Returning to a small town is comforting, in a weird way. I guess going home anywhere is comforting, but something about this place eases my mind. There’s not the constant stress of academic performance, or the anxiety that comes from trying to be socially adequate among people who probably feel just as self-doubting and unsure of the future. No one here is running to make billions before they hit 30, or talking about anything computer-science-related that creates an uncomfortable barrier of comprehension.
I hadn’t thought much about how severely different my hometown is from the place I moved to five months ago, but coming back I feel like my body has lost the sensory adaptation it built up for eighteen years. I knew when I left that I would always be on the outside when I came home, simultaneously knowing this place like the back of my hand and not quite fitting into it anymore. What I didn’t realize was how different everything would feel. For months, I couldn’t quite understand why my friends ditched futures elsewhere to return here, to this compact town that manages to dig up every memory I’ve tried to bury. I let them make the choices they knew were best for themselves, and I let myself settle into the choice I made; a fast lane a thousand miles away, headed in a direction I haven’t figured out, but headed somewhere, and rapidly.
Now that I’m back, I feel the weird sense of relief that I can only guess my friends felt upon returning. It’s not just a change of pace, it permeates in everywhere all over town. There’s no pressure to get anything done, no pressure to go anywhere or do anything or even think about doing anything. In a lot of ways, this is nice. I don’t feel like I have to be well rounded and hyper successful and well articulated and good at everything or anything at all, honestly. It’s enough to wake up and get through the day and return to sleep. There’s no pressure, no anxiety, not a significant amount of stress to keep me up more than two nights a week. And I guess I understand why people craved coming home so much.
My dad said once that the biggest problem with growing up in a small town is that people don’t have much ambition. He said that because most people are doing fine, they don’t have the incentive to change anything. I understand that now. Growing up, I always hated living here. I hated it more than anything else. I felt like if I could just go anywhere else, things would be better. And I left, and they are, but not without a price. In California, I feel like I have to be someone more than who I am. Everyone is on a one way track to the place they want to be in eight years, and I’m just along for the ride trying to learn new things when it’s really too late to try. And I know this is a generalization, and I’ve met people who don’t look at the future like it’s a map, and the people who do will probably end up changing their minds as many times as I already have, but that attitude of perpetual motion, the high pressure, high anxiety, high stress, high stakes mindset has an atmosphere of its own. Whether or not I actually want to be super fucking rich and super fucking successful and super fucking monumental in five years, I get caught up in wondering if I’m doing enough, if I am enough, if I should be padding my resume more and learning six new languages and doing all the things I quit ten years ago not because I actually want to but because I feel like I have to compete just to exist, to take up space and breathe air and it’s exhausting.
And I lived and breathed that energy for months, and then I came home to a place where my old teachers congratulated me on not quitting yet, and I remembered how easy it is to be here. It’s like marinating in ambition-less, nothing-really-matter-flavored broth, until your skin gets wrinkly and suddenly you’re buried six feet under the ground without ever having left this area code. That scares me. It always scared me. It’s why I knew I would go to school anywhere far enough from this place to feel the ties break and to leave it all behind, as much as is possible when it comes to the one place you lived your entire life.
I never liked it here because I have always had more ambition than my body could hold. But not useful ambition, like the kind that’s focused and driven and guides someone to the places they’re supposed to go. I have the kind of ambition that works sporadically, sometimes giving me the motivation to power through things for months before seeing the gnarly details, the kind that feels like screaming stuck inside lungs, that builds up too much and leads to choking when it matters most, and results in desperately trying to latch on to some straightforward path towards success. It’s still ambition though. Every now and then I do something impressive and I wonder if there really is a future where I achieve at least one of the far-fetched things I daydream about. I was driving in april and drinking a strawberry banana smoothie when I got the gut feeling about where to go to school, and that makes me sound more crazy than promising, but it led me to a place that was, in all honesty, the best choice I could have made. Regardless of how many times I verbally doubt it.
The thing is, coming home I’ve realized I’m not made of endless drive and effort. Some days I just want to lie in bed reading E! news articles about people who don’t matter, or try to remember where I got each of the pictures stapled up on my ceiling. I am happy kicking a soccer ball around in the back yard with my dad and my brother and knowing I’m not good at it, or failing to bar chords on the ukulele but passing the time trying, because here I don’t have to be “faking it” as Josh would say. Here, it’s okay if I am not spectacular at anything. There’s books to half read and coffee shops to loiter in and old stuff to go through and old friends to see and that’s enough to fill the time. And is there really much more to life than filling time?
I don’t know. This is the existential rut I fall into. There’s a really great Shakey Graves song called “Dining Alone,” and when he played it live he said “No matter what you do in life, you’ll have times where you really just feel like you’re stuck in a rut. And this is a song about that,” and the song talks about thinking about all the things he’ll never get to do and trying to escape from that understanding. And I really relate to that. I have a bad habit of getting lost in thought and ignoring the present, which is honestly the worst way to go about spending time. High stress environment or not, it’s better to be there in the moment and take what you can get from where you are.
Maybe this is the enlightenment I was looking for when I started writing, maybe it’s emotional maturity, maybe it’s the influence of new people in my life, or the result of getting away from old people, or, more likely, a combination of all of it. Some days I feel like I could change the world, and other days I feel content with the thought of bringing someone home for the holidays some year. There’s definitely a middle ground there, and a way to find a balance between everything in life. There aren’t really “answers,” but the right mindset is somewhere between where I’m from and where I’m going, which means it’s somewhere along the way.
Anyway, it’s nearly 2am and I’m not sure this is making sense anymore. But does it really matter if no one else will read this?