Visiting my hometown and feeling a bit sad
Visiting my hometown and feeling a bit sad
So about 2 years ago, I moved away. Broken spirit broken person, over 3000 miles. However, yesterday I landed for my first visit back here. And I just feel weird. Like I'm not supposed to be here or something, it's very ominous. I constantly feel anxious.
The weirdest thing was seeing how my parents have started to age. And the woods where I used to hang out are all housing developments now. I'm currently sleeping on a mattress in my old room, aka the office now, surrounded by random shelving and printers and stuff. it's really a weird feeling in here too.
I don't know what I expected but I definitely don't feel like I'm "home". It's like some weird alternate dimension version of home. There's still some people I'm yet to see and I wonder how that's gonna go. So far everything already feels uncomfortably different. Alongside that, the rose tint has also come off and I have a lot of bad memories going through my head too instead of any sort of nostalgia. Almost like the different person I was back then is still lurking here somewhere watching me.
Anyone familiar with such a feeling, after being away for so long?
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There’s a concept that we studied in literature in University about never truly being able to go home again after you grow up. We were reading an Alice Munro short story collection but Tom Wolfe famously wrote about the topic.
While the article's author seems to mostly complain about changes, I personally experienced the opposite. After years the town had barely changed at all, which felt very strange and worse the people that stuck around, but aged, had become what I perceived as distorted shadows of what I remembered with very little personal growth apparent.
Well, thinking about “you can’t go home again”, it can be because the home you knew no longer exists
Or the you that was no longer exists
There's an expression that no person ever steps into the same river twice: because it's not the same river, and they're not the same person.
In my 40s I went back to my home town, not having lived there since I was 18 (none of my family still lived there). First shop I went into the woman said, "Hi MrsDoyle, how's your mum?" In the bank, the teller clocked my name and said, "Aww, I used to babysit you!" I got a big hit of the claustrophobia that drove me away in the first place.
Here's the Wikipedia article for the (aptly titled) Wolfe book.
You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood ... back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame ... back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting, but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.
It might get better later on, once you accept that the world has moved on, your old room is now an office, your parents are becoming old people, and time is passing. At some point you start getting nostalgic about the things that remained the same in a different way - or at least I did. But Wolfe is still right - it's not home any more.
For years, coming back to my hometown made me feel alien, like in a dream where everything was just slightly off. Like somebody came a rearranged my kitchen drawer while I was sleeping. Just wrong.
But now, twenty years later it, it changed. It didn't become home again but a place that I felt a deep connection to. My friends and I are now parents. The places where we were young and stupid are no longer for us. But that's okay.
I can never go back. Nor do I want to. But I understand my friends that stayed or returned. It wasn't such a bad place after all.
Very well written and lots of truth in there, especially the end about seeing it with new eyes. Thanks for sharing!