Making a home at all costs
On loving a place.
I have never quite known where to call my home. There are ancestral roots, deep ties in my family to the Blue Ridge Mountains, and then there are my own places, those where I have been witnessed: San Francisco, where I first entered this world; the suburbs of the North Carolina Piedmont, where I returned with my mother after my parent’s divorce as a baby; the coastlines of South Carolina, which oversaw my teenagehood and all the pain and joy that comes with it; New York City, which I moved to a month after my eighteenth birthday and which taught me isolation and fulfillment in equal, soul-crushing measures; the pine forests of rural North Carolina, where I, at the ripe age of twenty-two, became entrusted with my own classrooms of young individuals, met some of my closest friends and co-conspirators, and the place which eventually brought me to Chapel Hill and Durham, where I currently live while I attend graduate school at UNC, working towards my Masters in Folklore. Along the way there were stints all around the world: Paris, Peru, Chile, Kathmandu, Jordan, Canada.
All of these places have held me and seen me even when I did not wish to see them back. I understood myself most in glimpses out of airport windows and train tunnels. I existed most presently in liminal spaces, where I did not have to commit to anything. In liminal spaces, I only had to exist for a little while. I only had to be present in the short term. I did not understood what it meant to be somewhere in any kind of meaningful way; I could visit a place and exit it easily. I did not need to be known; I did not need to know home. I wanted my roots to exist most within myself, able to be picked up and placed back down at will.
When I first moved back to North Carolina, I did not want to fall in love with it. It was a reluctant move, one borne out of necessity (I needed a job). I had spent the previous few years traveling the world, and I had fallen in love with the weightlessness of constant movement: the feeling of not having to belong, of becoming comfortable with being a visitor. It was dawning upon me that I had perhaps never had a home, at least not in the sense of place. Home for me felt like an ever-changing horizon, a place that I did not need to know nor understand. I would find it in glimpses, in small moments where the light struck right and I understood the lineage I come from and the ways I carry it with me, weaving these stories into everything I do. That is home: the smell of smoke, the trees bending in the wind, the creaking of a front porch. I can find it anywhere. I can find it everywhere.
But I think I always wanted a home, or at the very least, I wanted roots. I wanted a place to call my own, and I always thought that somewhere along the way I would stumble upon it and it would feel right. It would not require work. It would find me as if it had been looking for me all along. In many ways, I suppose that is true. I wanted to find a place to love; I just never expected it would be a place that might not love me back. The South, in the end, is not the easiest place to live, nor the easiest place to love.
My first year in North Carolina, I lived two blocks away from the oldest known living longleaf pine tree, and I used to spend most days walking to it, around the field, and back home, the sun rising up or falling behind me. The world was quiet and filled with birdsong. It was the first time I ever lived alone. I was twenty-two and impossibly lonely. Everything was beautiful. Everything reminded me of something else. Often those other things hurt, even then, even still. I could never find the right words to explain how it felt. I was living in a small town and teaching in an even smaller one, and the only people I knew were the five other artists working with me. Those artists are some of my best friends now, but it wasn’t always that way. Our bond was forged over time and out of necessity, and cemented as we grew and changed together. We like to joke that we all met at rock bottom, and we’ve all watched one another claw to something better, something honest, something true.
It was that year that I first began writing this newsletter, trying to find some way to write myself home. In New York, I dreamt of the Carolinas; back in the Carolinas, I dreamt of steel and glass. I did not think I would ever be happy or satisfied; I felt myself begin to find comfort here, in those pine trees, and I felt again that same pressure to leave—to abandon a place before it could abandon me.
I don’t know when home became such a complicated feeling for so many of us, but I know I am not alone in feeling this way. The moment I begin to love a place, I also begin to feel I must leave it. I often do; I have moved every year for the last seven. Alone in the woods of North Carolina, I found myself on Zillow, dreaming of the West Coast, of New Zealand, of returning to Canada. Of anywhere that would have me. Of anywhere that I could begin again.
And then something strange happened, and I began to realize I did not want to leave this place at all. That somewhere along the way it had woven itself into the fiber of my being. That the drive through the hills back to my apartment felt more familiar than anywhere else I had ever been; that I could recognize scents and smells; that I was known at the local cafe. I was forced to show up in a place because it made itself known to me. I could not run away—nor did I want to.
It was that year that I applied for graduate school, terrified suddenly that if I did not get in, I would have to abandon the first place I felt I had ever truly loved. I am lucky; I was accepted, and I have stayed. And in those last two years, I had found myself drilling even deeper into this place, forcing my roots into the ground. I have placed them there even when they did not want to be, even when my identities as a young person, a queer person, an artist, an organizer, all felt at odds with the reality of life in these places.
All the stories I had seen before showed the people like me leaving home behind, forging it somewhere new entirely; but this project has shown me that home does not require me to exit everything I have ever known—including myself—but be willing to meet myself on a similar plane. To show up and not look away, whether it be from the parts of myself I do not wish existed or from the pieces of this place that make it so much harder to call it home. Sometimes it feels as if this place does not want me here; that I have so much love to give it and it does not want to love me back. That it would be easier to leave and seek out home somewhere else, somewhere that might open itself up more readily to who I am. Then I remember that I have already done that, I have already disappeared with abandon, and somehow, no matter where I went or how far away, all I ever really wanted was to be here, even if I didn’t quite know what here looked like yet.
It’s not to say don’t go. It’s not to say that the South is the right home for everyone. For some of us, the call is away. For some of us, you have to go. (I especially appreciated Skylar Baker-Jordan’s thoughts on this in the 100 Days of Appalachia newsletter recently). For some of us, you have to go in order to realize you want to come back. I am grateful for the places I have seen and for all that I have learned in them, and most of all I am grateful for all the ways in which they slowly but surely led me back here. For better or for worse, whether I want it to be or not, the South is home.
Now, as I stare down the gauntlet of PhD applications and the continuation of my academic career, I am filled with the same fear I once was, the fear that I might have to leave home, again, in order to pursue the work I desire to do. I do not know what will come of the next few months, or where I will end up. But I do know that, no matter what happens, I want to come back. I have a place to return to. Every time I return now I take the same exit off the highway and roll my windows down and inhale the air and it is as familiar to me as I am to myself these days. I am not an abandoned thing; I will not abandon this place. I am known.
In 2018, right in the midst of most of my travels, I posted this quote from Paulo Friere from his Pedagogy of Hope, which I found myself revisiting as I drafted this post today:
“No one leaves his or her world without being transfixed by its roots, or with a vacuum for a soul. We carry with us the memory of many fabrics, a self soaked in our history, our culture; a memory, sometimes scattered, sometimes sharp and clear, of the streets of our childhood, of our adolescence; the reminiscing of something distant that suddenly stands out before us, in us, a shy gesture, an open hand, a smile lost in time and misunderstanding, a sentence, a simple sentence, possibly now forgotten by the one who said it. A word for so long a time attempted and never spoken, always stifled in inhibition, in the fear of being rejected—which, as it implies a lack of confidence in ourselves, also means refusal to risk.”
May we no longer refuse the risk. May we never have a vacuum for our souls.
I’ll leave you with a poem I wrote on my first week of graduate school, for a course on ritual, where we were asked to adapt the ever-popular “I Am From” exercise by George Ella Lyon. In the end, I am from these things, which are rooted in place but not tied to it:
I am from the woman in the portrait, from coffee grinds and orange-lit lamps from the courtyard past the cemetery and the flowers that grow into the empty graves there. From the smell of the marsh, mud and magnolia, and the pine trees, which know how to spin out far and return to their roots when the wind stills. Their limbs long gone, burrowed beneath the dirt. I remember as if they were my own. I too know the endless winter, the damp and the dark. I’m from hedging bets and losing minds, from memory slipping away like water. I am from all the women who came before me, who did this alone, and who were beautiful, even then, even now. I’m all grit and callus; I was taught to be tough if I wanted to survive this. I’m from shipwheels and Cadillacs, made and then made again in an airplane, over an ocean, in the middle of the lake. I’m from words you won’t hear outside of this place and an accent I thought I had to lose to make it there. I suwannee, I swear, I have never known where to call home. I’ve been born in every place I’ve ever lived. The golden bridge and the palm fronds of the church, the horizon sinking into sand, the steel buildings stretching into the sky. I’ve been all places, and all places lead me back to the mountain, to the forest, to the farmhouse on top of the hill. I’m from mimi and my mother, the apartment off the highway and then the kitchen where the women wore their hair to the smalls of their backs and the men prayed solemnly around the dining table. I’m from the gulley, from the sea. I’m from the words I remember and the words I wish I didn’t. From the man who couldn’t give up an empty horizon and the fear I have that I’m like that, too. I’ll go, I’ll look. I’ll come back. I’m from the wood, from the green, the place that no one ever truly seems to leave.
PROMPT OF THE WEEK
What histories are you soaked in? What do your roots look like? If you leave, where will you go? If you come back, where do you come back to?
In lieu of five things this week, I will offer an apology for the scattering of posts over the last few weeks as we wrapped up our summer hiatus here at Good Folk and returned to the school year. I began my second year of graduate school this week, and as such, we will be back to our regular programming—both with the podcast (some very exciting guests in the upcoming lineup!) and the newsletter—soon. Much love, as always, and stay tuned.