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John Bunyan's avatar

Until recently, I never understood people that romanticize high school. My high school experience wasn't bad at all, but the ensuing decades were significantly better. Why would I want to go back?

But I kind of get it now. How's this for privilege: until COVID, my life generally improved year after year. Nothing is linear, of course, but the general trend was up. Now I look back at 2019 with a melancholy wistfulness that I believe is called "nostalgia."

I don't actually want to return to 2019, not really. I'd be living in a web of lies, and this time I'd be aware of it; I don't think my mind can withstand that much cognative dissonance. But the blend of security and possibility that 2019 held - I miss that. Part of aging, I suppose, is reckoning with the reality that at some point that secure station with seemingly endless future possibilities - that home - isn't coming back.

The truth will set you free, it's said, and I believe it. But what goes unsaid is that once free there are only a few paths worth taking, and none of them lead backwards. And so we travel onward, knowing we can't recreate what we've lost, but with a growing determination to make the most of the path we're on.

Thank you for your piece - I always appreciate a good reflection that prompts me to do the same.

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Yakubian Ape's avatar

I and many of my friends refer to ourselves as "refugees", and only half in jest. We grew up in different parts of the country, but we all agree that the places we remember from the past are dead and gone. There was nothing left for us in those places. It's a difficult adjustment to make, and, for a while, you really feel like a man out of both time and space, but thankfully, as you said, there are other expats, and I was fortunate to meet a lot of them, and they continue to come at pace.

You're right about home not needing to be perfect to be homesick for it. I was raised in the most cookie-cutter, soulless suburb imaginable. It was the quintessential place to buy in and sell out, as they say. The most culture we had were chain restaurants and groups of bored, schlubby middle-aged dads that would get together, dust off their instruments, and play old Boomer rock staples at the local watering holes on Friday nights. It was a decent place to grow up, but I lived there in my early twenties and couldn't have resented it more. For a young person, unmarried and unattached, it couldn't have been more of a dead-end place. But, at the same time, I go back and... it's still safe, overwhelmingly, and still affluent, too, and, unlike most places in the country, growing more so as more and more people flee the nearby cities. However, it certainly doesn't look like the place I grew up in. All the new construction is dreadfully ugly, modernist, Apple Store-chic crap, and all the new houses are cheap, ugly little boxes that are really just four walls of vinyl siding masquerading as a house (but still cost $600,000!) You go to the Costco and, looking and listening to the people around you, you'd think you'd somehow teleported to Bangalore. But, I think Bangalore is probably preferable to some of the nearby towns, which look more like Guatamala or Honduras every passing year. If I learned anything from living in a big city for a while, it's that there's an unspoken value that so many pretend not to know to being surrounded by people who speak the same language. How can you even form a community if you can't even speak to your neighbors? And, yes, I know - you can't, and that's the point. You mentioned the Kalergi Plan by name, so, you already know that.

Anyways, that's enough from me. Great read - always glad to know I'm not the only one who feels like an exile in my own country.

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