The Disorientation of Being Home
Another piece I’ve written for the MAEKAN Briefing.
I recently moved back to Seattle, where I grew up and spent the majority of my adolescent and adult life. Being back here and out of San Francisco — has been a strange experience on a number of levels.
On one hand, it's the first real "travel" I've done in a year, except for the prior visit up here to find an apartment. I enjoy traveling because it disorients me just enough to make me reflect on my life. The flight home from any trip inevitably finds me asking questions about what I missed when I was gone (and what I didn't) and what I want to bring home with me.
When leaving San Francisco and returning "home" to Seattle, I thought a lot about what I was leaving behind (and had made peace with) and what I wanted to bring with me. I also thought about what I was "coming home" to, given that I hadn't lived in the Seattle area in almost a decade.
The other strange thing about being back is how much of myself I see reflected back at me from the city. While I "did less" of my favorite things when I moved away from Seattle — some by choice (photography), some by circumstance (I didn't have a drum set anymore) — being back has invited those parts of me back out again. I live within walking distance of the venue where my high school band opened for our then heroes. I can bike around the campus where I went to graduate school and stop by the first classroom I taught in.
Being back - and having these parts of me invited out — makes me wonder to what extent I let my environment shape who I was when I was in San Francisco. I think it's easy to blame things that are external to us - our friends, our jobs, our environments — rather than accept our own role in change. But what I'm realizing now that I'm back in Seattle, is that while the city has changed, I am the thing that is both foreign and familiar. Seattle is simply a catalyst for that realization.
Accepting that I muted parts of who I am is the strangest feeling of all, because I don’t necessarily want to accept that I could have been fully me the whole time. Being home, I feel as though I'm reacquainting myself with myself. Maybe this is all a function of growing up, and now I can think even more intentionally about what I want to leave behind and what I want to bring with me in the months and years to come. Maybe being "home" is just enough disorientation for now.