I wasn't always a homebody. As a teenager, I often wanted to erase the world around me and create an entirely new narrative for my life. I wanted new scenery, new plot, and some new characters. At times, I wouldn't have minded tweaking my own personality a bit. I wasn't happy in my own skin and assumed, as teenagers seem to do, that many of the adults close to me contributed to that unhappiness. So I applied to college with the intention of pursuing a popular dream for a high school senior from Decatur, GA: to go somewhere where I wouldn't have to be who people had decided I was in elementary school. I wanted to go to a place where I wouldn't just be my infamous brother's sister, or that nice, quiet "Kate Brown" from an oddly religious family that doesn't celebrate holidays. But my parents played the money card, deciding that it was their money, their decision. Marking out any out-of-state schools, I was down to two feasible options. Although part of me wanted to taste the life of a big university, the narrow walls of my comfort zone longed for a small, easily navigable campus. By my birthday I had signed my college career over to a tiny liberal arts school in North Georgia. Only an hour and a half from Decatur "Where It's Greater, " I still felt myself embedded in the same assumptions, the same stereotypes. I was still perceived as a nice, shy girl, now assumed to be religious because at Berry, excitable bible students far outnumbered wild party goers. Nearly everyone I went to school with was from Georgia and many of them new someone, who knew someone, who knew someone I knew from home. I kept my close friends from high school, who remain my closest friends today, and together we could be ourselves. We had our college lives, but when we got together were some of the only times I truly felt like I was being myself. Just like in high school, I felt like I was walking among a group of people that had already decided who I was before I even got there. The shyness everyone always assumed to be true has in fact always been my biggest fault, and I just didn't have the courage to break other assumptions for fear of standing out. So why stick around and keep trying? My junior year, I left for England to study abroad. At first, I didn't care where I went or what I studied while I was there. I just wanted to breathe some fresh air.
For the first time in my entire life, I entered a setting in which I knew absolutely no one but where I immediately felt like I was home. I didn't have a childhood friend as my constant in case I didn't make any new friends. I was alone and I was scared to death, but something about the whole experience felt natural and normal. By the end, I had made some of the quickest and closest friends I have ever made on my own. I had to search deep within myself to remember what qualities I had that people might like and what qualities I liked in other people. But most of all, I finally got my chance to start over and make friends on my own while still holding onto my roots. I starting missing home for the first time since high school and when three months was over, I was ready for the nine hour flight. I knew I could keep more than one place and more than one person close to me. And most of all, I realized that part of what "home" is can simply be the people that you can't wait to run back to every time. I wanted to cut the strings at such a young age only to realize that there were times when I wanted to tie them back together.
After finishing college, becoming a first-time Aunt, and marrying a fellow "Decaturite" (Jason), home was finally becoming a place where I belonged. Then Jason got a job that uprooted us from Georgia and plopped us in Monroe, Louisiana. I bawled for the first hour after leaving family at the airport, especially after seeing my big sister cry, which was a very rare occasion. She knew, like I did, that we would have to work hard for my niece, two months old at the time, to really know who Jason and I were now that we weren't living close by. It took me until the Louisiana border to finally stir up some excitement for our first big move. I loved our apartment and got lost for a while in wedding gifts and job searching, but thoughts of what I was missing still weasled their way into my idle moments. I didn't want to miss all of my niece's firsts. I didn't want to miss out on time with my parents and siblings, now that I had real relationships with them. I didn't want to see distance separate friends who hadn't been apart for any substantial amount of time for the past seven or so years. Especially since after college, we all had finally accepted that something about that unique small city life was part of what made us so inseparable. And much to my disbelief, I didn't want to leave the place I wanted so badly to leave as a teenager. It was my home. I could do it for a few months at a time, but not for this long. I wouldn't know who to be without it.
Six months later, I'm finally starting to get used to the fact that time doesn't stand still. No matter how much I try to keep things a certain way, everyone else around me keeps moving. The only person that remains constant is myself. So once again, I've had to really do some soul searching to figure out what I feel I can contribute here and what kind of people I want to surround myself with. After reading a Maya Angelou quote a friend recently showed me, I came across another that keeps poking its way back into my subconscious. Maya said, "I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself." I am finally starting to realize the importance of first feeling at home in my own skin. As long as I know what I stand for as an individual and remember the people and places that are a part of me, I can then feel at home wherever I may be living. I have grown tired of feeling like a stranger in a place I have made my home. This is my home and I will find my place in it.
