job training who
had moved here with her husband a year ago for his job.
“Do you like it here in Iowa?” I asked her, as I am always eager
to pester other people who have also come from other places, probably in search
of validation that I am not the only one who feels like a tree without roots.
She stared straight ahead and said, in a tone of grim
determination, “We. Are. Going. To. Like. It.”
I found myself admiring and taking note of that attitude, her
acceptance that whether she “liked it here” was a moot point by now. She was
here. It was done. Bloom where you’re planted, and all of that.
Later I had dinner with a couple friends who also just moved
here, one from Massachusetts and one from Scotland. Conversation with them was
comforting, as they both understood first-hand the pains and pleasures of
starting over—the girl from Scotland much more so than I. But both of them also
had plans to move back home eventually. Home—where all their family and friends
would be waiting for them.
That type of home doesn’t exist for me anymore. I don’t have
a place to move back to someday where everyone I’ve loved in my life will be
awaiting my return with open arms. My parents are still in St. Louis, but
everyone else from my life is scattered. There is no prospect of moving back
home for me, just of visiting old homes and creating new ones. The journey
itself must become my home.
I was at my first staff meeting in January, feeling new and
out-of-place and wishing that I could just skip right over this inevitable
stage of not knowing anyone or anything. And wishing that I did just have a
familiar home to go back to once this whole stage was said and done.
But then we played Two
truths and a lie, that game where you say two things that are true about
yourself and one that’s false and everyone has to vote on which is the lie.
The facts that the girl across from me gave were this: “I
have never left the country.” “I have never lived outside of Iowa City…” (I was really hoping her last one
wouldn’t be I have never been off of this
street) “…And I have never gotten a speeding ticket.”
The lie turned out to be that she never lived outside Iowa
City, because for one year she lived in a different city in Iowa.
And in that one moment, I suddenly remembered how glad I am
for all the varied truths I have managed to gather in my short life. I felt
glad to have studied abroad, to have written a column that earned me hate mail,
to have skydived and bungee jumped, and to have taught an Indian village how to
dance the Macarena.
This is always how it is with me. I go back and forth. I
feel a push and a pull. I want to be far but I want to be close. I want to have
adventures but I want the familiar. I crave excitement and calm. I am jealous
of people who stay until I remember that I’m not. I am made up of these two
opposing desires, one of which has been allowed to develop only because I was
pushed to leave home.
Doug and I were out to dinner with our friends Ben and Abby several
months ago and a Lady Gaga song came on. “I did what any girl would do, and I
would do it all over again,” Abby said, repeating one of the lines. “That’s
what Ben’s paper is about,” she said, nudging her fiancée. “The concept of
eternal return.”
“What’s eternal return?” I asked.
“It’s feeling so content with the choices you have made that
you would choose to repeat your life again, moment for moment, feeling every
joy and every sorrow exactly the same, all over again.”
That’s me. I would do that. In a heartbeat.
I can never relate when people say things like “I would never want to go back to high school.” I
feel nostalgic for every part of my life, and I would be happy for the chance
to re-live any of it.
And maybe that’s precisely because I have gotten to have so
many different and amazing experiences without staying anywhere long enough for
things to get stale.
Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa might not sound like
places that would be exciting or that would be all that different from each
other, but the people I’ve met in each place have been unique and wonderful.
And that’s the only thing that really matters
to me anywhere I go.
Letting go of day-to-day friendships with people I love is
always the hardest for me. When I click with someone it feels like destiny, and
like a mistake to part. I’m never comforted by “how easy it is to keep in touch
these days.” When someone moves, things change. Period. That’s why moving is so
painful.
I’m trying to train myself to not get so hung up on
particular people, but to instead focus on the take-away lesson that all of this
has taught me: There is no shortage of good people anywhere. The more you move
around, the more of them you get to meet.
I try to remind myself to stop and just think about all of
the experiences I wouldn’t have had and the people I wouldn’t have met if I
hadn’t moved all these times and had all these adventures. And when I focus on
that I stop, at least for the moment, feeling jealous of anyone or homesick for
a place that doesn’t exist. Instead I just feel lucky.
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