I’ve written about the sense of home, moving, and how all of that is rewired in the adulthood in this blog before. Today, I’m writing about it a little bit more.
Every time I go back to visit my old hometown I end up with very mixed emotions and this last trip was no different….only maybe it was. For those of you who don’t already know, I was born and raised in the Los Angeles area. When I turned 18 I moved up to Oregon to attend the University of Portland, and one year after graduation I began my life of living and working across Asia, Europe and the US.
For a girl with a nomad’s heart, it was a dream come true getting to move every few months. A new country, new city, new home, new friends, new adventures at every turn. Yet, I always felt a sense of longing and melancholy when I thought about my beachside town and the gritty hustle of LA. I would fall in love swiftly with every new place I traveled to…but California was always home…no matter how long I was gone.
Things changed.
Over the course of the past five or six years I started seeing changes in my old city that didn’t feel comfortable or sit well with me. Maybe it’s stuff that had always been there, but I was not as aware….maybe I was outgrowing the city or maybe it had outgrown me. I know that I was tired of the hustle and the high prices. I felt uncomfortable with the lack of authenticity that felt like it was becoming far more common. The crime, the dirt, the lost souls….all just became too much.
Once the pandemic hit and the world pressed a massive pause button….I knew deep down inside that all of the things that were making me feel less at home would intensify ….and I was right.
Ultimately, my hometown, state, and the things that were happening there pushed me away. I found a new hometown, made a plan, worked myself to the point of exhaustion (and a little madness) to get there with my two kids, my dog and a hamster…and made it happen. Even though I had only visited this new place three times prior, I knew it was home….and over a year later it still feels so much more like home than anywhere I’ve ever lived before. My kids and I can breathe here….literally and figuratively.
The strangest, or most interesting part of it all is that I don’t miss my former hometown at all. I miss some of the people I had to leave behind, but for the first time in my life, that dull ache of homesickness I always felt when I was on the road, doesn’t exist anymore. I’ve been back three times in the past 12 months to visit family…but even though everything looks somewhat familiar (the shiny veneer that existed throughout my childhood and up until a few years ago is gone now….a dull patina has taken its place) it also feels disconnected and foreign.
It’s not home anymore. I no longer go home when I visit. Where I live now is where I go home to…and come home to.
I think perhaps things have evolved like this for me because my last few years in LA were such a struggle. A lot of hard hitting moments happened to me there and at the same time the city was falling apart…..leaving was like saying goodbye to an old lover who had grown toxic and abusive. The good memories were no longer enough.
So here I am in my little town in the desert feeling a lightness in my heart that I haven’t felt in ages. I still have too many worries and stresses. I am a mother after all….but the worries and stresses are different.
The nomad heart that sent me across the globe in my youth still exists. I follow one too many foreign and regional property accounts on Instagram and I love dreaming of a tiny apartment in London, a cozy cabin in the mountains of Washington, a villa surrounded by olive trees in Tuscany, a townhouse in New Hampshire, and a country house in Sweden. I mean, have you seen how amazing some of these homes and places are and how inexpensive too?
As I get older, the realization that I don’t have the amount of years ahead of me that I used to, to cover as much of the earth as I dreamt of doing hits hard. It’s one of very few things I resent about the aging process….the lack of time. Something we really don’t think about in our 20s, is it?
…but I do find comfort in knowing that where I am now feels like home.
For now, I have come home.
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