If you read the previous post, you know that I have FINALLY moved out of the town where I had spent a large part of the last thirteen years of my life, having moved there when I was ten. Living in the same place for that long meant that when it was finally time to move, I spent weeks digging myself out of piles of clothes, paper, and other detritus I'd pulled from closets and and from under the bed and thinking "where did all of this come from?!" (On an unrelated note, I recently helped my grandparents pack up their home of more than forty years, which was a monumental task. Thirteen years is plenty). It also meant that while I was packing, I had a lot of time to think about my hometown, and what it meant to finally be leaving it for good after all this time.
Here's the thing: I have a love-hate relationship with my hometown, in a way that I think many of us who grew up in small towns do. I love it, mostly, because of the rural neighborhood where I grew up, because it was safe and I could run around with the neighborhood kids without our parents ever really having to worry about us. I loved my large, green yard, and the patch of woodland behind our house that connected into a slightly larger one that in childhood seemed immense, and where we could pretend to be anything we wanted. The creek that flowed through it was our conduit, and we spent days of every season wandering up and down it, trudging through deep water, edging past brambles and stepping on slippery stones until we found ourselves sitting on the banks of whole new worlds.
When I began to grow up, when running around barefoot with a back of twelve kids was suddenly "uncool," my town offered me next-to-no opportunities. For a town whose biggest draw is a strip mall, the lack of anything to do was incredibly frustrating. No cafes or coffee shops. No movie theatre. No mall. All we had was a bowling alley partially owned by a sex offender, so obviously our parents weren't crazy about us hanging out there anyway. I spent the majority of my adolescence holed up in my room wallowing in my own boredom, playing "The Sims" on the computer and giving my avatars much more exciting lives than my own, and staying up late scribbling into moonlit journals about how unhappy I was. Later, when I made friends my own age, we busied ourselves with extra-curriculars and volunteering after school, and on the weekends we would hole up in someone else's bedroom or living room, commiserating and expressing our greatest fear: that we would end up staying in this purgatory between childhood and adulthood forever. So many of our friends' parents and grandparents were graduates of the our high school, but we wanted to go places and do things and see things. We didn't want to stay here like them, to raise another generation of bored children. We wanted out.
Most of us did get out. I went to college (in another small town, but a different one, at least) for four years, including a semester abroad in Cheltenham England during my junior year. From Cheltenham I branched out to London, Bath, Florence, Edinburgh, Amsterdam, Galway, and more. Here, at last was the dream: I was so far away from my hometown. I was finally seeing a part of the world I'd always wanted to see. I took thousands of pictures, met new people, tried new foods and developed new hobbies, and I broadened horizons. Coming back from England saw me deeply unhappy again, but eventually I pulled myself together, threw myself into my studies and jobs, drank a little on the weekends, and spent the next year pushing toward the cap and gown.
That's what made it so hard when I found myself with a diploma in my hand, but with no job offers in my inbox. I wasn't unhappy at the thought of being back with my parents; I get along with my family extremely well and am probably closer to my parents than most people I know. I was unhappy because I had no choice but to go back to the town I had so desperately wanted to escape. I had worked so hard all through high school and college in part because I wanted it to pay off in a way that meant I never had to come back. Coming back and staying for 18 months, and working in a local diner was absolute torture, because I lived in constant fear of someone--anyone--I'd known from high school coming in and being waited on by me, of them thinking or saying, "wow, we really thought you were going to be something; we thought that you, of all people, would get out." The days I wasn't at the diner I was bored to death working the desk at the local library of an even smaller town twenty minutes away, where I sifted through job listings on the Internet, planning my escape.
But I finally did escape: a job was offered, and it swept me off to the big city. I've been here since late February and am truly enjoying myself. And here's what I've come to realize about my hometown: it is a great place to raise a family. I was a very happy child. It was only in adolescence that boredom set in, and then in young adulthood that I realised I could be sucked into its opportunity-less vortex forever if I didn't act fast. It's not a bad place; it's just that I always knew it wasn't the place I wanted to spend the rest of my life.
That isn't to say that I want to spend the rest of my life here in Philadelphia; I am enamored of this place for many reasons, but there is still so much of the world I haven't seen. Maybe I will end up here long term; I certainly have no plans to leave soon. I don't know where my life will take me in the (hopefully) many years ahead of me, but I am more than happy to make Philadelphia my home base for now. If nothing else, at least I'm not nearly as bored as I used to be.
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