next »

[keineidee]

The Chronicle has a new article up about place and identity and relocating versus staying put:

http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2009/05/2009052201c.htm

The writer talks about feeling connected to Philly no matter where he roams, but is also developing roots in Western Michigan where he lives with his family.

I think about this question a lot as someone who has lived in a number of very different places over the years. What makes a place "home?" My experience is a little different from Benton's.

My backstory is that I left a job about three years ago in a place that had come to feel like home after close to 8 years. I came here to where I am now b/c the new job would allow me to grow in directions I couldn't in my old place.

However, when people ask me where I'm from, I reflexively say that "I'm from X" -- not from the place I grew up. Then I always add "but I grew up in Y" and then start muttering stuff about "my spiritual home" that I find embarrassing even as I say it. I really do miss the landscape and environment, as well as the culture, of "X," and I suspect everyone around me knows it, which is probably annoying to them.

Objectively speaking, a lot of place like "Y," and extol its virtues. Recently I decided to start making an effort to celebrate those virtues instead of pining for what is not. I have been visiting "Y" hangouts, going to "Y" sights, etc. There are many good things about "Y."

However, I suppose I haven't invested in the ways Benton describes, and it shows. I have no house, kids, partner here so could drift off to the next thing if I wanted...or find a way to go back to "X." Three years out I'm still fantasizing about doing just that, even though the job here is still worth staying for.

As for "Z," where I grew up -- I visit once or twice a year, but I'm quite content with that.

Has anyone come to terms with your own "Y"? Do you have an "X" in your past, or is your real home "Z?"

[polly_mer]

Hmmm.  Interesting question.  I spent the first 18 years of my life in the same town in which most of my relatives still reside, but I don't consider it home.  If asked, I reply that home is the town in which I did most of my education and in which have spent about a third of my life living (although not in consecutive chunks).  When we have lived away, all we could talk about was getting situated so that we could move back home.

Well, we're living here now and I'm starting to think that I've outgrown home.  It's familiar and we have established a life here (chosen family made of dear friends and a house), but I'm actually pretty excited about the possibilities of moving somewhere else for that elusive TT position. 

The longtime dean of students left a couple years ago and was quoted as saying, "I was drawn here for a reason.  It's been a great couple of decades, but I am now drawn to other possibilities."  At the time, I thought that was just one of those nice boilerplate ways to not burn his bridges.  Now that I have that feeling, I have a better appreciation of why it is often used as a standard response, even in non-applicable situations.

[kedves]

I find it too easy to "stand in the place where you are" and have loved every place in which I've lived.  I am trying to avoid doing that here because this place has many disadvantages for me.  Moving has ripped at my heart almost every time I've done it.

The geographic landscape of the area in which I grew up gives me a sense of comfort, and I miss the feeling of the big city in which I spent 15 years.  I think of myself as between places now.  I am seldom able to watch "my" baseball team play, but I haven't developed a fondness for a new team.  One of my many housing fantasies involves a Gypsy wagon (vardo), but life without commitment to a place is hard for me. 

[onion]

That article really made me think.  We moved quite a bit when I was growing up, and when asked where I'm from, I usually name the city where I went to high school, although I'd lived somewhere very, very different from the ages of about 5 to 15.  So this city where I only lived for 3 years seems like "where I grew up."  Maybe that's because my family is still there, 20+ years later.  However, sometimes I find that I claim the big city where I went to grad school and lived for a bit afterwards as "home."  Sometimes people call me a liar when I say that, but that city really felt like home.  Maybe it's because I spent a lot of time with folks from the same ethnic background as me.  I'd never had that before in the other places I'd lived--outside of the family.

I've been living in a town for 4 years now for my first TT job, and I've tried so hard to make this "home," but I hate it.  I hate almost everything about it.  I tried to "bloom where I was planted."  I spent a year fully immersed in this town--its culture, its activist groups, touring its religious institutions as well as dive bars, and I just don't "fit" here.  I'm getting ready to move for a new job in a couple months, to a place I know almost nothing about, for a job that looks like it will be a good "fit," and I'm wondering and hoping if I can make this new place "home," and just how to go about doing that.  I've noticed that my colleagues and friends with children, as Benton describes, can more quickly establish or feel like they are home.  My mother astutely commented that, in house hunting expeditions, when one has children, the school district might guide your decisions, for whatever reason.  I don't have that.  I usually try to live in neighborhoods with people from my ethnic group, but current town doesn't have a "Little X," and new town doesn't either.  It will be interesting, that's for sure.

[the_honey_badger]

I'm from a region with a distinct regional identity (including self-deprecating yet self-exalting jokes), my family was there for over 300 years and I realize that it shaped my world view and I'll always be a small-town-girl-from-X at heart.

I believed in the "grow where you are planted" idea when I moved for my tt job to a very different region. After seven years?  Its alien territory---despite owning a house there and building a daily life.  One thing is that it too is a place with an overwhelming regional set of identifying cultural features (from foodways to religion), the student population is overwhelmingly local and much of the faculty has self-selected to get back "home." More than that?  I realized that the physical landscape affects me---I come from a green place with lots of water and live in a landscape that is flat and brown. Its just not mine.

I may live here another 30 years but the day I retire?  Off to my normal latitudes, landscape and culture for me. Its been an interesting visit but its just not "home" outside of my house.

[erzuliefreda]

I went to college near my hometown, so I spent 21 years in the same general area. I loved it there, for the most part, and until I was 20, I didn't think I would ever leave. But I went away for grad school.

For 13 years, I lived in an Amazing City. I spent 4 semesters of that time in UniTown, but I hardly count that time. My heart was still in Amazing City. The city became like a friend to me. I never felt like I was from there, but it was my adopted home.

Now I have spent nearly 1 year in Southern TT City. My life is better here in many quantifiable areas--like the TT part, for instance. And the city is fine. It's pretty, historic, and meets all my needs. We have a Banana Republic and an Ann Taylor, even. I am fortunate to live here. I miss Amazing City terribly, but I do my best to hide that, since people already mistrust me as "that woman from Amazing City." Most of the time I am successful.

Every day at some point, though, it hits me that I really live here, and am not just visiting Southern TT City. Sometimes that is when I see another gun shop or a Confederate flag. Sometimes it is when I think, "Is it wrong to have fried chicken three times in the same day?" I passed through a wave of depression at the end of term, where a numbness washed over me and I struggled to feel anything other than anxiety and despair. I tried to keep quiet then, because I knew anything I said would be anti-TT City.

The wave has passed now and I feel better able to appreciate aspects of my life here. I want to be happy and rooted here, even though we won't buy a house for five years, at the very least. I look forward to the day when I feel like this city is my home.

[mended_drum]

I've lived in the midwest, the northeast, the deep south and Europe.  Each time I moved, there was a pretty significant culture shock, and I both loved and hated my new locale.  As I look back on it, though, I think that my intellectual development is truly tied to these moves.  Having to redefine "normal" repeatedly and to decide which personal characteristics and behaviors were important for me to hold on to and which ones I could (or should) adapt has made me a much less judgmental and easygoing person.  And it's made me more confident about those things that I feel most strongly about.  I honestly don't think that I would be the same scholar or teacher--let alone friend or citizen--if I had never left the area where I grew up.  It would have been far too easy to have my assumptions challenged only in the classroom.  And I'm absolutely certain that I would hold more stereotypes about people living in other geographical areas.

[systeme_d_]

BTR's post sounds much like my own experience.

I grew up in a small city in a region where people from my ethnic group were plentiful, and lived in an enclave.  I went to college and grad school in a neighboring state, in small, medium-sized and huge cities there, and I flourished. 

TTville is much smaller, and is rural to an extent that I had I never experienced before (except for a one-year dissertation fellowship in a similar rural small town in yet another region).  It is safe and quiet, but outside of my job, my colleagues, and my students, there is really nothing here that interests me or sustains me.  Dear SO is even more miserable here, athough SO comes from another very different region as well.   It is not home for us, and never will be.

I remain hopeful that I will find another job somewhere else in the next decade or so, but if that does not happen, we will leave immediately upon my retirement, and relocate to either my home region or dear SO's --probably mine.

Like Benton, I miss foods.  I use Google Earth.  And I scan the job ads every year, looking for a way to go home.

[concordancia]

I am jealous. One of the most depressing things I realized when I hit my deep first year depression here was that I didn't even have any place that I would particularly care to relocate to, certainly not in the sense of "home." On the plus side, it made me pull my act together in a way that one of my cohort still hasn't quite done.

On the down side, it has been nearly two years and here still doesn't really feel like home.

[locutus]

I've been sitting here for a while trying to come up with a non-rambling answer. My experience is that I've lived in three regions of the US. Regions A and B feel like home to some degree. I'm from Region A, virtually all of my family is there and a handful of my wife's. Region B my wife is from, and we both went to college there (different cities). However, region C, where my wife and I met, always felt like we were just visiting. Maybe it's because no family lives there, we had mixed feeling about the town, and many of our friends were from other places.

[keineidee]

Just reading again I realized I got my XYZ's all mixed up in the initial posting. Sorry about that. Just ignore the letters and you can get the gist (as I supposed you did if you read it).

Interesting that a few folks have said even if they stay where they are now for quite a while they might plan to retire someplace else more congenial to their internal home-sense. That is a long horizon. I am really not sure I could make that choice. Of course, in addition to no family or house, I'm not in a TT, so I feel pretty mobile, at least hypothetically. I have been making deals with myself about timelines and achievements so I don't feel sunk in the mire indefinitely.

On the other hand, I keep wondering if I'm falling victim to the "geographic cure" syndrome--where I imagine felicity and fulfillment are right around the next bend (or maybe back at the last one). After all, I can wax nostalgic about every place I've lived -- even the ones where I distinctly remember spates of misery. It is just living *here* I find a challenge...

[barred_owl]

It seems that no matter where I've lived, my sense of being "home" is closely associated with the friendships I've made and the strength of those bonds of friendship.  I'm back in the area in which I grew up, and the decision to return here (after I was down-sized out of a previous job) was based largely on knowing that my best lifelong friends were still here, and that I wouldn't have to get to know the area as if it were new to me.  Things have changed in this town, and not always for the better; there are more strip malls, more traffic, and fewer farms and open spaces.  There are McMansions in the distant suburbs, and there has been a precipitous decline in the once-vibrant downtown of the closest city.  Some of the changes make me sad, but knowing that my dearest friends are only a mile or two away is comforting.

Life in TTville was a close second-best as home for me.  I still have good friends there, and would go back in a heartbeat if I ever had the opportunity.  TTville is in a rural midwestern area, but not far from major population centers and first-class universities.  It may not have had all of the amenities of living nearer a metropolitan area, but it was comfortable, cozy, and the sort of place where you could leave your doors unlocked at night and never worry about doing so.

In contrast, during my brief stint as an adminicritter, I lived in one of the most idyllic, picturesque locations in the country, but it never really felt homey to me.  Perhaps it was because of the short time I was there, or maybe it was the loneliness of being in admin. that made it easier to leave and remember the place as simply being a beautiful location.  Oddly, though, I met more people from my original home state (where I am now) at this location--at least 10 of my colleagues at a very small school were from my home state!  My admin. asst. grew up just 5 miles from my hometown and is only 2 years older than me; we had many shared reminiscences of life here.

Finally, my two geographically distant but ecologically similar field research sites would, in my estimation, make wonderful retirement locales.  I can't convince my SO, however, that we might consider relocating to either one some time in the next 15 years or so--he doesn't like cold, cold winters.  I love both places, though.  My original research site still has a wonderful wilderness feel to it, even as the tourism-based economy expands there.  The second site is fairly far-flung, distance-wise, but is quite possibly where some of the best times of my life were had.  Oddly, it was at this same site that most of the friends I made hailed from my TTville state/region!  Few of them are still there, as far as I know, but the memories are still quite vivid.

For now, I feel like I've come full-circle, but I've always had a strong sense of wanderlust.  My final resting place may not be here in home state and home town, but it will be a place where the people I live and work with are ones I can truly call friends.

[conjugate]

Tough question for me; I was born in one place, and at the age of 2 my parents moved to another place, and when I was 9 moved again to another place; at 18 I went to grad school in yet another place, and got an instructor position after a year of unemployment in another place, and then three years in another place and one year in another, and seven in another, and now I'm on the verge of moving to another.  That's six different states (two locations in some of them), none of which is "home."  I spent the most years in a midwestern state but mostly grew up in a southwestern state.  I don't have much of an accent from any of these places, as far as anybody who has heard me speak is willing to say.

[aandsdean]

I grew up in Los Angeles and went to college in the LA suburbs, then left at 22 to go to grad school.  My parents moved to Midwest Metropolis when I was 29, so I had some anchor there for a while, though I never really "lived" there again, only visiting for holidays and two or three slightly longer trips to do dissertation research at the Huntington and the Clark (that WAS convenient, by the way, not having to pay for those trips!).

I felt very dislocated in the Southern town where I went to grad school, which was deeply alien to me in pretty much every conceivable way.  I lived there for five years, and by the end did sort of feel at home, most particularly because of my dear friends in grad school.

My first TT job was in the Midwest, and though it was at a SLAC that is 20 miles from where my dad went to college, it took me a long time to feel at home there.  I was there 10 years.  My wife is from that state, and we married about half way through my 10 years there, and that was helpful, but I never quite adjusted.

My second TT job (department chair) was back in the (rather deeper) South, and we both loved it pretty much from the get-go.  Had it not been for institutional politics that I can't get into, I suspect we'd still be there.  It was close to Giant Southern Metropolis, but in a small town, so it satisfied my wife's small-town roots and my need to be near a city.  And my best friends from grad school are in GSM, so that was wonderful as well.  Though I felt the same painful tugs as Erzuliefrieda, above, the countervailing factors were strong.

Third job (source of my moniker)--well, frankly, the less said the better.  It was in large Plains City, which we hated.  The amenities and convenience were nice, but the political climate was utterly beyond the pale for any thinking person (I don't say this lightly, but even sensible conservatives are appalled by the place), and I also disliked my institution, though I loved the people I worked most closely with.

Now I'm back on the other side of First-TT-Job State, near where my wife is from.  My paternal great-grandparents' graves are in a cemetery about 25 miles from new school.  I like it a lot, so far (one year), and all I can say is, Hmm.

[carebearstare]

I am from the Midwest, and lived in the same town until I went to undergrad. Even though I never felt like I fit in there, it definitely structured my concept of what normal is. As an adult, I find that I'm constantly discovering ways in which my perceptions of that place were skewed (for example, I have a hard time reinterpreting it as conservative, even though it was). Oddly, much of this has been driven by Facebook, where I've connected with old friends who never relocated, only to realize how distant my life is from theirs. I often wonder what life would be like had I stayed there.

College was where I truly found myself, and although it was in the same region of the country it was at a school that had a student body from all over the nation and world. I realized then that I feel much more comfortable in places that are full of transplants. This isn't to say that they don't have culture, but rather that they are constantly being changed, by people who are seeking change.

The city I lived in before and during grad school feels most akin to that sense. With all its faults, I deeply connected there and built an enjoyable life. TTville, while urban, fails to encapsulate that sense of renewal and revision that makes me feel comfortable. I'm not sure I want to establish roots here, and it seems very hard to do so if you are not from here.